“You can’t even drive by the highway sign without feeling triggered,” my therapist said. “How do you expect to return to the scene of the crime and emerge from that unscathed?”

She’s always intentional with her language, my therapist, and she knows phrases like “scene of the crime” will make me cringe inside. Those choices are deliberate, because I too am very careful with my language and tend to avoid calling my trauma out for what it is, or to downplay it, or to bury it altogether. She was warning me here not to bury it.

In the waning of the year, ahead of a brand new January, I shy away from New Year’s resolutions. Instead I try to choose a specific word to keep in mind as a theme or focus for the coming months. And so, on December 31, 2023, I decided I wanted that word to be courage. At that time, I had in mind that I wanted to have courage to finally pursue publication for my written work. I never would have dreamed that the word courage would be coming into play in a very different way for me, right away.

In the interest of conciseness, I will not bother writing out all the nitty gritty details, but essentially, I’ve come to the conclusion that I will need to be making a trip to the house in which I spent my teenage years and endured unspeakable harm. I’ve previously written about returning to the general area, here and here, and called it going into the belly of the beast; that was child’s play compared to what I’m facing now. I’ve dealt with some extremely hard things; this is on a whole other level. My therapist impressed upon me that I will at some point crumble, and I need to allow myself to do that, to literally allot a generous amount of time for that. I need to plan for the psychological aspects of this endeavor just as much as I need to plan out the logistics. Stay tuned for how all of this goes in the end, I suppose.

I’m working on figuring out how to make this happen sooner rather than later, because I do not want to risk having my courage wane and fizzle out. I am a compartmentalization queen, but allowing myself too much time to consider what is coming will offer opportunity for panic to set in and override my desire to get this done.

I’m scared.

But if ever I’ve had any courage at all, I will use it now. It will take all of the courage I can find and then some. I found a website that has a bunch of famous quotes about courage, and they’re all good, but this one stood out to me the most this morning:

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'” ― Eleanor Roosevelt

On January 1, 2024, my adult self felt empowered by the word courage and the idea that the best is yet to come. On January 2, my brain shifted backward into childhood, thinking of a quote from one of my favorite stories. I had a great love for the Chronicles of Narnia series as a child, and a little quote from Aslan has been echoing in my mind like a subtle drumbeat for days now.

“Courage, dear heart.”