Where I've gone since being a child

When I first became an adult, without really being aware of it, I felt like a child trying to move around an adults body. It's been a long time since then, I've found connection with myself, 'integrated' into my body, feel like I own it and that I'm one whole person.

It feels strange being an adult, it feels strange being in my thirties. I certainly never expected to get here when I was younger. I don't know if I feel fully like an adult, the older I get, the more connected I feel to myself, the more I live as me, as the age I am, the less I'm able to connect with the traumatised child I was. This isn't to say I can't access my inner child. It's different. It feels strange, having most of my life be about my identity first as trying to make sense of life after CSA, then as a victim, then as a survivor. I don't feel like that person anymore.

I don't feel like I'm a survivor. The coping and survival mechanisms that kept me alive are gone, the awkward and awful phase where I had nothing is gone, I have 'healthy' coping and survival mechanisms. I think I'm now in a place, an uncomfortable and awkward place where I get to be someone who isn't connected to their CSA anymore. If I want to. It feels weird, like I'm a suit, trying to work out how to move around and control it. ​But I'm in control, I'm choosing it now.

Not feeling trapped or stuck by my mental health is uncanny and uncomfortable to me. Because now I have to choose who I am, what I want to be, who I want to be. I think I find it hard seeing myself in the mirror. So much time has passed, and I've made myself into a whole person. But accepting and connecting with that is a letting go, it's accepting that after 22 years of determined recovery, I don't need or recover anymore. And that's terrifying.