Rebecca Does Life

I walked past this piece of art in Iceland today, and I stopped.

I looked at it and immediately thought, that’s how I felt in my marriage.

My arms felt stuck at my sides. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t reach for anything. I couldn’t pull myself out. I felt suffocated, like no matter how hard I tried, I was still trapped in the same place.

And that head bowed down in defeat – I knew that feeling too.

There was a time when I had lost so much confidence in myself that I questioned my own thoughts, my own feelings, and even my own perception of what was happening around me. I became hypervigilant. I was constantly trying to anticipate what would happen next, how something would be received, what I had done wrong, or how I could explain myself better.

I spent so much time trying to communicate what I was feeling, only to find the conversation somehow turned back toward me – my tone, my timing, my sensitivity, my motives. Eventually, I started questioning whether I was even allowed to feel what I felt.

That does something to you.

Little by little, you become smaller.

You stop trusting yourself. You stop speaking as freely. You start choosing your words carefully. You begin measuring your reactions and carrying the weight of things that were never yours to carry.

I was surviving instead of living.

And I think that is one of the hardest things for people to understand about emotional pain. From the outside, you can look like you’re functioning. You’re going to work. You’re having conversations. You’re making plans. You’re getting through the day.

But internally, you can feel completely trapped.

For a long time, I thought moving forward meant somehow fixing what was broken. Trying harder. Explaining better. Being more patient. Finding the right words. Maybe if I could just communicate it differently, things would finally change.

But eventually, I realized that I couldn’t keep losing pieces of myself trying to make something work that was continually making me feel like I was the problem.

Leaving didn’t immediately make everything better.

There was grief. There was uncertainty. There were questions I didn’t have answers to. There was the difficult process of separating what I had been told about myself from what I was beginning to understand about myself.

But there was also space.

Quiet.

And in that space, something started happening that I didn’t fully realize I needed.

I could hear myself again.

I could breathe.

I didn’t have to constantly explain or defend what I felt. I didn’t have to anticipate someone else’s reaction before allowing myself to have my own. I could sit with my thoughts without immediately questioning whether they were valid.

My head slowly started to come up.

I started remembering what it felt like to be me.

I don’t think healing has meant forgetting what happened. And it hasn’t meant pretending it didn’t hurt.

It has meant learning that I am allowed to move forward.

That I am allowed to take up space.

That I am allowed to trust what I know inside of myself.

That I don’t have to remain in a place simply because I once promised I would stay.

And maybe that’s why this piece of art stopped me today.

Because I recognized the person in it.

I recognized the exhaustion. The defeat. The feeling of being unable to move even though every part of you wants to.

But I also know something that this version of me didn’t know then:

Being stuck is not the same as being trapped forever.

Sometimes you need space before you can move.

Sometimes you need distance before you can see clearly.

Sometimes healing begins simply by getting far enough away from the noise to hear your own voice again.

And maybe moving forward isn’t about suddenly knowing exactly where you’re going.

Maybe it’s simply lifting your head.

Taking the next step.

And realizing that you can breathe again.

I am still learning what it feels like to live without the weight I carried for so long.

But there is something powerful about realizing that the person I thought was gone was never actually gone.

She was still there.

She was just waiting for enough space to move.

And maybe that is what healing looks like sometimes – not becoming someone new, but finally becoming free enough to find yourself again.

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