I learned to call survival normal

Dear Delyara, One of the hardest things about looking back is realizing how much I normalized. The tension. The emotional unpredictability. The waiting. The criticism. The instability. The feeling of never fully exhaling. I called it life because I had to. I called it normal because naming it accurately would have made it harder to bear while I was still inside it. Now, as an adult, I’m learning the long work of renaming things truthfully. That has its own grief.