I’m going to be extra vulnerable here and give you a glimpse into the other side of this journey. Because there’s a part of August that no one saw — the part happening inside my chest, inside my head, inside the places where old fear still lived.

CPTSD doesn’t disappear just because life is moving forward. If anything, big changes make it louder.

So every day, I felt two realities at once.

On the outside, I was packing, planning, organizing, and pushing forward. On the inside, my nervous system was bracing, waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for something to fall apart, waiting for the kind of shock it had learned to expect.

Just because it wasn’t logical didn’t change what was happening. The CPTSD that I live with daily is the residue of a life lived in too many unstable moments. And as much as I would’ve liked to, I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there. Because it shaped everything — and continues to—from the way I breathed through every waiting moment. To the way I reacted to delays. To the way I held myself together so, from the outside, everything looked good to everyone else, especially my girls.

But there was a darker side. The nights I lay awake, second- and third-guessing every decision, every plan, every action, even though things weren’t really wrong. But my body didn’t know how to trust that things could go right. Staring at the dark ceiling above my head, listening to the familiar sounds of the wind dancing along the side of the house, the cat into her nightly mischief, everyone sleeping. Trying to breathe through it all and envision the goals and path ahead. Sometimes it would look bright and full of all our hopes; other times it was full of gnarled trees whose branches I couldn’t quite escape. Then, inevitably, I’d fall back to sleep. And every morning, I got up and kept moving forward.

And that’s the part of the story that needs to be shared. The trauma is mine to tame, the origin is mine to face, but stepping forward in the face of all the doubt doesn’t belong to just me. And if that trembling resilience helps someone else move forward even while shaking, that part matters.  

So August wasn’t just about the offer. It was about learning that even with CPTSD — even with the weight of a nervous system that never rests — I could still choose a future that felt bigger than the past.

And in choosing it, I proved something to myself: the nervous system that once held me back no longer gets to decide the direction of my life.

This time, the future didn’t just pull me forward. I stepped with it.