There are moments that divide a life into “before” and “after.”

People think “after” begins with a celebration —

a survival story, a miracle, a steady return to normal.

But the truth is quieter.

Uglier.

More complicated.

“After” begins when the world expects you to be grateful for surviving,

but your body hasn’t caught up yet.

Your body is still trapped in the moment it almost died.

It was supposed to be a routine delivery —

or as routine as delivering twins ever is.

But nothing about that day felt safe.

Not the fluorescent lights.

Not the metallic smell of the room.

Not the panic that slithered beneath my skin like a premonition.

They tell you childbirth is beautiful.

They don’t tell you it can feel like standing on the edge of a cliff

while strangers argue behind you about how close they can let you fall.

There was blood.

Too much.

Voices blurring into echoes.

Monitors screaming.

Doctors moving with the frantic choreography of people trying not to say the word “danger.”

My vision tunneled.

My hearing dimmed.

My soul — I swear this with every ounce of truth in me —

hovered somewhere above my body, watching.

Not dead.

But not fully here either.

It felt like stepping through an invisible doorway into a place between worlds,

a place where time slows,

where the air feels too thin to breathe,

where a woman realizes she might leave her babies before she ever gets to touch them..

There was a moment —

one terrifying, bone-deep moment —

where I felt myself slipping.

I wasn’t afraid of dying.

I was afraid of leaving them.

Every instinct in me screamed,

Stay. Stay. Stay.

Not because I wasn’t ready to die —

but because I wasn’t done being their mother.

And then…

I was back.

Not fully conscious.

Not fully coherent.

Just… back.

Alive.

But not the same.

No one warns you that surviving trauma doesn’t feel like victory.

It feels like your soul comes back wrong —

misaligned, overstimulated, too aware of the world’s dangers.

After that day, the world became poison.

Literally.

The fear of chemicals didn’t come from nowhere.

It came from the way the antiseptic smell in the hospital seeped into my memory

like a warning label that never stopped flashing.

It came from the realization that something invisible

— a substance, a medication, a mistake, an unseen reaction —

had the power to kill me without anyone noticing until it was too late.

It came from the understanding that survival was fragile,

and the things that could break you

didn’t always come with a warning.

So, my brain did what traumatized brains do:

It tried to protect me.

It scanned rooms.

It scanned labels.

It scanned faces.

It scanned air.

Safety became a calculation, not a feeling.

I began to fear:

cleaners

candles

perfumes

lotions

detergents

anything with a scent strong enough to remind me of antiseptic death rooms.

People said I was overreacting.

They said it was anxiety.

They said it was silly.

But they weren’t trapped inside my nervous system.

They weren’t living inside a body that remembered dying

even when the mind insisted everything was fine.

Trauma rearranged me.

That’s what no one talks about:

How the mind can walk away from trauma,

but the body keeps kneeling at its altar.

The body remembers the bleeding.

The slipping.

The half-gone heartbeat.

The moment the veil thinned.

The fear carved into the organs.

And so:

My heart learned to sprint at nothing.

My muscles learned to stay tense even in sleep.

My brain learned to replay danger even in safety.

My breath learned to hide in the top of my chest.

My skin learned to flinch at sudden sounds.

My senses learned to over-perform.

My instincts learned to over-protect.

People called it OCD.

People called it anxiety.

People called it dramatic.

People called it “new mom nerves.”

But I knew what it was:

My body didn’t trust the world anymore.

And honestly? Neither did I.

And then the babies came home.

Two newborns.

One toddler.

One exhausted husband working.

One terrified mother trying to stitch together a life between panic and responsibility.

I was barely alive myself,

and yet I was expected to keep three tiny humans alive,

alone,

every day,

on no sleep,

with hormones collapsing like broken scaffolding,

and trauma still dripping through my veins like cold ink.

I did it.

Of course I did.

Because women always do.

But something inside me fractured.

The version of me before the hospital died in that delivery room.

The version after was built entirely from instinct, fear, and obligation.

Every panic attack I had later —

every moment of chemical terror,

every obsessive thought,

every night I lay awake listening to my own heartbeat in dread —

all of it traced back to that day.

The day I crossed the line between life and death…

and returned with the nervous system of a survivor,

not a civilian.

People think trauma ends when the moment is over.

But trauma has a different definition:

Trauma is the moment your body stops believing you’re safe anywhere.

This chapter is the truth I never told:

I didn’t almost die once.

I’ve been almost dying every day since —

quietly, internally, invisibly —

inside a body that never learned how to turn the alarm off.

But even alarms get tired of ringing.

And that exhaustion —

that bone-deep realization that survival is not the same as living —

is what prepares the ground for transformation.

Not healing yet.

Not hope yet.

But the beginning.

The beginning of a woman who would one day look at her trauma

not as a prison —

but as the fire that forged her.

The Girl the Darkness Raised: A Memoir of Scarcity, Survival, and Becoming