“To say, ‘There aren’t many mentors available,’ is a total cop-out. It’s up to you to be proactive in the search”
Dear Fellow Traveler,
I was a bit shaken reading your poignant, heartfelt letter about how you know the suffering of abuse, and how it shatters you — but also the life of beauty that you can build afterward. It’s true, the endless struggles, the bottomless depth of pain, the mind-numbing silence all around. The herculean efforts to get up again, day by day, trigger by trigger, to renew, rebuild, retrust.
You described it so well — it indeed takes a “village” of therapists, friends, and family to start healing. But is it true? Can there be a time when I’m no longer haunted by nightmares, confined by limitations of what happened? Can I hope for a day when this becomes a catalyst for post-traumatic growth and I can be someone bigger than the sum of my experiences? Is it possible for this to become a detail of who I am, not a definition? And mostly… Can I dare dream to have a beautiful, shining future like everyone else? Will I ever see myself as anything other than a hastily patched, shattered vase, severely handicapped?
I, like most of us, stay silent. No one will understand. There is safety in silence. Its wall protects but also isolates, severely limiting hope. Those who have breached that wall and are part of the incredible “village” who carefully help rebuild are angels in the truest sense. Thank you for peering back over to the other side and giving hope.
Still Shattered
Thank you to all of the letter writers who completely spelled out the mentor problem — how so many women don’t have mentors and don’t know where to find one. However, when you focus on the problem, you focus on the problem (and all its sub-problems). When you’re ready to focus on solutions, you look at the problem with solution-oriented eyes, and you see something different.
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