Kate Didd

(Day 51)

You know nothing and I mean nothing hit harder than therapy in surround sound.

Not one voice. Not one perspective.

Two.

My male therapist and my female therapist… sitting on opposite ends of the same truth, like a mother and a father arguing over how to raise a child who already raised herself.

One softens me.

One steels me.

One says, “baby, come here, let’s hold it.”

The other says, “stand up, you’re stronger than this.”

And I swear sometimes they trigger me in ways that have nothing to do with them and everything to do with what I never had, what I needed, what I lost, what I built anyway.

It’s not just therapy.

It’s re-parenting in real time.

It’s sitting in the middle of two kinds of love I didn’t grow up trusting, watching them both fight for a version of me I haven’t fully met yet.

And here’s the part people don’t talk about:

When you hit a level of pain so extreme, so all-consuming, so relentless, it doesn’t just hurt…

It shuts you down.

Your body, in all its brilliance, pulls the emergency brake.

Not gently. Not gracefully.

Decisively.

Because feeling all of it at once would’ve destroyed you.

So instead, it does something holy.

It numbs you.

And people love to romanticize strength, but let me tell you, there is nothing glamorous about becoming so detached from your own body that you feel like a ghost operating a human life.

It’s quiet.

It’s efficient.

It’s eerily peaceful in a way that should scare you.

Because when the pain goes…

Everything else goes with it.

Joy doesn’t knock anymore.

Comfort feels distant.

Love? Filtered.

Magic? Muted.

You’re safe but at the cost of being fully alive.

And for a long time, I lived there.

Functioning. Performing. Smiling. Building.

Untouchable.

Unreachable.

Unfeeling.

And I thought… this must be it.

This must be what healing feels like.

But healing doesn’t silence you.

Healing reintroduces you.

And no one tells you that coming back from numbness is its own kind of heartbreak.

Because it doesn’t happen all at once.

It’s not some cinematic breakthrough where you cry once and suddenly everything is restored in color.

No.

It’s gradual.

It’s layered.

It’s… tender.

It starts in the smallest, almost unnoticeable ways.

A moment where music sounds a little deeper.

A hug that lingers in your body a second longer than usual.

A tear that surprises you not because you’re sad, but because you felt something at all.

And then comes the part that changed everything for me:

You don’t just let the good feelings back in…

You let the pain return too.

But differently.

Softer.

Held.

Understood.

It’s not the same pain that once consumed you, it’s pain that’s been processed, translated, alchemized into something… almost sacred.

Because now?

Now it comes with context.

With compassion.

With the quiet knowing of “I made it through that.”

And somehow… that pain carries gratitude.

Gratitude for the version of you that endured it.

Gratitude for the body that protected you when you couldn’t protect yourself.

Gratitude for the numbness that once felt like loss but was actually love in armor.

And this is where the magic starts to slip back in.

Not loud.

Not overwhelming.

But warm.

Like sunlight touching your skin after a long winter.

Like laughter that doesn’t feel forced.

Like peace that isn’t earned through silence, but through presence.

And suddenly, the same body that shut everything down…

Starts opening back up.

Not recklessly.

Not all at once.

But intentionally.

And those mother/father voices?

They start to make sense.

Because you needed both.

The softness to feel safe enough to return.

The strength to walk yourself back through the door.

And me?

I’m still in it.

Still learning how to sit inside my own body without needing to escape it.

Still letting feeling come back in colors instead of floods.

Still discovering that peace isn’t the absence of pain…

It’s the ability to hold it, gently, without losing yourself.

And for the first time in a long time,

It feels good to be here.