DISCLAIMER: Stories reflect lived experiences about addiction, mental health, recovery, & trauma. It’s not medical advice. Some material may be emotionally difficult. If you’re overwhelmed, go to our support library or reach out to someone you trust.
This story explores the profound impact of trauma, stigma, and abuse on personal identity. It conveys a deep sense of loss and disconnection, where the narrator feels stripped of their voice, choices, and sense of self. Trauma initially erodes the narrator's softness, trust, and agency, followed by stigma that imposes unwanted labels. Abuse further dismantles their reality, leading to self-doubt and a fractured identity. Despite this, the story ends on a note of resilience, highlighting a persistent inner spark that holds the potential for healing and reclaiming one's true self.
Nothing feels like mine anymore.
Not my voice.
Not my choices.
Not the woman I thought I was becoming.
Trauma took pieces of me first—the softness,
the trust, the sense that my life was something I could shape.
Stigma followed close behind, telling me who I was before I had the strength to speak for myself.
It turned my pain into a label I never agreed to wear.
And then there was the abuse—the slow unmaking, the way it taught me to doubt my own memory, my own worth, my own reality.
It hollowed out the parts of me that used to feel solid, leaving me apologizing for wounds I didn’t cause.
I learned to shrink, to stay quiet, to survive in rooms where my body was present but my identity was slipping away.
I became a version of myself built from fear and endurance, a shadow carrying a story I never asked to live.
So now nothing feels like mine—not because I failed, but because so much was taken in ways no one saw, in ways people judged before they ever understood.
But even under all that—beneath the shame that isn’t mine, beneath the names they gave me, beneath the damage I didn’t deserve—something still flickers.
Something that remembers who I was before the breaking.
And maybe that small, stubborn spark is how I find my way back to myself.
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