#HealingInTheDarkness

[jmikepatt]

The Echo of Shadows: Waking Up in the Past

When the nightmare ends, you don’t wake up to peace; you wake up in the ruins of where it all began. Time doesn’t heal—it traps you, replaying the trauma like a broken record.

I’ve always wondered what it means to “wake up.” People talk about healing as if it’s linear, as if the past stays locked away behind a door labeled "yesterday." But that’s not my reality. When I wake up from the nightmare, I’m not waking up at all—I’m falling backward, dragged to the moment when the first crack splintered my soul.

I can’t pinpoint my mental age because trauma is a thief of time. Every flashback, every shiver of anxiety, drags me back to different years, different wounds. I’m the child hiding in fear. I’m the teenager screaming into the void. I’m the adult trying to patch it all together while the echoes of those younger versions of me cry out for answers I still don’t have.

People say to let go, but how do you let go when the nightmare feels safer than the unknown? At least in the nightmare, you know the monsters. You recognize their faces, their voices. Out here, in the supposed “real world,” the monsters hide in plain sight—wearing smiles, offering empty promises, blending into the crowd.

"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?"—Jeremiah 17:9

This verse resonates with me because it acknowledges the darkness within us. It’s not about denying the pain but confronting it, as terrifying as that may be. The sickness isn’t just in the trauma but in the way it warps our perception, making us question what’s real, who we are, and whether we can ever truly move forward.

Every day is a fight—not to erase the past, but to survive it. To understand it. To let it shape me without letting it destroy me. I don’t have the answers, but maybe that’s okay. Maybe surviving is enough for now.

Change is created by choice.

[jmikepatt]

https://www.jmikepatt.com