Bring Me Back to Life: A Memoir of Loss, Trauma, and Finding My Way Back

Product Description

I did not set out to write this book.For years, I stood on the other side of the room, clipboard in hand, helping other people find their way back from the edge. I was the steady voice, the regulated nervous system, the person who could walk into chaos and somehow make it feel a little less overwhelming. I knew the language of healing. I knew how to map out a treatment plan, how to track symptoms, how to normalize pain without minimizing it. I could quote the research on trauma, burnout, grief, and recovery.What I could not admit at least not then was how much of that research lived in my own body.My book comes from the quiet places in between sessions and staff meetings. It comes from late nights staring at the ceiling, from mornings when the alarm went off and my first thought was not “I am grateful,” but “I am already tired.” It comes from the moment I realized I could help people come back to themselves while being almost completely absent from my own life.For a long time, I believed that was the cost of doing this work well. I told myself that if I just pushed harder, cared more, read more, did more, eventually the emptiness would resolve itself. Instead, I grew more efficient and less alive. Numbness became my unspoken survival strategy. As long as I was functioning, I convinced myself I was fine.I was not fine.What follows is not a clinical manual, though you will hear echoes of my training and my years in the field. It is a memoir of losing myself while trying to save everyone else, and slowly learning that survival and living are not the same thing. It is about loss that lingers, trauma that hides in competence, and the dangerous comfort of being needed by everyone but yourself.This is the story of what happened when I finally turned toward my own pain, let someone see me, and began piecing myself back together, not into who I was, but into someone more honest, marked, and fully human. Read more