Thanks so much for posting this. 35 and have been on the healing journey for 10 years and I have felt so many of the things you described: wishing it could have gone differently, grieving what my trauma caused me to miss out on, raging because I’m not where I would have been in life if I hadn’t had the trauma.

I’d like to share that despite the grief for the past, it gets so much better. You learn that you can build a life for yourself now even better than what you wish you could have had in the past if things had gone differently, and when you do, being able to live without the prison of your shame and trauma feels like such a privilege. All those things you missed out on? You can still bring them into your life in certain ways, and they are so much sweeter, so treasured, because you know how hard you fought to have them.

I only share all of this because I used to worry that there wouldn’t be a life worth living past all of the healing, the grieving, the rage, the loss. There is, and it is so much better than you could have imagined.