I Pick Me

For most of my life, I didn’t get to choose. Not when my stepdad broke my arm because I climbed on the counter to get a glass of water. Not when the church we ran to for safety turned out to be a haven for a priest who preyed on children. Not when my dad abandoned me as a baby. Not when my mom drowned her pain in opioids and, eventually, left this world when I was just 18.

Life handed me a script soaked in trauma, and I followed it because I didn’t know there was another way. By the time I was thrust headfirst into motherhood, barely an adult myself, I was already carrying the weight of lifetimes. Then, almost losing my second-born son shattered what was left of me. For five years, I floated in dissociation—half-present, half-alive, running on survival mode while my nervous system was screaming on overdrive.

When my youngest daughter was born, the floodgates burst. Everything I thought I had tucked away came roaring back, triggered in ways I couldn’t control. And then came the final blow—finding out the priest who was supposed to offer sanctuary had been arrested for torturing a teenage boy. Something inside me broke.

I spiraled. Hard.

I don’t use that word lightly. My coping turned into self-destruction. I peeled, picked, burned, and cut my skin because pain was the only way I could feel relief. Let me make this crystal clear: self-harm is not about wanting to die. It was never that for me. I didn’t want to end my life—I wanted to survive the pain inside my head. And in a twisted way, physical pain was the only way my brain could release dopamine. The only way I could breathe.

Two years. That’s how long I lived in that hell. Two years where my husband and I truly wondered if I would make it out alive—not because I wanted to die, but because the harm was eating me alive. Doctors handed me band-aid solutions in the form of meds that made things worse. Nobody seemed to understand what was really happening.

Until I decided to understand it myself.

I became my own case study. I learned everything I could about trauma, somatic therapy, the nervous system, the brain’s wiring. And then I found something that changed everything: Rapid Transformational Therapy—a blend of hypnosis therapy and emotional mapping technology that allowed me to trace my anxiety back to its roots and actually reprogram the way my brain responds.

For the first time in years, something worked.

I haven’t self-harmed in months. I can feel the difference deep in my bones. I’m learning my triggers. I can pause. I can regulate. I can choose.

And that’s the point of this blog—I pick me.

Not my skin.

Not my scars.

Not my pain.

Me.

Because after everything life has thrown at me, the most radical, rebellious thing I can do is choose myself.

And if you’re reading this and you’re in that dark place—where you think nothing will work, where you feel like you’re drowning in your own body—I need you to hear me when I say: it can get better. There is a way out. And it starts with the smallest, bravest act: choosing you.

Today, I pick me. Tomorrow, I’ll pick me again. And again. And again.

And that’s how I win.