Walking in Real Reality

I haven’t written an entry here for the longest time. For months, my desk has been consumed by a gruelling, beautiful, and necessary excavation—the writing of my memoir. I sat at my teak dining table while I sighed, groaned, and bawled, pouring decades of unedited trauma, physical blows, and global tragedies onto clean paper. I thought writing the final sentence would be the peak of my relief. But as it turns out, the truest, most staggering transformation didn’t happen on the page. It happened yesterday afternoon, at a crowded shopping mall, over a plate of dessert.

I had just finished a long, beautiful lunch date with my oldest school friends. These are the girls who knew me in school decades ago, when my school uniform hid marks from beatings I had endured. They knew me when I wore the high-energy mask of the classroom joker just to hide the storm at home. Today, as they looked across the table at me, they stopped and smiled. They told me I looked different. They said I looked deeply cheerful, light, and truly happy. They could physically see that the unyielding, suffocating tightness that had locked up the back of my neck and my shoulders for sixty-one years had finally uncoiled and left my body.

After they left, I chose to stay behind. I decided to take a slow walk through the mall entirely on my own, and for the first time in my life, I stepped into what I can only describe as real reality.

For a survivor of Complex PTSD, the world is rarely real; it is a landscape of threats. Your internal system is a high-functioning, hypervigilant machine constantly projecting its energy outward to scan for danger, manage everyone else’s emotional weather, and manually engineer safety. For years, that internal panic manifested in subtle, protective habits—like a deep-seated compulsion to collect beautiful, external containers, hoarding them as temporary vaults just in case I ran out of emotional space inside my own skin.

But this afternoon, walking through those crowded shops, the frantic, defensive urgency was completely gone. The internal boardroom of my mind was completely quiet. There were no inner voices talking over each other, no phantom creaks from the past, and no chronic anxiety about losing control.

I wandered into many shops, but a strange, beautiful thing happened: I didn’t buy anything whimsically. The old impulse to hoard material clutter or buy beautiful boxes to keep myself safe had completely dissolved. I didn't buy rubbish. I was frugal, clear-headed, and perfectly at peace. Instead, I chose to spend my money entirely on nourishment and joy—on a good meal, crisp drinks, and sweet desserts. I sat alone, treating my body to the simple, sacred luxury of the rest-and-digest frequency, without a single shred of defensive noise.

I now realize that we don’t need to buy external containers to hold space for our lives when we finally realize that we are the sanctuary. When your adult self finally takes the wheel, true confidence arrives not from a gallery of credentials on a white wall, but from Tawakkul—the quiet, unshakeable trust that we are perfectly safe, profoundly held, and flawlessly provided for by the Divine.

I am sixty-one years old, and I am finally learning how to just be. I am writing my future on clean paper, taking slow, weightless steps on the tracks, and enjoying the absolute sweetness of a quiet mind.

The coffee is warm, the room is clear, and the healer has finally come home.

As my manuscript moves closer to traditional publication layout, I will be sharing updates, behind-the-scenes glimpses, and early excerpts right here on the blog. Thank you for walking this long railway track with me. Stay tuned.