TW: trauma
I first read The Perks of Being a Wallflower as a teenager, around the same time my own memories of a traumatic youth began to surface—alongside my reconnection to my Indigenous roots. The book resonated deeply with me then, but what I couldn’t have known was how that one line would echo through my life years later.
No matter how much I have learned—through therapy, through reconnection, through family history and hard-earned growth—I still found myself accepting the love I thought I deserved.
Some traumas run deeper than the individual. They are ancestral. Societal. Cultural. I see them reflected in our television shows. I see them in my mother. I see them in my cousins. I hear them in the stories told about the women in my family. And even when I am actively trying to understand, to move forward, I find myself repeating the same mistakes.
“We keep going toward pieces of shit,” my brother once said. “We see the danger, but somehow we convince ourselves that that is the relationship worth salvaging.”
We are conditioned to be hostages to danger. Taught for centuries that we must protect hostile environments—and the people who thrive within them. So when something feels safe, when it feels calm or nurturing, we don’t fight for it. We don’t work through it. We don’t trust it. Because deep down, we don’t believe we deserve that peace.
We think we deserve the chaos.
The cruel irony is that healing makes this harder to spot at first, especially with people who are good at hiding their faces.We don’t immediately recognize that we’re still following the same patterns—we just think we’re doing better. It takes time. We convince ourselves we’re choosing differently now.
But our bodies remember what our minds try to forget.
The signs start to appear. The same red flags we once ignored. The same tightness in the stomach. The same unease. And suddenly, our body is signaling what our mind hasn’t fully accepted yet: this is harm. And if we are going to truly heal, we must stay present. Alert. Awake.
And then it happens.
The realization lands. The trigger is pulled. Your world collapses. Everything you worked years to build feels like it’s turned to ash. Your body and mind revolt at once, and the old script starts playing:
You deserve this.
No.
You knew this time. You saw the danger. You asked the questions. You set boundaries. You listened to your intuition instead of silencing it. You sought the truth and recognized it for what it was—and you pushed it away.
You didn’t do anything wrong.
You were manipulated. Groomed. Your care was used for someone else’s benefit. And when you are still surrounded by trauma, when escape isn’t simple or immediate, it can be nearly impossible to see that you are trying to “salvage shit” instead of nurturing something that was actually safe.
I blamed myself over and over again. My fault, my fault.
But as I slowly reconnected—communicating again with the person at the center of an old misunderstanding—I felt something unexpected: ease. Safety. Familiar comfort. The feeling I have in my closest friends, my chosen family. The feeling that doesn’t require me to shrink or bleed to earn it.
That quiet sense of home.
That was what I deserved all along.
The feeling I lost through poor communication. Through blurred boundaries. Through things left unsaid. Safety. The safety that could exist when two people are willing to listen—because once upon a time, we really did.
In everything and everyone who gave me safety, there was a sense of home. And I hope—truly—that they felt it too. Because that is the kind of love we all deserve.
I accept the love I deserve.
