Time does weird shit. Emotions don’t line up with what’s happening, and that mismatch alone can knock the wind out of us. Someone catches a tone in someone else’s voice, or a smell, or a look, and suddenly the whole body reacts like we’re back there again, even though we’re standing in the kitchen or the bathroom or buckling a car seat. These moments never arrive politely. They show up when we are already stretched thin, already holding too much, already moving through the day on momentum and instinct. There’s never a reserve. There’s never extra. Just enough to get through the next thing before something inside decides now is the moment.
We finish up with a client and we have eight minutes. Eight minutes to pee, eat something that barely qualifies as food, hold our daughter, check in with our spouse, orient to what day it even is. And then headspace has other plans. Someone drags a memory forward that’s been buried so deep it never had language. There’s an internal argument about what’s needed in that moment, comfort or space or reassurance or silence, and before we can translate any of it into words, overstimulation hits and we snap at the person we love. Again. Watching it happen like it’s on a screen we can’t shut off.
Sometimes it feels like watching ourselves mess things up in slow motion, fully aware and completely unable to intervene. Every minute stretches into years. Whole years vanish like they were never ours to begin with. The internal chaos isn’t subtle. It’s loud. It’s embodied. It hums under everything.
From the outside, it looks impressive. A well-established professional. Someone who owns and runs multiple successful businesses. Someone grounded, articulate, stable. An attentive parent. A present spouse. A clean home tucked into the woods like a curated image of safety. Strong boundaries. Competent. Put together. And there is pride in that. Real pride. We learned how to do this for a reason. It kept us alive. It still does.
But the cost is real.
The cost is our authenticity as a plural being. Our voice as survivors. Our ability to actually fall apart and be held without consequence. What most people see is one. Very few know the many. The ones inside who keep everything running, who hold memories they never asked for, who carry terror and tenderness at the same time. Hidden. Quiet. Working nonstop behind the scenes. Lonely as fuck.
When people talk about trauma, they usually mean specific events. Single moments you can point to. What comes to mind for us is different. It’s the slow hollowing pain of giving deeply and meaningfully, again and again. To clients, work that matters and is chosen, work that feels sacred and connective and alive. To our spouse. To our child. To our animals. To our community. Always noticing. Always attuned. Always responding with care that looks like intuition but is actually years of learning how to feel first and ask questions later. That way of being is a strength. It’s also vulnerable. And over time, the wound forms in realizing that this level of attunement is rarely mirrored back.
The longing to be taken care of in the same way doesn’t fade. To be known well enough that someone can tell who is present. To have the complexity understood instead of flattened. To have someone see how tired we are without us having to explain it. That loneliness doesn’t resolve. It becomes its own ongoing ache.
In the absence of real connection, we disappear. Then we come back. We forget what we said. We forget how much we cared five minutes ago and then it all crashes back at once. Too much feeling. Then nothing. Then everything again. We mess up relationships. We say things sideways. We pull away when we want closeness. We stay when we should step back. Inside, there are constant negotiations about safety and energy and risk. Some of us are bone-deep tired. Some are furious. Some are screaming internally while doing everything possible to appear functional.
And still, there is so much love here. Real love. Deep love. Love that never shuts off even when it hurts. Sometimes it’s the only thing tethering us to this world. What we want, desperately, is for that love to be met without conditions. To be seen without being simplified. To be held without being managed.
A lot of us learned how to survive without ever being taught how to rest. How to exist without bracing. So when things slow down, it doesn’t feel peaceful. It feels wrong. Unsafe. Like something bad is about to happen if we stop paying attention.
This is written from lived experience. Not from resolution. There is no resolution right now. In other parts of our life, we are a licensed mental health counselor, consultant, supervisor, author, instructor. This isn’t therapy or treatment or clinical guidance. It’s not a substitute for care. This is an offering between plural folks. No sanding the edges. No making it easier to digest.
The last several months haven’t just been hard. Everything has been on fire. Louder. Heavier. More expensive. Less forgiving. Not one crisis, but many, stacked together without pause. Disorientation became the baseline. Hospital stays. Medical emergencies. Family interactions that reopened old wounds. Grief layered on grief. Groceries costing more. Bills stacking up. Healthcare feeling like a maze designed to wear you down until you stop asking for help. And if you say that out loud, suddenly you’re a problem to be managed instead of a human being responding to impossible conditions.
All of it lands in the body first. Muscles tighten before thoughts form. Sleep gets strange. Pain hums in familiar places. Headmates keep watch. Some hover close to the front, hoping not to be noticed. Others get pushed forward without consent. Old coping strategies resurface like they never left. Not because we failed, but because the conditions returned.
December always makes it worse. Family stuff. Memories resurfacing. Expectations to perform joy and gratitude and coherence. Sitting at tables with people who don’t ask questions because they don’t want the answers. Being gaslit by people frozen in denial. Masking hurts physically. The crash afterward can feel like fresh injury. Christmas came and went this year and it didn’t feel like a holiday. It felt like grief dressed up as tradition. Like something painful pretending to be normal. It hurt in a quiet, soul-level way.
Some nights look like sitting on the floor because the bed feels wrong. Or lying on the bed because the floor feels too real. A dab pen within reach just to soften the edges enough to unclench our jaw. Music loud enough to blur headspace. Sometimes silence. Sometimes nothing at all. We don’t plan. We don’t process. We let whoever is closest stay there. We let time blur. We stop performing survival.
It’s the solstice. Usually that matters deeply to us. We proposed on the solstice. We’ve marked it with ritual, with fire, with drumbeats echoing through the woods, with the unseen standing close. This year, the drum stayed on the shelf. We didn’t have the capacity to open those doors. The night felt long, and that felt right. Heavy. Quiet. Grief and pain sitting right alongside a small, strange sense of endurance. Something old and steady moving underneath everything. Not hope. Not answers. Just presence.
We are still here, and that matters more than people like to admit. Not in the polished, inspirational way survival gets packaged and sold back to us, but in the real way. The way survival actually looks. The way it costs something. The way it leaves marks. The way it asks for compromises that don’t photograph well. The way it creates shame and guilt and grief alongside relief. We are deeply shaped by how we survived, and there are parts of us that still don’t know how to forgive themselves for the choices that kept us alive. That doesn’t make survival less meaningful. It makes it honest.
Survival is not a slogan. It is not resilience porn. It is not a neat arc with a moral at the end. It is messy and nonlinear and often contradictory. It can involve things we’re proud of and things we still can’t talk about out loud. It can include love and harm in the same breath. It can mean doing what worked in the moment and living with the fallout later. We carry all of that. Real survival leaves residue. It leaves nervous systems altered. It leaves bodies holding stories they didn’t consent to remember. It leaves people alive and struggling with what it took to get there.
And still, survival holds meaning. Not because it’s pretty, but because something inside refused to give up. Something adapted when no one else was coming. Split the load. Figured out how to endure without guarantees. That intelligence deserves respect, not shame. It deserves care, not erasure. We don’t owe anyone a version of our story that makes them comfortable or inspired. We owe ourselves honesty about what it actually cost.
What we are holding right now isn’t optimism. It’s recognition. A clear understanding that what we are living through is not a personal failure or a lack of effort. It is the predictable result of existing in a world that exploits care, punishes difference, and demands productivity at the expense of humanity. That violence lives in our bodies. It shows up in the way rest feels dangerous. In the way joy tangles with fear. In the way stopping feels like a threat instead of relief.
And yet, inside all of this, there is something that has not been extinguished. Not untouched. Not unscarred. But present. A collective will to remain. A refusal to disappear quietly. A refusal to be simplified, corrected, or erased to make the world more comfortable. We don’t need to be fixed. We don’t need to be made smaller. We need space. We need safety. We need room to exist as we actually are.
Because we refuse to let people who benefit from our silence decide whether we are allowed to exist.
Warmly, -K
About the author.
We are a plural, queer, neurodivergent person writing from inside survival, not after it. We share lived experiences as we move through profound joy, destabilizing depression, and the long, uneven work of healing complex trauma in our own way and in our own time. We are a parent, partner, psychopomp practitioner, licensed mental health counselor, clinical and spiritual consultant, clinical supervisor, and mental health educator on plurality from a plural perspective.
There is something spiritual at the core of how we move through the world. An embodied way of sensing, listening, and exchanging energy with people, places, and moments. We don’t experience connection as surface-level. We experience connection as presence, resonance, and responsibility. Those who have been made invisible, living or deceased, are witnessed here with the compassion and dignity everyone deserves.
This work is shaped by many layers of knowing. Our ancestral lineage. Our lived experiences in this lifetime. Navigating the mental health system as a plural person. Over fifteen years of clinical practice as a licensed mental health counselor. Five years of rigorous training and practice as a soul worker and psychopomp. Nearly a decade of marriage. Breaking generational trauma while raising children as a plural person. Living with complex grief that does not resolve. Growing up in the talons of a narcissistic parent. And surviving childhood sexual exploitation while learning how to repair what was broken without erasing what kept us alive.
We write at the intersection of survival, care work, spirituality, and refusal. Refusal to disappear quietly. Refusal to simplify complex lives for the comfort of others. Refusal to let political systems, institutions, or cultural amnesia decide whose pain counts and whose existence is negotiable. Access to mental health care is a basic human right. Silence is political.
It’s important to name that while we are a licensed mental health counselor and clinical supervisor, and that training inevitably informs our lens, this space is not a clinical offering. This writing is personal and rooted in lived experience. At times we may share educational information, but it should be received as knowledge offered by a stranger on the internet, not as treatment or professional guidance. This space does not establish a clinical relationship and does not replace your own mental health care.
Beyond The Opal Veil exists for those of us who stayed alive in ways that don’t photograph well. For those who carry intelligence, shame, tenderness, rage, and endurance in the same body. This space tells the truth without sanding it down to make it easier to swallow, and without demanding resolution as proof of healing.
This project is anonymous and separate by design, protecting safety, confidentiality, and creative autonomy. What’s offered here is meant for reflection and resonance, not replacement for care. We speak truthfully about trauma, survival, and plurality while holding firm boundaries around privacy and professional responsibility. Stay Connected
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This space isn’t built for urgency or algorithms. It’s built for continuity.
If something in this writing resonated, lingered, or unsettled you in a way that felt familiar, you’re welcome to stay connected here. Beyond The Opal Veil exists as an ongoing container for truth-telling, reflection, and survival narratives that don’t get cleaned up for public comfort. This is not content designed to motivate or optimize you. It’s a place to name what’s actually happening, especially in bodies and lives shaped by trauma, dissociation, care work, and systems that were never designed to hold us.
Subscribing means you’ll receive future writing directly, without having to chase it through feeds that bury anything inconvenient or uncomfortable. Some posts will be raw and personal. Some will be reflective, political, spiritual, or quietly observational. Some will sit with grief. Some will sit with refusal. None of it will ask you to perform healing or optimism.
There is no expectation of engagement here. No obligation to comment, share, or respond. Being connected doesn’t mean being visible. It just means having access to a space where the truth isn’t diluted, and where survival is spoken about as it actually is: complex, costly, meaningful, and ongoing.
If this space ends up not being for you, you can step away at any time. No guilt. No hard feelings.
