The Things I Still Flinch At

Day 239 – July 20, 2026

There are things my body knows before I do. A knock at the door is one of them. Sometimes I can be perfectly fine. Working, reading, watching something stupid, arguing with Roger about whether he has already had enough treats for one lifetime. Then somebody knocks and my entire nervous system launches itself into DEFCON 1 before I even know who is there.

It is almost impressive. My body apparently has a very dramatic security department. The frustrating part is that logically I know I am home. I know where I am. I know what day it is. I know the past is not happening again just because somebody touched the other side of the door.

My body does not care. It hears the sound and reacts.

That is the strange thing about trauma. Sometimes your mind has moved forward before your body gets the memo. I hate that. I hate how physical fear can be. The racing heart. The tight chest. That instant cold feeling under the skin. The way every sound suddenly becomes important. It makes me angry because it feels like somebody else still has access to me.

Not physically. But there are echoes.

I do not want to give those echoes more power than they deserve, but I also do not want to pretend they are not there. They are. Sometimes I still have nightmares. Sometimes a sound in the hallway makes me freeze. Sometimes I still cry in the shower. I wish that last one embarrassed me less. There is something about the shower that removes every distraction. No phone. No screen. No task. Just water and skin and memory.

Some days that is peaceful. Some days it is not. I still sometimes scrub places that do not need scrubbing. That is one of the hardest things to admit because it feels so primitive. As if some part of me still believes I can wash away the fact that somebody touched me when I did not want to be touched. I know I cannot. I know I am clean. I know none of what happened lives on my skin. But trauma is not particularly interested in facts.

So I let myself cry.

That part is new. I used to get angry at myself when those moments happened because I thought they meant I had gone backward. I do not think that anymore. A bad moment is not a direction. It is a moment. I can fall apart at 10:00 and laugh at noon. I can panic when somebody knocks and still open my laptop afterward. I can have a nightmare and still have a good day. That flexibility feels like progress.

Not the fact that the fear is gone. It is not. The fact that the fear does not automatically own whatever comes next. That matters. I spent a long time thinking recovery meant eliminating reactions. Now I think maybe it is more about shortening their reign.

Fear shows up. Fine.

You can sit there for a minute. You do not get the whole afternoon. That feels much more realistic. And honestly, I am tired of demanding perfection from my nervous system after everything it has been through.

It is trying. So am I. That has to count for something.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And a body that is still learning the danger has passed.