November 2025 - Evolving Beyond the Wound
There’s a question I’ve been sitting with lately:
Who are you outside of your trauma?
It’s a question that can sting at first, and for so long, I didn’t know how to answer it.
My identity had been shaped around what I survived; the abuse, the chaos, the rebuilding, the “doing the work.” It was as though I only existed within the context of my pain, and everything I created, every boundary, every insight, every offering was born from that wound.
But healing has a funny way of evolving.
Eventually, healing asks you to loosen your grip on the pain that once defined you. It asks you to release the identity of “the one who overcame” and step into the one who is simply living.
I’ve been free from an abusive relationship for six years now. Six years of facing the grief, the rage, the terror, the numbness. Six years of turning toward my body and learning how to listen again; through dance, through breath, through stillness.
Healing, for me, has looked like alchemy. I’ve taken the pain and turned it into art, movement, writing, teaching, messy creation. I’ve given it shape so it wouldn’t consume me.
But over these 6 years, I’ve realized something:
I am not bound to my pain.
I am bound to my joy.
Because while trauma takes, joy restores. While healing teaches, joy expands. While reflection grounds, joy liberates.
There was a time when I believed that healing meant constant excavation; always going deeper, peeling back yet another layer, finding yet another wound to mend and free myself of. But I don’t want my life to be one endless autopsy of my pain. I want to live inside my joy. I want to savour my morning coffee. I want to dance without always analyzing what emotion I’m processing. I want to laugh with friends until my cheeks ache. I want to be here, not in the shadow of what happened to me, but in the light of who I’ve become.
Because evolution isn’t just about healing, it’s about remembering that you are more than what hurt you, that your pain doesn’t define who you are. It’s about anchoring into values that make you feel alive. It’s about cultivating security from connection to yourself, to others, to the pulse of the moment.
And that’s where I find myself, in this tender in-between. Still growing, still self-reflecting, still being met by the echoes of old pain at times. But also laughing, dancing, creating, and falling in love with the ordinariness of being alive. I do see healing as a lifelong endeavour, but it’s not something that is meant to consume us and prevent us from truly living. We’re meant to evolve, to allow life to move through us in cycles of grief and joy, contractionand expansion, endings and beginnings. When we forget that life ebbs and flows, we lose our ability to fully inhabit the present season we’re in.
So I ask you:
Who are you outside of your trauma?
What brings you joy, not because it’s therapeutic, but because it’s real?
What part of you is ready to stop surviving and start living?
This is the medicine of the moment, the invitation to root back into the body, into joy, into belonging.
To remember that you are not a project to be fixed, but a living being deserving of peace, pleasure, and play.
With love,
Zofia
