Rain falls outside in the darkness of the night. Fall is slowly leaving its place for winter to arrive. These are times to stay home more, have some hot tea, and look inside ourselves. It’s not December yet, but almost. Another year has passed. It feels like 2025 was filmed both in slow motion and in full speed. These last weeks I’ve felt this gnawing emptiness of having left a heavy burden behind: a nasty and painful one that I had desired for months to be freed of… Now that I have been, life at times seems like an empty forest on which snow had fallen the night before, white, pure, blindingly bright, but also silent, the trees naked without any leaves, and cold. Anxiety creeps in before the peace that I so much craved and has finally arrived.

Grief is part of the process of healing trauma and we do grieve bad times, not only the good ones. Sometimes we miss the adrenaline and cortisol that were running through our veins when we were in the midst of our worst and lowest. We become used to stress, pain, and suffering when we go through it. When your survival is at stake, hope and despair live together in your heart; those are times in which body and mind are laser-focused on escaping harm, rebuilding your life, and getting to the point I like to call the bootstrapping phase.

After the peril has passed, when we’ve gotten back to stability, bootstrapping our new life looks exciting. We’re exhausted, torn apart, but we enjoy those first days of freedom. In my case, this involved a move, and getting paid money I was owed by a government agency. Oh, the excitement of buying my new desk! Renewing my wardrobe after more than two years I hadn’t been able to! Feeling permission to enjoy life again! No more guilt from buying a cup of coffee using the last coins left in my pocket! I’m no longer a burden to my friends! Oh, all the plans in my head! I’ll be writing on my blog lots more, I’ll be reading on my new bed for days without end! I’ll learn Go (the programming language) and I’ll write a nice project in it! I’ll feel safe! The world seems to have no limits those first couple of days or weeks…

No. Life requires process. After those first days of (well deserved) enjoyment, excitement, and energy towards a new beginning, body and mind politely or (not so politely) ask you to rest. They ask you to remember what you left behind, not to torture ourselves, but to process it. Suddenly your mind shows you things you always knew had happened, but you weren’t able to consciously engage with back when they happened. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts because you suddenly find yourself without enough energy to do all those plans you were playing in your mind with. It hurts because it asks you to accept that you were vulnerable back then, but still are. It hurts because you were “meant” to be doing great now that all the bad things are over, weren’t you?

The fact is that you are doing great when going through this grief stage, but now it’s time to take a real break. Society wants us back on our feet as soon as possible. That’s part of the capitalist trap: reducing our sense of dignity to whether we are capable to produce or not. Work wasn’t about that in the preindustrial past. I won’t get into this, as there are plenty of authors out there that are able to explain that better than I will ever be, but this is common knowledge (or I hope it is!). So we pressure ourselves to get back to our “normal performance” as fast as we think we can. However, trauma profoundly disrupts your body and soul. It’s very likely that we’ll never get back to what we had thought of “normal performance” ever again. Have you ever entertained the possibility that your past hyperperformance may have been a trauma response? Maybe your “hyperperformance” wasn’t that “hyper” either… I’ve come to realize that during the darkest months this year I had bursts of coding and writing productivity, but it wasn’t really something I sustained; I engaged with these hobbies when I needed to emotionally support myself. Now it’s time to shift their place in my life so they fit better in it.

A very good friend of mine told me a couple of days ago to give myself more grace. She’s right. There’s a world of opportunities in front of me, but there is absolutely no need to force myself to choose any given path. I carry a lot of good things on my shoulders as well: experience, knowledge, projects, friendships… I have succesfully kept safe spaces that I’ve guarded against the waves of destruction I had to face, like this very blog, my small coding projects, my coffee nerdiness, my esoteric readings… There’s this core that makes us who we are that we must protect when facing terrible situations, whatever those might be. Giving ourselves grace, I believe, is honoring that core, cherish it, and telling ourselves: “Hey, you’ve got way more power you think you’ve got.” And in so many times, that power you’ve got is collective in nature: it’s your friends, the people who really love you –not those who fake so–. You too are part of the people who you love: you give power to them too. We are stronger in community and if you really want to feel empowered, trust those loving people in your life, even when trauma, pain, and suffering scream at you you’re not worthy of their love.

This is a new beginning. It always is. As much as I want to write about tech, coding, linguistics, I’ve wanted to write about this for days now. As that good friend of mine also says: “Curiosity shall be our compass;” and she’s right about that as well. That shall be one of my mottos from now on.