Last week, I had my first EMDR session. I wrote a little about it in the days following, but now it’s been about a week since the first session, and I can already feel and see a difference.

My marriage is and has been a huge point of pain and trauma in my life. While I still don’t know if my ex intended to neglect me, minimize me, put me down, and make me feel as though I couldn’t trust myself, it doesn’t change the fact that being married to him was the most traumatizing thing I have ever been through. Years of neglect, dishonesty, him hiding things from me to avoid arguing about them, and never feeling good enough for his love and devotion, have left their mark. Surviving my marriage was a feat I can honesty say I didn’t think I’d accomplish. I was suicidal for a huge portion of my marriage, and while there were other factors contributing to those impulses, I now know my marriage was a big part of it.

EMDR has brought up so many memories I had repressed. It’s been hard, recognizing and accepting the truth about what I lived through. It’s one thing to know in a general way that you’ve been through a lot of shit. It’s another thing entirely to really dig into the specifics and feel your body communicate how much pain still exists inside of you from those experiences. I didn’t want to complete the session, to be honest. While I wasn’t close to a panic attack, the realization of just how much would be drudged up during the healing process was enough to make me want to slam my laptop shut and forget I had ever signed up for therapy at all.

But I persisted.

If there’s one thing I know is true about who I am, it’s that I persist. I deeply resent the need to be resilient, and I resent the people who have made it necessary for me to be resilient, but I am proud of how strong I am. My experiences didn’t make me strong. My trauma didn’t make me strong. I survived those things and I persisted through them because I was born strong. From my first breath, the odds of life were stacked against me. I was born two months premature. I weighed 2 pounds 4 ounces, and when I lost the water weight, dropped to 1 pound 14 ounces. I was so small, the diapers made for premature babies came up to my neck. Born that early, whole organs hadn’t even fully developed.

But I persisted.

Too young to even be aware of that persistence, I began my journey through life with an attitude. Nothing was going to hold me back. And I wasn’t going to leave anything behind. I grew quickly. I grew strongly. I was a small child, but tough. I was sensitive and emotional, but smart and clever. Part of EMDR is looking back across your entire life to look for ways we might have developed our negative core beliefs earlier than our primary points of trauma. And while I have seen places where those negative core values developed (primarily because of childhood friendships that were bad for me), I’ve also realized how strong I was, even as a kid. Because despite how often I struggled to make and keep friends, I never stopped giving people chances. I never changed who I was to make others more comfortable. And I kept looking for the people who would accept me as I was.

This therapy has shown me that I am and have always been so much stronger than I ever gave myself credit for. And as a kid, as a teenager, and even as a young adult, I may not have understood a lot of what I was facing, it doesn’t make it any less true that I persisted through it all. Pastors and pastors’ wives passing down shame and judgment, either to me specifically or to the women attending church in general. I look back across my younger years and I see so much emptiness that I couldn’t articulate because I didn’t have the language for what I felt.

But I persisted.

And now, having gone through a lot of pain, a lot of disappointments, a lot of hard lessons and traumatic experiences, I can say that yes, I resent the need to be as strong as I’ve had to be. But I am also grateful to my body, to my mind, and to my heart for getting me to this place, to this point in time. It has taken 31 years, but I am finally stepping into the person I know I have always been, and who now is finally being given the space to thrive, the space to express herself, the space to simply exist.

My therapist said, in terms of how I’ve responded to/handled my trauma, I’ve been very “proper.” Then she said, “Fuck proper. This shit is messy, and that’s okay. Be messy.” A more perfect description of how I handle my life in general, could not have been said. I am and always have been “proper.” I have carried so much responsibility, so many labels, that separate right and wrong behaviors, choices, feelings, reactions, intentions. I have never given myself the space to simply exist, forgetting the needs and desires other people place on me. I’ve always, at some point or another, carried other people’s views of who I am and what I should be doing.

I’m a woman, therefore I need to have kids.
I’m a woman, therefore I need to workout and eat healthy and make sure I look and dress the right way.
I’m a woman, therefore I need to cater to the feelings of men.
I’m a woman, so I should grow out my hair and wear makeup and shave.
I’m a woman, so it’s okay to get an education, but I definitely can’t show off how smart I am.
I’m a woman, so I need to make sure I get married and devote myself to my husband’s desires. They come first.
I’m a woman, so I’m expected to fit the role of feminine.
I’m a woman, so I’m expected to do the emotional labor in relationships.
I’m a woman, so I need to understand that a man is going to be more sexual than me and that if I want my needs met, I need to meet his. (By the way, this has NEVER been true. I have had a higher sex drive than every single man I have ever been with. And meeting his sexual needs has NEVER helped any man be emotionally intimate and open with me.)

This isn’t even touching on how I, as a woman, am expected to behave and exist in any professional or educational environment. Yet, from pretty much the outset of my existence, I have existed with expectations and responsibilities I did not ask for. And when I have attempted to reject any of these things, I’m told that I “just haven’t gotten to the right place in my life yet.” Or that I’m “seeking too much attention.” Or I’m “making things up to sound edgy.”

I do not want kids. Don’t tell me that I’ll change my mind because I know I won’t. I’ve had two miscarriages. I also will always want kids because I’ve had two miscarriages and there are two significant losses there. But I won’t have children to fill some selfish void in my life.

I sometimes workout and I sometimes eat healthy and a lot of the time I don’t, and I really don’t give a shit how anyone feels about that because it’s my body and sometimes I want to eat a whole tin of double chocolate chip cookies, okay? Maybe you’d be a lot less cranky and judgmental if you had a cookie, too.

I cater to no one’s feelings but my own. That doesn’t mean that I don’t care about the feelings of others, and just because I am a proudly, staunchly feminist doesn’t mean I hate men. I can acknowledge gender inequality and still recognize that social norms and gender roles harm men, too.

I love playing with my hair. I’ve had it long and brown, long and blonde, long and red. I’ve had extensions. I’ve had it short and brown, short and magenta, short and blue, short and purple, short and pink, short and blonde. I’ve shaved my head. I will not ever wear my hair in anyway to please anyone but my damn self. If how you see/accept/feel about/love/think about me changes due to how I wear my hair, then that is your fucking problem. Not mine. I love wearing makeup, and sometimes I really hate it. I’m not wearing it everyday. I shave most of the time, but sometimes I choose not to because it takes time and maybe I just don’t feel like it. It’s just hair. Who gives a shit? Worry about your own body and let me exist how I want inside of mine.

I struggled throughout my primary school years. I had test anxiety before they really understood that that was a legitimate thing, and it made me believe that I was stupid. Didn’t help that kids called me stupid all the time. Wasn’t until college that I realized just how smart, intelligent, creative, and talented I am. I am a fast learner. And while there are some subjects I still struggle in, I still learn the material. I still retain the information. I still, eventually, understand what I am being taught. I will not hide or minimize my abilities to make anyone more comfortable in themselves. And if you’re a man who is actually threatened by a woman who is smart, grow the fuck up and get over yourself. If the only way you can feel good about yourself is by making others feel less than, the issue is your own self-worth.

I lived ten years of my life for someone else’s wants, desires, hopes, and dreams. He did not do the same for me. I will never, ever, make that mistake again. I will live my life for myself first. I will happily and loudly support the people in my life in their pursuits, and I will support my partner in theirs. But I will not sacrifice my ambitions for anyone. Nor will I ask anyone to sacrifice theirs for me.

I reject, outright, the feminine/masculine binaries. I am simply me, and I am more than my outward appearance in the world.

I will do my own emotional labor in relationships, but I will not do anyone else’s. My marriage ended because my ex wouldn’t do his emotional labor. Friendships have ended because I wasn’t willing to do work the that was someone else’s responsibility to do. I will always do my own emotional labor. I have for my entire life. But I am done overloading myself just to make others feel better about their lack of accountability. That toxicity, that passive-aggression, that manipulation takes up too much time and too much energy. I’d rather be alone that exist with shallow people who don’t care about my wellbeing.

I am a very sexual being. I love sex. I love casual sex. I love committed sex. I love sex with myself. I love living in a body that holds the potential for so much pleasure. I am also a generous lover. I care about my partner’s pleasure. I give deeply and thoroughly, and so I also expect to be given back because physical love should never, ever, be one way. The idea that one gender likes/needs sex more than another is exactly the kind of thinking that pivots people in relationships against each other. I have been in sexual situations where I gave so much more than I was given. Situations where I was promised pleasure, where I was told I would be gratified, and then wasn’t. And I’m not saying that it’s wrong to focus on the other person’s pleasure, because it’s not. But it is wrong when one person’s pleasure is neglected more often than not. And I will not sacrifice my pleasure anymore. I don’t care how that messes up your view of gender roles.

I am allowed to exist as who I am without external pressure to perform, conform, or assimilate to other people’s expectations for me. I have persisted through the muck and mire of hard lessons, some of which took years to learn, and now I am giving myself the place and room to be messy. To just exist. To stop expecting so much of myself and just live.

I’m allowed to just live.

YOU are allowed to just live.

I will always persist because that’s who I am. I hope to, one day, have built a life where I can minimize how much I have to persist, a life where I can just be the sensitive, loving, compassionate person I am. I am already building that life. But I will also be persistent. I will be resilient. I will fight every battle I face, and I will not allow myself to be overcome. I also hope that I keep my compassion, my love, and my ability to forgive. Because underneath the pain, the loss, the disappointment, the confusion, is really just a woman who is trying her hardest to understand the world and her place in it.