I still grieve the standards I accepted when I was trying to survive

Dear Delyara, It’s not just people or choices I regret. It’s standards. What I let count as enough. What I told myself was normal. What I learned to tolerate because it seemed easier than wanting more and risking disappointment. Survival can make a person lower the bar in ways that only become visible later, when the nervous system is finally calm enough to see how little it had asked for. That is one of the hardest griefs for me now. Not that I endured. That I normalized so much while enduring.