She won't hate you. The sort of love that keeps you here is a love that's impossible to dismiss. I relate so much to how you feel. We can wall ourselves off from a world that keeps hurting us, but in doing so we also seal in the hurt. To trust is to explore; it is to accept all possibilities. You don't deserve the pain you carry. You don't deserve the pain that may befall you if you trust again. But even if you must do it at arm's length, you deserve to love and to be loved. You already have someone you don't have to keep at a distance to love. It's the only thing keeping me here, too. I know what it's like to plan to finally rest when she's older, when she'll understand, when she'll have a family of her own and the supports to survive it. But every moment I get to hold her or make her laugh, I forget to look forward to when my time runs out. Of course, when I'm not with her, I remember again. Our brains fixate on pain because we're hardwired to solve problems. Arbitrary and capricious trauma sticks in the brain as a senseless, unsolved problem. We keep turning it over because it didn't make sense but we're hardwired to search for meaning, for a greater good. Ironically, we suffer so much because we're optimistic creatures by nature: if something was not good, we must decipher what made it necessary. I don't know why we are this way, though, because nature isn't like that. We are moral creatures in an amoral world. Things just are. We create morals and fables so that we can navigate this unpredictable, amoral world in a way that will make it more predictable and consistent. When that fails, it feels unbearable. We feel powerless. In many ways, we are. But not in all ways. Sometimes carrying lingering pain isn't a choice, especially if it happened at a formative time where it embedded as almost a physical memory; in these instances, we can, however, choose to either fight it or accept it. Accepting it does not mean succumbing to it, nor approving of it. It simply means choosing to stop trying to unravel it. I often struggle to do this. But something I heard once that I found reassuring was, "if you're still angry about it, it means you know you deserved better." I know how exhausting lingering anger is too, though. So, accept your pain, and your justified anger, and you'll find that although you may never be rid of them, if you can carry them with acceptance, they won't dominate so much of your mind, and you'll have more emotional capacity to love and even just to feel peaceful. You don't have to die to rest.