actually, i CAN Blog

Some days, the pain is sharper than memory. You bend, reach, move just slightly wrong—and there it is: the ache. The throb. The burn beneath the skin or inside the joints. It shows up without ceremony, like a ghost you’ve learned to tolerate, not fight. But here’s the thing no one talks about: sometimes, that pain feels weirdly functional. Almost like it’s doing something important. Not good, not pleasant—but vital. Like it’s carrying a message the psyche couldn’t hold without cracking. Because when you’re the kid who had to swallow what should have been screamed, when you were taught early to tuck your instincts behind your teeth and wear “I’m fine” like armor, your pain doesn’t just disappear. It relocates. What couldn’t be expressed verbally, gets encrypted into flesh. What couldn’t be named emotionally, gets stored in the joints, the gut, the nervous system’s circuitry. That’s not dysfunction. That’s survival. And in a world where your soul wasn’t allowed to protest, your body did ...

There’s a kind of damage that doesn’t just hurt — it takes pieces of you with it. When life has stripped you, betrayed you, or left you crawling through the wreckage, it’s not just the bruises or the memories you’re left to heal from. It’s the theft of your soul. Trauma, addiction, betrayal — they don’t just wound, they steal. They take your trust, your joy, your sense of safety in your own skin. And this is especially devastating when the very people who were supposed to protect you — parents, family, the ones you were told you could trust without question — are the ones who brought the dysfunction, neglect, or harm. A soul lost in that kind of betrayal is harder to reclaim because it isn’t just safety that’s been taken; it’s the blueprint for safety itself. The hands that should have caught you were the ones that dropped you, and that rewrites something deep in your bones. When the roots are poisoned, the branches grow in strange, protective ways — twisted to survive, not to thrive. ...