stick to the script
Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m stuck sharing a body with a younger version of myself. And honestly? It’s fucking exhausting. I feel completely haunted by a psyche I thought I had long outgrown. I’m looking around at my life and the stage is entirely too familiar…
“No, wait,” my mind whispers, “We’ve been here before. We already played this part. We outgrew it, remember?” Yet the cues are hitting anyway, and I feel like I am on the precipice of getting sucked back into a performance I have zero interest in stepping back into.
I spent the earlier part of my thirties doing the psychological heavy lifting to heal that girl. Not fixing her, exactly, healing her. There’s a massive functional difference.
I spent years untangling the messy, exhausting neural pathways of self-destruction, avoidance, shame, and pure, raw survival mode. I forced myself to write a final act with people who were never going to grant me the grace of an apology. I forgave the older, messier iterations of myself who operated out of deep attachment trauma. The one who didn't know how to exist in a room without trying to dissociate and disappear at the first sign of true intimacy.
For nearly a year, I practiced a deliberate, austere psychological isolation. Off the grid. Celibate. Meditating. Writing. I sat alone in the dark, grieving the loss of old ego identities, trauma bonds, and the futures I thought I wanted. I literally let entire versions of my life undergo cellular death so that healthier systems could finally take the stage.
And for a while, the rewiring worked. The new script was nearly flawless, and the cues were being hit, one by one:
Recover from an illness and setback that almost systematically fucked my entire life. Check.
Relocate to a new big city, disrupting the old environmental cues. Check.
Rebuild my relationship with my daughter into something stronger and more secure than either of us had ever known. Check.
Stop auditioning musicians because using them as a mirror to feel validated was just a trauma response. Check.
Meet a man who actually felt grounded, emotionally legible, kind, and ready to secure a real attachment. Check.
Finally let him into my inner world without my fight-or-flight kicking in and charting the nearest exit. Check.
Find work that aligns with my actual values and makes a tangible impact, not just a paycheck to survive. Check.
Leave big city and go back home and see if my stable relationship can withstand domesticity and suburbia. Check.
Piece by piece, I directed a highly functional, mature adult life and for the first time in a long time, I had peace at home and a partner who took some of the load off.
From the outside, it looked like a definitive arrival. I looked like the definition of a woman who had successfully integrated her past, wrapped it up, and left her defining battles in the rearview mirror.
Then, life happened and foundation fractured.
Womp, womp, womp…
The one person I finally trusted enough to build a secure future with betrayed me in a way I never saw coming, triggering a massive relational shock. Simultaneously, my older brother was dying. Someone else from my past passed away unexpectedly, and his death forced open an entire vault of unresolved history I hadn't realized I was still carrying.
Then came the part that gutted me the most: looking up to see my daughter watching me, her face tight with concern because she could tell I was breaking down emotionally and losing my internal grip.
The reality is, I’ve been in a state of deep, functional depression for months but the strange paradox is that my life hasn’t actually fallen apart.
I’m still killing it at work. I pay the bills. I sent my daughter to Homecoming and the Winter Formal, showed up for every choir performance and cheer tryout. I answer the emails, lead the meetings, solve the problems, make dinner, remember birthdays, and continue being the emotional ceiling for everyone who needs a roof. I lost twenty pounds. I am going to the gym. I am actively writing, creating, executing. Externally, the hyper-efficiency of my life is flawless. The coping mechanisms are highly optimized. The facade is holding.
Inside, I am time-traveling.
Look around, and the scenery is slowly becoming a carbon copy of a past I thought I escaped. The ghosts are here. The triggers are everywhere, laid out like psychological landmines, and my reflexes are firing on old, primitive wiring. The last few months have been a masterclass in slipping back into the defensive playbook of a 25 year old who doesn't know how to process the catastrophic hand this past year dealt me.
And the dangerous part? It’s been completely insidious. I am going out for drinks more and laughing louder to mask the hollowed-out spaces. I stay booked and busy, a classic manic defense against grief. I’m hanging out backstage, lingering in the studio, keeping the decibels high enough to drown out the internal noise. I entertain a married guy in my DMs, as if I didn’t already run this exact self-sabotaging script 10 years ago. I reconnected with exes from a decade back, looking at unfinished love stories and men I blew off, casually asking myself over drinks and sushi if I should fuck around with any of them just because they’re familiar, and I’m looking for a hit of dopamine to numb the breakup.
So far the distractions have been efficient. Blowing off steam has been functional. I’m keeping the whole world spinning on its axis, while actively standing in the wreckage of my own history. It’s dangerous territory and I’m wise enough to know, unsustainable.
The older I get, the less convinced I am that healing is a script you can just memorize and finish. I used to think of it as a final destination. I went to therapy. I set the boundaries. I filled the journals. I forgave the people who hurt me, and then I forgave myself. I found the grounded guy, secured the career, lost the weight, built the whole pristine life. I thought: Congratulations, you’re healed.
But that’s Bullshit. Obviously.
In real time, I’m learning that healing isn't the permanent eradication of your old ghost scripts. It’s just how your nervous system responds the first time life gives you a brutal reason to read them again. That’s the real stress test. And this year handed me a couple of catalysts.
What surprises me now isn't that my brain defaulted to a regression. It's how incredibly logical the old script feels when you are drowning in pain. The 25 year old version of me has an answer for everything. She knows exactly how to blow up intimacy before it can reject her. She knows how to mistake attention for actual connection. She knows how to romanticize emotionally unavailable men because their chaos and unavailability feels safer than stability. She knows how to stay booked and busy so she never has to sit quietly with her own heavy grief. She knows how to make pain look glamorous perched next to speakers in the glow in LED lighting.
But sitting here at 36, looking at her, I realize she has absolutely no idea how to actually live.
That’s the break in the text.
When I was 25, those behaviors weren't a pathology to me. They were adaptive. They were the brilliant, desperate tactics that kept me alive emotionally when I didn't have a single healthy tool in my shed. They weren't character flaws; they were survival strategies.
The problem I am facing right now is that survival strategies have strict expiration dates. What protected me at 25 is exactly what threatens to ruin me at 36.
And that is why the last six months have been so deeply unsettling. I haven't been watching myself become a stranger. I've been watching two distinct versions of myself negotiate over who gets to write the next line. One of them wants immediate emotional anesthesia. The other wants a meaningful life. One whispers, “Go where it’s familiar, go back to your old ways.” The other says, “No, bitch. Go where you’ll actually grow & be okay.”
Some days the younger one is louder. But she isn't wiser. She's just terrified. And fear has an incredible ability to impersonate instinct…
I spent the last few weeks wondering if I was fundamentally unraveling. Today, I think something much slower was happening. I think severe grief was just introducing me to parts of my psyche I had mistaken for dead.
And maybe the script was never about making sure those shadow parts never resurface. Maybe it's about recognizing the cue when it happens, thanking that younger self for the fierce protection that got me this far, and choosing consciously, painfully, over and over again not to let a traumatized 25-year-old direct the life of the 36-year-old woman I’ve spent a decade becoming.