I Should Not Complain

I Should Not Complain Anymore

I am so pissed that my closest friends think everything becomes magically okay once you achieve something, once you become financially stable — as if trauma just dissolves the moment your bank account looks better.

I was not even five years old, lying in my mother's lap on a tile bench at a bus stop in some small town, waiting for a bus that kept not arriving. I was covered with a green-and-white blanket, a pattern like bricks. Beside us sat a small briefcase — the kind that used to live under our bed, packed and placed there that night, waiting to be carried off somewhere. I stared at it for a long time. It was the only familiar thing in a place that felt like nowhere.

My mother wanted to leave. She always ended up going back to the same house — the house where my drunk father had beaten her until she bled. He didn't stop her from leaving. He didn't stop her from taking me out into the night. He just let us walk out after the violence, knowing we would come back.

You want to know what trauma feels like? Ask me.

Ask me what it's like to see that same blanket pattern years later — on the wall of a restaurant, of all places — and feel something in you go quiet.

Ask me what it's like to see a woman sitting on the roadside with a suitcase and sadness on her face, and to recognize her instantly.

Ask me what it's like to think that sitting outside in the cold is safer than going home.

Ask me how it feels to live for thirty years and still not feel safe anywhere.

There is a difference between the trauma a teenager or young adult carries and the trauma a five-year-old carries. A young adult can name it — can watch themselves have a trauma response in real time and call it what it is. A child doesn't get that. A child grows up inside the fear without a name for it, sometimes without even remembering the original moment, until something in the world brushes against it and they react before they understand why.

I don't complain much anymore, not about the ordinary things — a lover's betrayal, a friend's cruelty. Next to what I've already survived, it feels small.

But I still listen to people with empathy. Not just listen — I trace the line between what they're feeling now and what I once felt, and I console them with the same words I used to say to myself in the dark.

And still, my closest friends think that because I live abroad now, because I've built independence — financial, emotional — I have nothing left to feel. Nothing left to grieve.

I am pissed. Not because my pain is bigger than theirs. But because they think it's gone.