Trauma recovery doesn’t come from “getting over it.” It emerges from changing your relationship with what happened. There are many ways to do this: through story, compassionate witnessing, individual work, and collective work. But a key way to reclaim your life is to express it in ways that restore agency. Some call this “changing the narrative.”

The way I talk, write, and paint about my experiences is a punch in the face to the people and systems that harmed me. Every one of my verbal, written, or painted expressions is a refusal to let them control the story. I stand up against these systems of rigid hierarchy: profit-driven medical institutions, insurance companies, the mental illness industry, and the disease management industry. These create the conditions that attract, employ, foster, and protect abusers and predators.

With neuroscience backing me, I feel power, strength, and hope. I can’t expect these massive systems to suddenly care about human life. But I can hope that my watercolors and words start a ripple effect, that maybe someday this truth will create real change, even if I’m not here to see it.

That’s why I keep talking. That’s why I will never shut up about what the gynecologist did to me, about the abuses I encountered at Rockford Center for Behavioral Health and ChristianaCare, about all the doctors and systems that block access to the treatments that actually help.

For example, my primary pain specialist could give me a lumbar sympathetic block with pulsed radio frequency ablation, which would provide months of relief. He has the machine, knowledge, and desire, but he doesn’t have the tools. The insulators for the needles cost $1,000, and it’s not cost-effective for the corporation to buy them for one patient. So instead, I have to keep undergoing nerve blocks, being dosed with radioactive isotopes each time–43 nerve blocks over five years–getting temporary relief every few months and a yo-yo trajectory, instead of real, sustainable relief that would let me rebuild my life.

With appropriate care, I could have focused on cooking food that is good for me. I could have rebuilt my physical capacities. I could have volunteered at the therapy barn. I could have gone to cool events at the museum. Instead, I’ve been forced to fight constantly just to get what I need, because the disease management industry we call a healthcare system is built against it.

Speaking my truth is part of my survival. But it’s also something bigger. Witnessing each other’s truth is healing for everyone. For the person speaking, and for the people listening and responding. Our nervous systems evolved for this. We are meant to share, to witness, to respond. That is how we heal.

So I speak. I tell my story, in my words, in my way. I call out what is wrong. I name the harm. I refuse to let the system erase me. And I hope that anyone reading this will feel the same strength rising in themselves. Speak your truth. Witness others. Hold each other’s humanity. That is how we build a culture of caring and connection, where abusers can no longer hide within the institutions that shelter them.