Kate Didd

At some point, the telling changes.

The stories don’t hurt the way they used to, not because they weren’t real, but because they no longer live in my nervous system. They live on the page. They live in memory. They live in other people’s mouths, where they are often handled without care. My trauma has been repeated so many times that it has lost its ability to ambush me. What once hijacked my body now arrives as information. Heavy, yes, but no longer in control.

What still catches me off guard is how other people tell it.

When people speak about my childhood, they don’t speak with tenderness. They speak with inventory. Abuse is listed like evidence in a file, each harm neatly stacked, as if naming it without feeling it absolves everyone involved. Sometimes it sounds like they’re trying to convince themselves it wasn’t that bad. Sometimes it sounds like rehearsal, like if they say it often enough, the meaning will dull.

I used to argue with that.

Now I understand: people protect themselves from what they cannot integrate.

I don’t need them to admit everything. I only needed to realize they knew enough. And they did.

That realization didn’t arrive loudly. It arrived as stillness.

Trauma doesn’t always scream anymore. Sometimes it shows up as inertia. As the sudden need to stop moving. As lying on the floor for a day, not because I’m broken, but because my body needs proof that I am no longer being chased. Free will isn’t just about action. Sometimes it’s about choosing not to run.

Running was my first survival language. I ran emotionally, physically, professionally. I mistook motion for freedom. Trauma wrapped itself around me so early it felt like inheritance, handed down with ceremony, dressed up as tradition, excused as love. In my family, men didn’t wrap gifts. They took credit. They absorbed praise meant for women and called it provision. That pattern didn’t just shape my past, it taught me what I would never become.

Which is why I became the problem.

I am both celebrated and despised in my family. They speak about their hatred of me openly, almost proudly, as if my refusal to stay quiet is a betrayal rather than a boundary. There was a time I tried to understand them, tried to locate the logic that made cruelty feel justified. That search nearly broke me.

Then something simpler arrived:

Why would I seek intimacy with people who treat me like an enemy?

When they accuse me, they expose themselves. When they justify, they confess. Accountability feels like an attack to people who have never practiced it. I don’t need them to change. I only needed to stop contorting myself to make sense of them.

That same clarity arrived in my marriage.

Our separation wasn’t born of a lack of love, it was born of unhealed history. Two people carrying childhood wounds, young-adult survival strategies, and early-parenting exhaustion into the same room and calling it stability. There were patterns between us that made parenting harder, not safer. Naming that was not failure. It was honesty.

I remember the moment I stopped recognizing myself.

I was married. I had three children. I was working inside a corporation that rewarded silence and punished conscience. I could no longer advocate, for myself or for anyone else without consequence. Advancement required swallowing a moral pill I couldn’t digest: earning comfort by participating in systems that harmed people already stretched thin.

That job didn’t just drain me. It taught me self-abandonment.

I walked into another abusive dynamic because it looked respectable. That’s the quiet danger when harm wears credentials. The most painful part wasn’t losing the job. It was realizing the woman I had fought to become was incompatible with the environment. Oppression doesn’t always crush you. Sometimes it asks you to disappear politely.

I refused.

And refusal has a cost.

I have been pushed out, set up, sidelined because accountability chokes people who benefit from avoidance. I’ve lost jobs for defending others. I’ve put my body between authority and the vulnerable. I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t negotiate my ethics. I stood still. There were moments I was so tired of surviving that I welcomed the idea of not having to anymore, not because I wanted to die, but because I wanted the nightmare to stop introducing itself as life.

Survival is the part they romanticize least.

No one tells you that peace can feel unfamiliar. That when safety finally appears, your nervous system panics because it doesn’t recognize the terrain. You laugh, almost hysterically, thinking: This is what I fought for and I don’t know how to hold it yet.

I no longer care about winning inside broken systems. I don’t have enough years left to betray myself for belonging. My children worry when I leave the house because they know I cannot unsee suffering. At least once a week, I will extend myself toward someone else’s survival. They do the work. I bear witness. And witnessing is holy to me. Celebrating someone else’s endurance keeps me tethered to this world.

The jokes don’t sting anymore.

The “crazy woman.”

The “difficult one.”

The “problem.”

Those labels were never diagnoses. They were defenses.

I laugh now at the exposure of my abusers, at how plainly they reveal themselves when they say I should have endured harm without resistance. I am a mirror. People don’t hate mirrors for lying. They hate them for accuracy.

I love who I am now.

I could not trade my integrity for a paycheck. I could not perform goodness while abandoning it privately. I became the woman many men around me pretended to be and that contradiction enraged them. Where they feared they were not enough, I exceeded expectation by refusing to shrink.

And maybe that’s the point I was always moving toward:

The hurt shaped me but it does not own me.

I carry it with humility, not allegiance.

I let it refine my sight, not define my worth.

There is nothing more destabilizing than a woman who survives, awakens, and still dares to dream, especially after you tried to bury her deep enough to forget she had roots.