1. What has hurt you is a thousand times less than who and what you are. You are not made up of the things that gave you pain alone. You are made up of an eternity of emotions, of feelings, of events and not all of them are sad. You are valid long past the things that give you pain. (You are made up of beautiful things too.)

2. The day you awake choking with memories that make you sick, insides that feel like they have been on the losing end of a bar fight, don’t blame yourself for not being able to cope with this darkness better. Don’t blame anyone else either. Instead, let the storm raging inside you calm down. Take as much time as you need. (Recovery has always been a journey more than a destination.)

3. Stop constantly cutting the fabric of your soul into pieces to clothe other people. You have felt trauma, and you hated it so much that you do not want anyone you know to ever had to deal with anything harsh every again. So you find yourself becoming the person people can turn to just so they never have to feel alone – remember when to say it is enough. (Not everyone understands that the fabric of a soul changes after suffering.)

4. Your pain is not irrelevant. It never was. And it never has been. The people who minimize your pain and your voice are doing so because they have not been through the same experience, they do not understand, and sometimes, they are guilty. (Do not allow other people to dictate the way you feel about yourself.)

5. Grief has always demanded to be felt so that it can turn to healing. Do not stifle to return to normal as soon as you can. Bottling grief has never been a method to accelerate recovery. The best method to recovery is to grieve for as long as you need to. Grieve until your body has bled the pain away. (No matter how badly it hurts, you will not bleed forever.)

6. Some things will always be painful reminders of the events that happened to you. Do not avoid these things. If you do, they will always have control and a hold over you the way that no thing should. Instead, face it. Feel the pain run white hot through your body, until it runs out. Your pain is finite. Your resolve and your strength is infinite and nothing and no one deserves the ability to take it from you. (Never forget that you survived. It was so terrible, but you survived.)

7. Find someone who just lets you talk about as much as you need. Find someone who lets you be silent in their presence for as long as you need. Find someone who allows you days where you fall apart for reasons they may not understand. Most of all, find someone who let you be when you need. And if you are fortunate enough to find someone who allows you to just be – always allow them to be themselves too. We are all flawed creatures, trying to make sense of terrible and beautiful things that have happened to us. (We all deserve someone who allows our flaws and our beauty to just be.)

8. Stop feeling ungrateful for feeling your pain deeply. Yes, there are people in this world who have lost more than you. There are also people in this world who have much more than you. But no one ever tells you to stop being happy because there are other people who are happier in this world. To feel pain, to suffer, is to be human. (You may be a little broken, but you will always be beautiful to someone.)