I want to tell you about a backward day, because I don't think we talk about those enough.
We talk about healing like it's a staircase. Up and up, a little better every day, until one morning you wake up fixed. But that's not how it actually goes. Not for me. Some days you climb, and some days you open your eyes already at the bottom, heart pounding, wondering how you ended up back here.
Today was one of those.
The nightmares came back
For two nights straight, I've had nightmare after nightmare about my parents. Hours of them. In the dreams I've lost my job and I have nowhere to go, so I have to move back in with them, and they treat me exactly the way they always did. Cruel in the offhand way that makes you feel like you're imagining it. My siblings were there too, laughing at me when I got scared, my dad on his phone, not looking up once the whole time I was in the room. In one of them I locked my door just to get a moment of peace, and someone picked the lock and broke it open because me needing space wasn't allowed to be a real answer.
I woke up from five hours of that feeling like I was five years old again. Helpless. Small. Right back in it, like no time had passed at all — like the years of work I've put into getting out never happened.
That's the thing nobody warns you about with healing. Your mind can know you're safe now, and your body can still wake up convinced you're not.
And then my body joined in
I overslept, hard, the way you do after a night your brain wouldn't let you rest. Which meant I took my medication hours late, and if you take anything for your mental health you might know exactly what that feels like — that foggy, dizzy, in-and-out feeling, like your consciousness is a radio station that won't quite tune in. So on top of the emotional hangover from the nightmares, I spent the morning feeling physically untethered, waiting for my meds to catch up to me.
I got in the shower because I'd woken up in the night sweating and I realized I smelled like my mom used to smell. And I know that sounds like a small thing, but it undid me. A smell can put you right back in a house you spent years trying to leave. I stood there and scrubbed it off and cried.
The part where I decided I was failing everyone
Here's where my brain really got going. Because when I feel like this, the story it tells me is always the same: you're failing everyone.
We still haven't finished our wedding thank-you notes and the wedding was in February. There are only about 35 left and my husband wants to knock them out today, and instead I'm lying in bed feeling like I can't do anything right. I checked my little business and I'd made zero sales — a hundred people had come by and not one had bought anything, and never mind that it's a holiday weekend and that's completely normal, my brain went straight to see, it's not working, you're not enough.
That's the trap of a backward day. Every ordinary thing becomes evidence. The unfinished notes, the quiet sales, the late meds — my mind stacks them all up into a case against me.
What was actually true
But here's what was also happening, underneath the story my brain was telling.
I got up. I showered off the thing that triggered me. I drank water when I realized I was dangerously dehydrated. I took my meds, even late. I drove my dog to the park and back safely, and when he wanted to go home after ten minutes, I brought him home and got him a cookie and cuddled him. I fed myself, even if it was just a Hot Pocket. My husband noticed I was struggling and wanted to take me out tonight, and was ready to sit and do those thank-you notes with me instead of leaving them all on me.
None of that is failing. On a day when your nervous system is screaming and your medication is playing catch-up and the past is showing up uninvited in your sleep — getting up, drinking water, keeping your dog fed and yourself fed and your body safe? That's not failure. That's survival. And surviving a day like this is its own quiet kind of strength, even when it doesn't feel like anything at all.
What I've learned about the backward days
I have, in my heart, forgiven my parents. Not because they earned it, and not because they've changed — I don't think they have. But because I got tired of carrying it. I moved on. I built a life.
And still, some nights, they come back in my sleep. And I've had to make peace with something that took me a long time to understand: you can forgive someone and still grieve that they were never able to love you the way you needed. Both of those things get to be true at the same time. Moving on doesn't mean the hard nights stop. It just means that now, when they come, you have somewhere safe to wake up to.
A person who worries when you're cold. A dog who needs a cookie. A life that is yours.
So if you're having a backward day too — if you woke up right back at the bottom of a staircase you thought you'd already climbed — I need you to hear this: you are not broken, and you are not going backward for good. Healing was never a straight line. It loops and stalls and doubles back, and none of that erases how far you've come. Some days the whole win is just getting through. And getting through counts.
I'm still here. Foggy and tender and a couple hours behind on my meds, but here. I hope you are too.
Be gentle with yourself today. Especially if it's a backward day.
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