It Didn’t Keep Me Safe Like They Said It Would

I’m back. The concert was last Saturday and I am still somewhere between emotionally wrung out and more at peace than I have felt in a very long time. Both of those things are true at the same time and I have decided to stop being surprised when that happens.

Before I get into it — I know people in my family read this from time to time and I want to be clear: this is not about anyone else’s trauma. They have their own histories, their own unprocessed things, their own survival stories. I have spent most of my life making room for that. This post is me finally learning to extend that same room to myself. To stop allowing my empathy for other people’s pain to be the reason my own gets dismissed. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

I debated writing this one at all. The old reflex kicked in — be careful, keep the peace, make yourself smaller. And then I remembered why I started. If one person finds this in the dark of their own tunnel and feels a little less alone, every word is worth it. The page has always been the room large enough to hold what conversations sometimes cannot. I’m not apologizing for that anymore.

So. The trip.

If you are not listening to Florence and the Machine I need you to stop what you are doing and go fix that. People talk about her like she’s just a voice and a dramatic stage presence — and she is both of those things, magnificently — but if you actually stop and listen to the words she wraps around the human experience, you will find more healing in a three minute song than in a lot of conversations you’ve had with actual people. I say this as someone who stood on an arena floor last Saturday in the middle of one of the harder seasons of her life and was completely undone — in the best possible way.

We were close enough to the catwalk that she was nearly within reach during her crowd work. I held back tears for most of the night and then Sympathy Magic started and I just let them happen. I recorded it for Evelyn — specifically for her — because the first time I realized that girl knew every word, she had her eyes closed and her whole heart ringing out in the back seat of my car. That memory cracked me wide open and I am not one bit sorry about it.

That last part. I’ve been sitting with it since Saturday.

I was taught that worthiness was a virtue. That in order to be given things — love, safety, basic acceptance — I needed to prove it. To earn it. To demonstrate gratitude above and beyond a thank you, again and again, in ways that were never quite enough. I spent most of my life trying to be good enough. Quiet enough. Small enough. Compliant enough. Believing that if I took up less space, asked for less, apologized faster, kept the peace longer, I would finally earn the thing I was reaching for. Florence looked out at that arena and sang what I had never been able to say out loud: it didn’t keep me safe like they said it would. And something in me that had been held very tightly for a very long time just… let go.

I don’t have approval-seeking issues. I have acceptance issues. There is a difference. Approval is about what you do. Acceptance is about who you are. I was never taught that who I was — just as I was, without performance, without proof, without shrinking — was enough. I was made to feel like an inconvenience from very early on. Not always with words. Sometimes with the way a room shifted when I entered it. The way my body was critiqued in spaces that should have been the safest ones a girl could exist in. The way everyone else’s pain got centered while mine waited quietly in the corner for a turn that didn’t come.

I was someone’s first child. I was called a miracle. And I was also the weight carried through years of conflict I never asked for and never chose. The miracle and the burden, existing in the same small body, trying to figure out which one she actually was.

She was neither. She was just a kid. It took me forty-five years to understand that.

All of my girls will know differently. They will know in their core that worthiness is not a virtue. That they does not have to earn their place in a room. That they don’t have to be good to be safe. That is the whole point of all of it.

My mom used to say: wait three days. Three days before a big decision. Three days before saying angry words — and if you still felt the same way, say them. If the lesson was larger than the reaction, go with the lesson. I’ve been sitting with this post for three days and my instincts are telling me to focus not on the who but on the what — the survival tactics I learned along the way and what it cost me to carry them. And I’m not even mad. I’m very sad. It’s another version of grieving I didn’t anticipate.

I want to talk about The House That Built Me for a minute — the Miranda Lambert song. I’ve been listening to it for years. When it came on I would close my eyes and walk my childhood home in my mind. Room by room, memory by memory. The yard where my mom planted dozens of blue spruce. The path to the back woods. The good times, the soft edges, the parts worth keeping. That was always the version I walked through. The highlight reel.

What I understand now is that I did that on purpose, even if I didn’t know it. The mind is remarkably good at protecting you from what you’re not yet strong enough to carry. It softens the edges, keeps the lights warm, lets you see the birthday cakes and the Christmas mornings and the sledding down hills without making you look too long at the holes kicked in the doors. Empathy is a bitch sometimes.

But this trip made me look.

The joy was real — I want to be clear about that. The good parts happened. They coexisted in the same walls as the hard parts, the way they do in most homes, in most families, in most lives. The food was good. It just came with a side of “this isn’t a cheap date” and I filed that away and kept eating because the meal was not going to be the hill I died on. The little back bedroom was where I did my homework with my door locked waiting for my mom to get home from work — and also where I made myself quiet and small because silence was the safest thing I knew how to be. The path to the back woods where I used to disappear to catch my breath after another fight broke out is the same path where my dad used to take my girls to the swing he built. The house held both. It always held both. I just only ever let myself see one side of it because the other side was too heavy to carry while I was still living inside it.

I am strong enough now to hold the whole picture. That’s why the rest is finally arriving.

I was abused. I want to say that plainly because I spent too many years softening it into something smaller. Not always by an adult — and that matters to name because abuse that doesn’t come from a grown up is still abuse. It still lands. It still shapes you. The adults in my life were not malicious in their inability to protect me. They were ill equipped, carrying their own unprocessed things, doing the best they knew how. I can hold compassion for that and also acknowledge that it left me alone in rooms I should not have been alone in.

Emotional abuse doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it looks like your body’s most basic natural functions being treated as offensive. Being told to flush repeatedly, to wash your hands three times, to swish your pant legs after passing gas in another room because the sound was unacceptable. A dramatic recoil from your breath that communicates you are not clean, you are not acceptable. Your physical existence monitored and managed as though it were an imposition.

This behavior was inherited. Passed down. I received it from more than one source across most of my life — in varying degrees, through different hands, but always carrying the same message: you are too much and not enough at the same time. The compliance I learned was a direct response to that. The quieter I made myself, the safer I was. When someone doesn’t want a solution, what they want is control. I offered solutions. The answer was always no. And I believed it was reasonable — that I was the problem — for far too long. Understanding where the roots are does not obligate me to keep watering the tree.

In the car on the way home from the concert, when things escalated — I apologized. Not because it was warranted. It wasn’t. But because it came out of me before I even made a decision to give it. Reflexive. Automatic. The way you flinch before you know something is coming. I have been apologizing my way through unsafe moments my entire life — not because I was sorry, but because my nervous system learned early that taking up less space might make you less of a target. I learned that in the little back bedroom with the door locked. I just didn’t know I was still doing it at forty-five in a car on the way home.

That’s not a character flaw. That’s a survival skill that has officially outlived its usefulness.

I drew the lines I had been needing to draw and part of me hoped that would feel like hitting a stop button. It didn’t. Sometimes the right move kicks the tilt-a-whirl into overdrive before it quiets anything down. The grief doesn’t stop because you named the thing — it just changes shape. And the new shape of it followed me home.

I cried at the airport — not just because I missed them, though I did, deeply — but in the way you only cry when you’ve been holding yourself together and you finally see a face that means you can let go now. Nick and Evelyn at arrivals and every bit of it came out in the middle of an airport and I did not care even a little. I cried the rest of the week too, unpacking both mentally and physically. Not sad crying. Releasing crying. Something held for a very long time finally being set down.

The witnesses I have been looking for have been here the whole time. Nick, ready to book me a hotel at midnight from seven hundred miles away. The people who already knew the shape of things before I said a word. Myself — finally able to bear witness to my own experience without needing someone else to validate it first. The panel is full. It has been full. I just kept leaving a seat open for people who were never going to fill it.

I am not ashamed of who I have grown into. I worked hard to become her. The weight of what I inherited is not mine to carry forward. I can put it down without dropping the love. I can love people and stop carrying them. The cycle breaks at the person who decides it does. I decided. My daughters are getting a different mother because I decided they would.

That decision is daily. It is not finished. But it is made.

I went hoping to be good enough one more time. I came home knowing I was done trying. Florence said it first. I just finally heard it.

It didn’t keep me safe like they said it would. And I am more whole for knowing that.

Glad to be home. 🖤