The Mess Wasn’t Mine

Imagine this:

You’re going on a trip, so you ask a friend to house-sit.
Someone you trust. Someone who’s always felt safe.
But when you return, your house is trashed.

The kitchen lights flicker erratically.
The furniture has been rearranged.
Your bed is in the living room.
Your clothes are scattered across every room.
There are dents in the drywall.
Confetti and glitter coat everything.
Your once-gleaming hardwood is now dingy and sticky.
And what is that smell?

You stand there—stunned—taking it all in.
The mess. The damage. The absolute violation.

You think about how long it will take to fix.
The money you’ll have to spend: electricians, painters, contractors.
The time: scrubbing, patching, sorting, restoring.

And then the rage hits.

It shouldn’t be your time.
It shouldn’t be your money.
You didn’t make this mess.
Why are you the one cleaning it up?

You call your friend.
They deny most of it.
Say it wasn’t that bad.
Tell you you’re overreacting.
They don’t offer to help.
They don’t offer to pay.
They just go on with their life.

What would you do?

Most people would sue.
Rightly so.

Maybe you’d win.
Maybe not.

But one thing is certain: you’ll be a lot less trusting in the future.

Even in this hypothetical situation, I am willing to bet you can feel the injustice. 
The WTF of it all.

The Injustice No One Sees.

This is what it’s like for anyone who’s experienced trauma.
Except all of it happens internally.
The violation. The mess. It all happens within. 

And when the damage is done inside you,
there’s no insurance claim.
No small claims court.
No one to sue.

You’re still the one left picking up the pieces.
Sweeping up someone else’s mess.
Paying for the damage they caused.
In time. In money. In therapy. In tears.

And most of the time?
They don’t apologize.
They don’t even acknowledge it happened.

So you’re left alone with a mess inside and no idea where to start cleaning.

This is one of the most frustrating parts of healing.

You can see the instigating event.
The choice another person made that impacted you. 
The one that made your survival response flicker erratically.
The one that rearranged your beliefs about yourself.
That causes your thoughts to scatter regularly.
The one that left dents in your memory—so now you constantly question yourself.

Someone else’s choice that feels like it coats everything whether you want it to or not.
The one that makes the future feel dingy and sticky.
And what is that voice inside—
the one whispering that it’s all your fault?

You can see it all. 
Someone else’s mess.
Made in your body. Your mind.
And you are responsible for cleaning it all up. 

Because if you don’t, you’re the one who will continue to pay for it.
In your self-talk.
Your limiting beliefs.
Your relationships.
Your career.
Your future.

That’s the ongoing injustice of trauma.

The traumatic event is the first injustice.
Everyday after, where you’re having to unravel the damage caused by others, is also an injustice.
But most people don’t see it that way.

Sure, they will praise your strength for surviving the event(s).
That’s easier to acknowledge. It’s obvious.
The rest is less so, which is why many people expect survival to be the end of it. 
They don’t want to hear about the clean-up process. 
They don’t want to sit with the messy middle.
The long, quiet journey of coming back to yourself.
They just want to hear the survival story.

But the middle of the story matters.
Because it’s when the magic happens.

When we talk about healing, we’re talking about learning to live with the wound differently.
We can’t make it disappear.
But we can change its shape and the space it takes up.
We can change how much power we give it to control our actions and our beliefs. 

It sounds so simple, but it’s anything but easy.

It requires conscious choice.
Unflinching self-awareness.
Emotional intelligence.
And a quiet devotion to a future self who often feels impossibly far away.

Some people believe healing will take them back to who they were before the trauma.

It won’t.

It’s not about returning to “normal” or who you used to be. 
You will never be that person again. 
Not exactly.

Instead, healing helps you to live as this new version.
It helps you become someone who can carry the pain without being defined by it.
Because trauma never goes away. 

It’s a lifetime sentence you didn’t ask for or deserve.

I used to lie awake asking what could possibly make any of this feel fair.
An apology? A consequence? Some kind of cosmic balance?
But most of those answers unravel under the weight of lived experience.

I’ve come to believe that there are five things we search for in the aftermath of trauma—some consciously, some instinctively.

And not all of them bring the healing we hope they will.

That’s the cruelty of it all—

The cost of trauma is high,
and the refunds are few.
You pay the price,
while they go free. 

But you don’t have to stay caged by what they left behind.

Generally, trauma survivors are looking for one or more of the following to help make sense of the senseless: remorse, restitution, retribution, repair, or reclamation.

Let’s look at why most of these options don’t meet the “sniff test” for true healing.

Remorse won’t undo the damage.

When you ask trauma survivors what justice would feel like, many say the same thing:
They want remorse.
They want the person who hurt them to feel bad. To get it.
Except most people don’t.

They’re too caught up in their own lives to see how their choices hurt others.
Real accountability is rare.
And even when it comes, it often feels too small for the scale of the harm.

But remorse doesn’t undo harm.
It can soothe something raw inside us, but only temporarily.
Because “I’m sorry” doesn’t rebuild trust.
It doesn’t pay the bills of recovery.
It doesn’t clean up the mess.

Remorse feels good in theory, but it’s often not enough in practice.

Especially when it never comes.

Restitution rarely satisfies.

Well, if they can’t or won’t feel bad, maybe they can make it right.
Pay for therapy.
Cover lost wages.
Help fix what they broke.

But most of them don’t.
They won’t.

And even when they do, it doesn’t always land the way we expect.

Because money can’t rewind time.
It can’t give you back the years you spent surviving.
It doesn’t repair the nervous system.
It doesn’t restore the innocence or peace they took from you.

Restitution can be validating—yes.
But it’s rarely transformational.

Retribution centers the wrong person.

Ok, so if we can’t make them pay,
what about making them feel the same way?

Because let’s be honest.
Sometimes we want them to suffer.
To lose something.
To hurt like we did.

We want justice.
Or at least a reckoning.

But vengeance is hollow.

Even punishment doesn’t fix the wound.
It might offer a flicker of relief—but it doesn’t last.
Because retribution centers them again.
And healing was never supposed to be about them.

It’s about you.
Your life.
Your wholeness.

So what begins to stitch the tear in a way that lasts?

Repair is rare—but powerful.

What if they changed? Did something to ensure it wouldn’t happen again?
Now we’re getting closer.

Repair is different from remorse.

It doesn’t just say “I’m sorry”—
It shows it.
It owns the harm.
Names it.
Validates your experience.
And works toward rebuilding trust—at your pace, not theirs.

But repair can’t happen without safety.
Without integrity.
Without them doing the work.
And many never will.

That’s why so many survivors have to grieve not just the harm—
But the absence of repair, too.

Reclamation is where justice begins.

In all of the work I have done, I’ve found that only reclamation feels like justice. 

To me, this is where the real healing happens.
When you stop waiting for the person who hurt you to fix it.
When you stop giving them the power to decide.
When you pick up the pieces—not because it’s fair,
but because you deserve to be whole.

Reclamation is saying:
“I get to decide who I become now.”
Even if no one apologizes.
Even if no one pays.
Even if the only repair is the kind I make for myself.

Reclamation isn’t loud. It doesn’t always look like triumph.
Sometimes, it looks like a quiet morning where you choose not to text the person who harmed you.
Sometimes, it’s going to therapy when you’d rather stay in bed.
Sometimes, it’s building a life that feels safe inside your own body.
It’s not justice in the traditional sense.
But it’s freedom.
And it’s yours.

What lingers after cleanup?

Much like a house-sitter from hell, trauma can leave our internal home feeling chaotic, unfamiliar, and violated.

And long after the walls have been fixed and the furniture has been put back where it belongs, you’ll still find glitter in the corners of your mind. 
An unwelcome sparkly reminder of what happened. 
Of how you were hurt. 
Of how much work you had to do to recover.

But that’s the thing about glitter—
It shows up where you don’t expect it.
Long after the cleanup.
It surprises you out of nowhere.

So does trauma.

Trauma gets pressed deep into the fibers of your life.

It shimmers when the light hits it.
Not because it’s pretty.
But because there’s still something calling for your attention.

I think that’s what healing looks like, too.

Not the absence of pain—
but the presence of something that stays. That lingers.
That asks for you to notice it.
Asks you to see how far you’ve come.
To see the justice you’ve reclaimed.

You may always hate the sight of the glitter.

The way it takes you back to the pain.
The messy house.

But it can also be a reminder the hurt didn’t win. 

That you’re still here.
That you stayed.
That you always believed your home was worth fighting for.
Because it is.