When I went to France to study abroad years ago, it was for an intrinsic reason only. I’d always wanted to study abroad there since high school and to experience the culture more in depth. So I did. And once I arrived, and I was in a safe space, all of the trauma that was stored in my body came spilling out. That was the unexpected part of the experience.  

I thought I was going to go to France and continue to just keep going, going, going like I had been for the previous 20 years, but that’s not how trauma works. I’d been in a continuously dangerous space for a long time and when I finally made it a point to step out and into something better, God delivered me to a safe place through a seed he’d planted in my heart over a decade earlier.  

Once, I was there, I thought I would just continue on with the armor and defensiveness that I had had for over 20 years, but what happens when you get to safe space and you’ve been fighting so long is that your defenses go down because you don’t really actually have to fight anymore. And that’s when all of the trauma that was stored in my body started to come out immediately and I bled all over the cobblestones of Aix-en-Provence.  

It was like I had no boundaries, not for a lack of trying, but just because I’d been fighting for so long, once I got there, I had no fight left.  

This is why I wholeheartedly disagree when people tell you to deal with what’s happening internally before stepping out into the world. Sometimes the world that you’re in is toxic and that’s the reason why you might need to move, because you’re not where you’re supposed to be, and that new space is the safe space for you.  

France gave me the freedom to run around what felt like the whole of Europe and just figure it out, heal, engage in play whether that was what I was consciously doing or not, address trauma, and fight for myself by becoming more aware.  

It wasn’t easy. Everyday I had suicide ideation and I would fantasize about different ways to take my life. On top of that, I had no boundaries, I was figuring out studying abroad, I was going to class everyday in a program that was strict about attendence, and I was dealing with trying to form relationships which are not good to form when you’re not okay emotionally.  

It was hard, one of the hardest things of my life. On Instagram, I remember people commenting on my photos saying how happy I looked, but I wasn’t happy at all. I was in a great deal of emotional pain that was overwhelming and messy. Even as I began healing, it wasn’t linear at all. I would go forward and then be drawn to things and people that reminded me of my past and then push away from them as well and then it was a cycle. The pain was so overwhelming that it made me have empathy for the people that choose to smoke their pain away and drink their pain away and all of the other ways we choose to mask because that healing process (which I continue to this day) wasn’t a joke, but the other side of it was so much better and I would never want to continue to sit in my shit, because there is no life there. And how good is God that he allowed me heal in the beautiful South of France?