The Emotional Chaos

There’s a point in every healing journey where language starts to break. You can explain the facts, cite the reports, show the footage, list the dates — but none of it captures what it feels like inside the body. The nervous system doesn’t understand bureaucracy. It only knows danger, injustice, and the impossible effort of trying to stay alive while being told to stay polite.

This process — the appeals, the retellings, the re-traumatization — has been like living in an emotional centrifuge. Everything that was once neatly compartmentalized keeps spinning to the surface. I wake up some mornings with fire in my chest, other days with static in my head. It’s like my body doesn’t know which version of me it’s supposed to protect anymore: the one who endured, or the one finally speaking.

I used to think truth would bring peace. That if I laid everything bare — the tiger, the feed chute, the years of silence — something in the universe would exhale and say finally. But peace hasn’t arrived neatly wrapped in justice. It’s arrived in fragments: in the nights I don’t dissociate, in the mornings I can drink coffee without shaking, in the moments when someone reads my story and says, “I believe you.” That’s peace now. Small, quiet, stubborn.

The emotional chaos of this process isn’t a sign of weakness — it’s evidence of recalibration.

The system tried to flatten me into compliance. My body refused. Every panic attack, every burst of rage, every bout of exhaustion is the nervous system renegotiating its terms with a world that taught it not to trust safety. Healing has made me feral in the best way. I’m done begging for understanding. I’m here to witness myself.

I’ve learned that advocacy and grief aren’t opposites; they are siblings. One fights, the other weeps. One writes formal letters to adjudicators, the other screams into the forest until her voice cracks. Both are sacred. Both are part of becoming whole again.

Sometimes I think the chaos itself is holy — the storm that clears the rot, the sound of my integrity refusing to be silenced. I am not who I was when this began. I’m sharper now, heavier with truth, but lighter in guilt. I no longer mistake composure for healing. I’ve earned the right to tremble and still be seen as whole.

Maybe emotional chaos isn’t the evidence of being broken. Maybe it’s the sound of truth rearranging itself after years of suppression.

Maybe this is what power feels like when it starts to come back home.

---

Rebuilding the Cage

How memory, evidence, and sacred anger became my tools.

I spent the last two days surrounded by witness statements and corporate spin — page after page of people trying to narrate my trauma for me. Words written by those who didn’t see what I saw, who twisted what I said into something convenient. Gaslighting dressed up as documentation.

And somewhere between the disbelief and the shaking, I started building. Scrap wood. Old panels. My hands remembering dimensions my mind had tried to forget. I called it the Temu Tiger Cage — part reconstruction, part exorcism. A mock-up of the holding chute where everything went wrong.

It’s strange, how the body knows before the brain catches up. My muscles tightened in the same sequence they did that day. My throat closed when I crouched to the angle where the plate sheared. My voice trembled as I walked myself through each motion — not as an exhibit, but as a living record. I spoke the words I couldn’t back then. I named the moments that went undocumented. I honored the version of me who kept breathing when she shouldn’t have had to.

I’m not sure what’s more exhausting — fighting the paper trail or facing the ghosts. But something shifted while I was standing inside that makeshift cage. The shaking didn’t mean

I was breaking. It meant I was remembering in real time.

Every board I screwed in place felt like a protest against revisionism. Every breath I took inside that space felt like proof that I survived the story they tried to erase.

This wasn’t a re-enactment. It was a reclamation. A declaration that I am no longer the exhibit — I am the keeper of the truth.

---

Song on repeat right now: "Run Run Run" Yeah But No.

Burdened with secrets, I run away

I hide out and keep them, afraid to pray

And the finer sight of life, just slips aside

And I'm burdened with secrets, can't find a way

Burned out by secrets that I can't shake

I'm tied down by deepest heartaches

And I feel desire's glance has marked me

The burden of secrets won't go away

Burdened with secrets, I run away

I hide out and keep them, afraid to pray

And the finer sight of life, just slips aside

And I'm burdened with secrets, can't find a way