THE ABYSS LEARNED MY FACE
“If you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” — Friedrich Nietzsche I have loved this quote for years before I understood it. It was beautiful. Mysterious. Haunting. It sat in my Notes app, in random captions, in the quiet corners of my mind. Oh, I loved how Nietzsche played with words. I admired the quote without fully grasping it. Until it became something I had lived through instead of something I had simply admired. Now I understand it the way you understand a scar, not from reading about it, but from touching it. Here's what nobody tells you about trauma: You do not just carry it. If you're not careful, you start to become the shape of it. The Fear That Built the Very Thing I Feared I used to tell myself, almost like a prayer, that I would never become my trauma. I said it to myself in the mirror. I said it in my journal. I said it every time an old wound tried to resurface. I refuse to become this. But fear does something strange when you feed ...