Welcome, friends. Many of you are coming here because we've had a connection. Perhaps we've organized rallies together. Perhaps you've read the hellacious essay that I published in ELLE Magazine last year. Or perhaps we've had a shared vision for the kind of world we want to live in. However you have found your way, welcome. I'm so glad to have you.
For the greater part of my life, I went through my days focused on a singular mission: to achieve all that I could be. My idea of success was defined by how far I could climb, and how well I could repress pain at the same time. I remember thinking at a young age, wasn't that what we are all supposed to do?
But six years ago, my life completely changed. I was living in New York City, working as the Head of Communications at a tech startup. And I was pregnant with Lily. And God, was I tired. Tired of pushing my work to extend my leave past their four week maternity leave policy. Tired of pushing myself—then and throughout my life—to work doubly hard to prove that I was capable. That I was worth it. I still remember the evening that I came back from a business trip to Chicago. I had just reached 21 weeks in my pregnancy. It was one of those terrible travel days, where your flight gets delayed several times and the airport is just overflowing with stranded travelers, laying on the floor in full agony. I still remember the exhaustion in my body as I stepped out of the cab, and the growing bitterness in my heart of giving so much to work over the years, without feeling any sense of gratitude or care for my own well-being in return. I was there to help them make money, and that was all. As I slowly trudged up the steps of our brownstone apartment, I fell. Right on my belly.
There's no greater awakening in life when you quite literally have life growing inside of you. There's no denying that I was exhausted, but that wasn't the reason for my fall. There was something so much deeper, so much darker, and I didn't have the tools or the trust in myself to access it. But it became clear to me that if I ever wanted to know what I really wanted in life and who I was meant to become, I needed to explore what this was and where it was coming from. If not for me, for my daughter.
They say that unprocessed trauma can leave an imprint on your body, even if you don't realize it. We store it in our hearts and our minds, our hips, our hands. From a young age, we are trained to believe that resilience is about how well you pick yourself up, and soldier through. But you realize that it's only when you slow down, that resilience is actually so much more about trusting yourself to just be.
The past several years, I've been working to peel back the years of oppression—in my life and generations past, by examining my lived experiences, and the way bits and pieces of it have come up in healthy, and also very toxic ways, in my adult life. My experiences as a brown woman, as a daughter of a refugee, a daughter of immigrants, a survivor of rape, abuse and kidnapping. So much unhealed trauma, tucked carefully in a box and locked away, in fear of what I could uncover if I looked at it hard enough.
It has been a tremendous heart and mind shift to break away from embedded narratives and patterns, and continuously exercise that muscle of trust within yourself. But as I continue to map my blueprint to liberation—with joy, authenticity and ease as my guiding values, I've found a new superpower.
Survivor's joy.
Definition
Survivor's joy: To celebrate survival against all odds, to feel deeply in your own power, to trust in your heart, to believe and have faith in your growth.
In this season of life, I have felt a calling to create and share my thoughts, reflections and understanding of survivor's joy as I continue to navigate all the hard and messy moments of living with trauma. Because we are all the walking wounded, my friends. So many of us unhealed, and just trying to get by and survive. Bargaining with rest, and hoping for slower days and softer landings that hardly ever come. But I want to share, that by trusting ourselves to go deep, to examine our past and the ways it shows up in our present, we can discover our own power and live and write our own lives. Something new. Something beautiful.
As I think about this shift for myself, and what it means to lay it out there for the world to see, my true hope is that some day, my daughters, Lily and Violet, will be able to read this, and have a deeper understanding of their mother. To know that when they are faced with challenges, that there is beauty in the hard things—you just have to find it. And should they have doubts, which indeed they will just as we all do, to know that they came from a long line of survivors, who were full of color, joy and monumental resilience.
Until next time.
With light and love,
Adrianne
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