You Are the Sky, Not the Weather

Trauma is basically that ex who still tries to log into your Netflix account years after the breakup—except instead of just messing with your “Continue Watching” list, they pop up in the most inconvenient moments to remind you they used to live here. They don’t pay rent, they don’t help with the dishes, but they’ll absolutely rearrange the furniture in your head just to prove they still can. You can try to ignore them, pretend they’ve vanished into the ether, but then one random song comes on the radio and suddenly you’re standing in the kitchen gripping a spatula like it’s a weapon, wondering why you’re ready to burn down your own house.

Choosing not to let trauma rule your life doesn’t mean it didn’t wreck you in places you didn’t even know could break. It doesn’t erase the flashbacks, the scars, or the ways it shaped how you move through the world. What it does mean is you’re officially done letting it DJ the soundtrack of your existence. You can say, “Yes, that was awful. Yes, it left a mark,” without also saying, “Here’s my schedule, go ahead and pencil in my emotional meltdowns until 2065.”

Because here’s the thing—you can acknowledge that something gutted you and still choose for the rest of your story to have more than jump scares and bloodstains. The monster might’ve been real, and maybe it even left the walls cracked and the lights flickering, but you’re still here. You’re still breathing. And now you’re the one holding the pen, which means you get to decide if the next chapter is a gritty drama, a ridiculous rom-com, or a scene where you triumphantly dance on the monster’s grave in the world’s most extra outfit.

 Let's get into it.

Acknowledging trauma isn’t about parading it around like a personality badge or making it your whole brand—it’s about telling the truth without making it the sun your whole life has to orbit. It’s being able to look at your past and say, “Yep, that happened. Yep, it sucked. Yep, it carved out parts of me I didn’t exactly volunteer for.” You’re not sugarcoating it, and you’re not gaslighting yourself into thinking it was fine, but you’re also not handing it a VIP pass to every decision, relationship, or mood swing you have from here on out.

The real power move is giving it a seat in the audience, not the director’s chair. It can be acknowledged, remembered, even occasionally consulted—but it’s no longer allowed to run the group chat of inner voices that narrate your life. You get to set the tone now. That might mean catching yourself before an old pattern calls the shots, choosing responses that reflect your current reality instead of your old wounds, or reminding yourself that your identity is made up of more than your survival stories. In other words, you stop letting trauma play the lead role in every scene, and instead cast it as a minor character who maybe shows up in a couple of episodes—but never gets the spin-off series.

This episode is about learning to live in that sweet, messy middle ground—the emotional liminal space where your trauma is acknowledged but not worshipped, respected but not given a fan club. It’s about treating it like one chapter in your backstory instead of the entire Netflix series. We’ll dig into how to spot when your old wounds are still quietly running the show, slipping into the director’s chair when you’re not paying attention. We’ll talk about what it really looks like to take the pen back from the worst parts of your history—sometimes gently, sometimes with the same energy you’d use to snatch your phone back from a toddler who’s about to text your ex—and start building a life that’s more “choose your own adventure” than “forced rerun of that one awful season you didn’t even like the first time.”

Because healing isn’t about pretending the monster never existed or pretending the fight scene wasn’t brutal. It’s about writing the sequel where you torch its lair, reclaim the territory, and then hang twinkle lights in the ruins. You’re still aware of the past—there’s ash on the ground—but now you’re the one deciding what grows there next.

Acknowledging trauma is basically standing in front of your own history and saying, “Yep, that happened. Yep, it hurt. Yep, it left a dent in my emotional fender that no amount of buffing is ever going to fully erase.” It’s about telling the truth—owning the fact that your story includes cracked paint and collision damage—without making that truth your entire navigation system. Because if trauma is your GPS, it will keep rerouting you back to the same damn potholes, and then act shocked when you blow another tire.

And here’s the thing—it’s not the same as pretending it didn’t happen. Denial isn’t healing; it’s just emotional taxidermy. You can shove it down into some dark mental storage locker and slap a “Do Not Open” sign on it, but it doesn’t just sit there quietly. It leaks. It oozes out in weird, sideways ways—sometimes funny, sometimes catastrophic, usually inconvenient. One minute you’re fine, and the next you’re crying in the freezer aisle because a box of Eggos triggered a childhood memory. Or you’re going completely mute in the middle of a harmless conversation because your nervous system decided it’s 1999 and you’re in danger again. Or maybe you’re four episodes deep into Love Is Blind, realizing you’re not even watching anymore—you’re dissociating so hard your brain has left the chat.

Acknowledgment is the middle ground. It’s not about letting trauma run your life, and it’s not about pretending it never existed. It’s saying, “Yes, this wound is real. Yes, it shaped me. And no, it doesn’t get to be my entire personality or my permanent excuse.” It’s choosing to carry it honestly, instead of dragging it around like luggage you refuse to admit is heavy.

Acknowledgment is all about balance—it’s saying, “Yes, this wound is real,” but also, “No, it doesn’t get to be the thing I lead with every time I walk into a metaphorical cocktail party.” Because let’s be honest, nobody wants to be that person whose entire introduction is just, “Hi, my name’s Michelle, and here’s a full PowerPoint on all my unhealed trauma.” That’s not identity, that’s entrapment.

And I’m not speaking from some detached guru-on-a-mountain perspective here. I’ve been in the trenches. I’ve had my trauma riding shotgun, acting like Google Maps, whispering directions I didn’t actually want to follow, and I clung to it like it was the only navigation system I had. Loosening that grip was not graceful. It wasn’t a serene, spiritual unbinding. It was more like prying my fingers off the steering wheel one by one while my trauma screamed, “You’re going to crash if you let go!”

So in this bonus episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on what some of that actually looked like for me—the messy, awkward, and definitely not-linear process of figuring out how to honor the past without letting it swallow my whole damn identity. We’ll dig into that limbo space where you can acknowledge your story without getting stuck in an endless rerun of the same plot twist, and how to start writing your next chapters without letting trauma grab the pen and doodle mustaches all over the margins.

Because the truth is, you can carry the history without letting it carry you. You can let your story be part of you without letting it run the whole show. And the more you practice that balance, the more you realize—you’re not just the main character here. You’re the writer, the editor, and the one who gets to decide when it’s time to turn the page.

Trauma recovery is basically like hosting the world’s most uncomfortable dinner party, where two guests you did not invite show up early, sit across from each other, and immediately start passive-aggressively clinking their forks. On one side of the table sits “I was hurt.” Across from them is “I’m healing.” One leans back, arms crossed, muttering, “This changed me forever.” The other sips their drink and says, “Yeah, but I’m still figuring out who I am beyond it.” One whispers darkly, “It was hard. It broke me.” The other replies, “And I can still have joy, safety, and connection.”

Your job as host isn’t to get them to hug it out or magically agree on a group photo. Your job is to keep both of them in the room without anyone flipping the table or storming out. Because the truth is, both belong at the meal. Both voices are real. Both parts of you get to exist. Trauma recovery isn’t about exiling one truth or overfeeding the other—it’s about learning how to sit at that table without losing your appetite.

And sometimes? It means letting them bicker, letting them side-eye each other, and reminding yourself you’re the one carving the turkey.

That “and” is where the real work—and the real mess—lives. It’s the space that keeps you from going full deep-sea diver into your trauma until your lungs burst, and it’s what stops you from slapping on a fake smile and acting like the whole thing was just a quirky character-building episode. Living in the “and” means you stop letting trauma be the entire GPS for your life, but you also stop trying to exile it to some emotional gulag. You weave it in with the rest of you—just one thread in a much bigger, more interesting tapestry.

And yeah, that thread might be knotted, frayed, or a completely different color from the rest, but it’s not the whole fabric. It’s saying, “Yes, this is part of my story,” while also making damn sure it’s not the only plotline anyone ever hears about. You can acknowledge the chapter without handing it the director’s chair, the casting rights, and the final cut. Because you’re not just the main character—you’re also the writer, editor, and set designer now.

When trauma’s running the show, it’s like you’ve been shoved so far out of the spotlight that you’re basically holding a prop plant in the background of your own life—silent, reactive, and completely at the mercy of whatever absurd plot twist the script throws at you next. Every scene is just a variation of the same survival response, and you’re left wondering when the hell you signed up for this role. Choosing differently is that moment you rip off the fake mustache, march up to the director’s chair, and say, “Thanks, but I’ll be writing this one myself.”

Taking back the pen doesn’t mean pretending those earlier chapters didn’t happen. They’re still there, stamped into the narrative with all their messy scars, typos, and smudged ink. The difference is, you stop letting them dictate the genre of the entire book. You change the tone. You shift the pacing. You rewrite the parts where you used to shrink yourself or repeat the same loops. That might look like setting boundaries so you’re not accidentally reenlisting in the same emotional war, or intentionally creating new experiences that have nothing to do with that one time everything imploded. It might be as subtle—and as radical—as practicing enough self-compassion that you stop seeing yourself as a walking museum exhibit of bad things that happened.

You’re still writing with the same ink, of course—ink that’s been spilled, smeared, and maybe even torn across pages you didn’t think you’d survive. Some chapters got ripped out completely. Others were written in handwriting so shaky you can barely read them back. But here’s the thing: the pen is in your hand now. Which means you get to decide what happens next.

Do you want the next chapter to open on a tear-streaked montage, complete with indie folk soundtrack and slow zoom? Fine. Do you want it to turn into a laugh-until-you-snort rom-com scene where everything goes delightfully sideways? Also valid. Hell, maybe you want to kick open the door and break into spontaneous dance like your life is a full-blown musical number—jazz hands, confetti cannons, questionable choreography and all. That’s your choice. That’s your creative control.

The past will always be part of your story—it’s already on the page, stamped in ink you can’t erase. But here’s the freedom: it doesn’t get final cut privileges anymore. Trauma doesn’t get to sit in the editing room and decide which scenes make it into the movie. That’s your job now. You’re the author, the director, the editor, and yes, even the casting agent. And you get to decide if the next season is another tragedy—or if it’s finally time to greenlight a plot twist where you win.

Making the choice not to let trauma run your life isn’t some cinematic breakthrough where the music swells, a single tear falls, and suddenly you’re healed and glowing under soft lighting. It’s not glamorous. It’s not a TikTok-worthy transformation with perfect before-and-after shots. It’s slower, grittier, and way more stubborn than that. Recovery is built out of a thousand small, boring, un-Instagrammable choices that slowly, quietly stack up until one day you look around and realize you’ve built something resembling stability.

Sometimes it starts with language. Moving from “I’m broken” to “I was hurt, and I’m learning.” It feels like semantics, but words are basically your brain’s GPS. If you type in the wrong destination, it will keep rerouting you back to Pain Town every single time, even when you’re trying to go somewhere new. Changing your self-talk is like correcting the coordinates—subtle at first, but it changes where you land.

Then there’s micro-bravery—the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them moments where you choose your present safety instead of reacting out of your past danger. Saying yes to coffee even when your brain mutters “people aren’t safe.” Holding eye contact with the cashier instead of shrinking into invisibility. Letting yourself take up physical or emotional space without apologizing, like you’re somehow blocking the cosmic view. None of these moments would make a highlight reel, but together, they’re tiny rebellions.

And here’s the magic: those tiny rebellions compound. One day it’s making small talk with a stranger without spiraling. Another day it’s realizing you actually feel at ease in your own skin for ten whole minutes. They don’t feel seismic in the moment, but they are tectonic shifts over time. Healing looks less like a sudden plot twist and more like building a new life brick by unglamorous brick until you’ve constructed something your trauma never planned for: freedom.

It’s also learning how to anchor yourself in the present so your triggers don’t get to snatch the steering wheel every time life throws you a curve. Because left unchecked, a trigger will happily floor the gas and drive you straight back into old territory you thought you’d escaped years ago. Anchoring can look a hundred different ways: grounding techniques like naming what you see, hear, or feel in the room; sensory resets like splashing cold water on your face or lighting a candle that pulls you back into your body; or sometimes just whispering to yourself, “Right now, in this exact moment, I’m safe. I don’t have to live like I’m back there anymore.”

And then there’s choosing your focus with intention. Not the fake “good vibes only” brand of focus that tells you to ignore your pain and slap a rainbow filter on it. That’s toxic positivity, and it’s useless. I’m talking about the messy, deeply human practice of saying, “Yeah, today had some garbage moments, and also I noticed a patch of sunlight on the floor that made me feel strangely alive.” It’s training your mind to let both truths live side by side: the grief and the gratitude, the wound and the wonder.

You’re not trying to erase the bad chapters—they’re part of your book, and pretending otherwise just disconnects you from yourself. Those chapters happened, they mattered, and they shaped you. But what you are doing is refusing to let them be the only ones you ever reread. Because every time you practice one of these small shifts—anchoring, focusing differently, choosing presence—you add a new page, a new paragraph, a new scene. And over time, those new chapters start stacking up. They hold warmth. They hold joy. They hold connection. They hold proof that your trauma may have written the prologue, but it sure as hell doesn’t get the final word.

And now? Now, dear listeners, we’ve officially reached the part of the episode I’ve been circling like a cat around a bathtub—curious, a little panicked, and very aware that once I jump in, I can’t climb back out dry. I’ve been perseverating on this section for a week—since the second I started writing this episode—because this is the part where I stop being theoretical and start being personal. This is the part where I unpack some of my own traumas with you. Not because I think my life story is the main attraction, but because I want to remind you that you’re not alone. That all this messy, complicated, sometimes ridiculous healing work we’re talking about? I’m in it too. I don’t just preach it into a microphone, I live it, wrestle with it, and occasionally lose the argument to it.

Why have I been dragging my feet on this? Well, for starters, even though I can talk about my trauma in bite-sized, sarcastic soundbites, I’ve never just…sat here and spilled it all out unprovoked. It feels weird. Like walking into a room and saying, “Hi, nice to meet you, here’s a PowerPoint on all my unresolved baggage.” And honestly, I don’t want this to feel like a trauma dump where you leave the episode needing your own therapist to recover. That’s not the vibe.

There’s also another reason I’ve hesitated—one I don’t really want to unpack ahead of time, because it’s going to become painfully obvious very quickly. So rather than spoil it, I’ll just let it land on its own.

But here’s why I’m doing this anyway: because I know how lonely it feels when you’re convinced you’re the only one dragging your particular brand of pain around like a ball and chain. And if hearing a piece of my story helps even one of you feel a little less like you’re carrying it alone, then it’s worth the discomfort. Life does keep moving—messy, limping, chaotically—but it goes on if you let it. You’re allowed to be hurt, to acknowledge the dent it left, but you don’t have to let it turn into a permanent stop sign.

So, deep breath. Without further ado—let’s dive in.

Let’s start at the very beginning, because—as our beloved Dame Julie Andrews once sang in The Sound of Music—it’s a very good place to start. On paper, my childhood had the right ingredients for what most people would call “a good upbringing.” My parents were doing the best they could with the tools they had. I never went without the basics: there was food on the table, water from the tap, clothes on my back, and a roof overhead. I had toys, the occasional family trip, those little snapshots of normalcy you’d expect in a middle-class family scrapbook. If you asked someone on the outside looking in, they’d probably say I had it pretty good.

But here’s the thing: the highlight reel doesn’t match the behind-the-scenes footage. I can tell you that there were happy moments—because of course there were—but I cannot, in good conscience, tell you that I had a happy childhood. What I walked away with was C-PTSD, and the kind of fractured memory that looks less like a timeline and more like someone shredded the film reel and left me with a handful of scattered frames. Most of my childhood is a blur. What I do remember tends to arrive in jagged little flashbacks—set off by a smell, a phrase, a sound—and more often than not, those memories are abusive.

And I’ll be blunt: I’m framing this as carefully as I can, because at my core I’m still that little girl who wanted nothing more than to be validated, to be told she was loved, safe, and enough. At the same time, I’m standing here as an adult woman who has earned the right to tell her story without watering it down to protect anyone else’s comfort. So I’m asking for patience as I walk this tightrope between tenderness and truth.

Because the truth is this: my childhood was marked by yelling that could rattle the walls, words that bruised just as badly as fists, emotional neglect dressed up as “discipline,” manipulation that warped how I understood love, and, yes—hitting. A lot of hitting. That was the backdrop of my “good childhood.” And that’s the soil my nervous system grew out of—the same nervous system I’m still unlearning from today.

I’ve known from a very young age that I “wasn’t right.” That something about me was off, different, wrong, even. That message was delivered loud and clear at home, and kids at school made sure to underline it for me, too. Every once in a while I’d find one or two friends who were just as “weird” as I was, and we’d huddle together for safety, but the larger message was always the same: you don’t fit.

By around age eleven, my parents decided I was too unmanageable, too much, too loud, too everything—and their solution was to send me to therapy. I don’t remember if it was a psychologist or a psychiatrist, and honestly, it doesn’t matter now. What I do remember is how unheard I felt. They sent me off for testing, stamped me with a diagnosis of Bipolar II, and that was the start of what felt like a never-ending carnival ride of medications, side effects, and crash outs. Meanwhile, the abuse at home didn’t stop.

The mental health system, at least as I experienced it, failed me spectacularly. Between the ages of eleven and seventeen—eighteen if I’m being generous—I was put on so many medications I probably had no business taking at that age. I was essentially a walking pharmacy, and yet no one seemed all that interested in actually listening to me. By the beginning of my junior year, I hit another low point and was hospitalized for two weeks as an in-patient. And again, I walked out of there still feeling broken, still feeling unheard, still carrying the same weight, just with a few new prescription bottles to juggle.

Every step of the way, all I wanted was to be normal—or at least to feel like myself, whoever that was. But instead of someone sitting with me and saying, “I see you. I hear you. Let’s figure this out together,” I was handed more scripts, more labels, more instructions to swallow this or that pill and wait for the magic to kick in. It never did.

When I turned eighteen, I made the choice to walk away from it all. To stop the medications, to step outside of the system that had left me more traumatized than treated. My mother has her own version of that story, but from where I stand, it was the first real act of agency I’d ever taken over my own mental health. It was messy. It was scary. And it was also the first step toward reclaiming my life from a system that had written me off before I ever had a chance to speak for myself.

And in the midst of trying to manage all the chaos of my childhood, I was put in a position where I was sexually assaulted. The part that still strikes me—if “funny” is even the right word for something so unfunny—is how long I kept it to myself. At fifteen, naïve and terrified, I refused to tell anyone. People suspected, they probably all knew, but my silence felt safer than the shame I imagined would follow if I spoke the truth out loud.

It happened at a family party. I didn’t know this man before that day, and I’ve never seen him since. Which in some ways makes it even more surreal—how someone can just appear, wreak havoc on your body and psyche, and then vanish, leaving you to hold the wreckage alone. It was a perfect storm of vulnerabilities converging all at once. I had already been taught through years of childhood abuse that anyone older than me automatically held authority. I had undiagnosed and unsupported ADHD and autism, which meant I missed social cues that might have set off alarms for someone else. And then there was him: an older man, who I'm told now was drunk, showering me with the kind of attention that felt flattering on the surface but was really bait.

To so many women, that story is familiar—the way an older man’s flirtation can blur into pressure, into danger. At fifteen, I didn’t have the language, the knowledge, or the framework to recognize what was happening. And then it was too late. I disassociated almost instantly. My brain, in a twisted act of mercy, pulled the plug on my awareness. I don’t remember much, just fragments—a flash here, a sound there. My memory is a jagged, broken reel, not because it didn’t matter, but because it mattered too much. Dissociation was survival.

And here’s another layer of cruelty: that assault was also my first experience of sexual contact. My introduction to intimacy was violence. My initiation into womanhood was a violation. It was just another nail in the coffin of a childhood already chipped away by abuse. By the time I was fifteen, there wasn’t much left of my childhood at all—just scraps I was desperately trying to hold onto while the world kept tearing them away.

I won’t subject you to any more of my Tales of Trauma™—we’ve covered enough greatest hits for one episode—but I do want to pause and talk about what came after. Because here’s the thing: as an adult, I could have let all of that run me. Easily. These were objectively hard things—things no kid should have to go through—and they all landed right in the middle of my formative years, when your brain is basically still in beta-testing mode. I could have decided, consciously or not, to let that pain script the rest of my life. To keep me small. To keep me bitter. To let it call the shots on who I was allowed to be.

Instead, I made a different choice. I chose to be bigger than my trauma. And let me be crystal clear here: that doesn’t mean I floated gracefully out of those experiences like some enlightened monk, glowing with serenity and humming inspirational mantras. No. I crashed. I burned. I went off the rails the way most of us do when we’re trying to figure out how to carry pain that heavy. I stumbled into bad choices, I self-sabotaged relationships, I flailed through seasons where I didn’t even recognize myself. Some of it was messy. Some of it was reckless. None of it would’ve made a self-help book proud.

But here’s the important part—the line I never crossed. I never let my trauma become a permanent hall pass for every decision I made. I never shrugged and said, “Well, because of my trauma, this is just who I am, so deal with it.” I refused to hand over my entire identity to what had been done to me. Yes, my trauma explained some of my behaviors. It shaped me. It made me raw, reactive, sometimes defensive. But it never got to write the final verdict on who I was allowed to become.

That’s the choice that mattered most. Not perfection. Not pretending I was fine. Not skipping straight to “fully healed.” Just refusing to let my trauma be the excuse that kept me small, stuck, or defined forever. It gets to be part of my story—but I get to be the one who decides how the rest of the story goes.

Because at the end of the day, my choices are my own. That doesn’t mean my trauma didn’t shape me—of course it did. It carved grooves into who I am, rewired my nervous system, left fingerprints all over how I see the world. But shaping me is not the same thing as owning me. Trauma doesn’t get full creative control. It doesn’t get to sit in the director’s chair, barking orders about how every scene of my life has to play out.

I get to choose the person I am today. And that choice wasn’t made in some shiny, inspirational vacuum—it was made in spite of, and sure maybe a little bit because of, what I’ve lived through. The cracks, the scars, the messy middle—they’re real, but they’re also proof that I’m still here, still deciding, still authoring the next chapters myself.

My trauma will always be part of my story, but it doesn’t get to be the headline. It doesn’t get to plaster itself across the front page and drown out everything else I’ve built. I do. My voice. My agency. My life. That’s the headline.

My legacy isn’t in the things that broke me—it’s in the people I’ve loved, the ones I’ve lifted, the ones I’ve stood beside when they thought they couldn’t stand on their own. It’s in the small ways I’ve shown up, the quiet moments where I chose compassion over bitterness, the stubborn choice to be bigger than the things I’ve endured. Every time I refused to let my pain be the only thing I offered the world, I built a piece of that legacy.

And yes, I joke that I run on spite—but honestly, there’s truth to that. Spite has a way of keeping the fire burning when everything else feels cold. It’s the grit that says, “Watch me become everything you said I couldn’t be.” But it’s not just spite. It’s also love. It’s also healing. It’s also the deliberate choice to grow softer instead of harder, more open instead of closed off. My legacy is a mix of all of that—the messy, contradictory fuel that’s carried me forward.

At the end of the day, it’s not the trauma that defines me, but the way I chose to move through it, and the lives I’ve touched along the way.

I was on TikTok scrolling earlier this morning—because of course I was—and I ran across a guy on my FYP who said something that stopped me mid-scroll. He said, “You are the sky, not the weather.” And I swear, it struck me straight in the chest.

Think about it: the weather changes constantly. Storms roll in, winds pick up, rain pours, the sun burns too hot, and sometimes it feels like the chaos will never let up. That’s trauma. That’s triggers. That’s anxiety, grief, depression—all the unpredictable storms that blow through our lives and make everything feel unstable. But the sky? The sky is always there. Vast, unshaken, endless. No matter how bad the storm, the sky itself doesn’t vanish. It holds it. It contains it. And eventually, the clouds move on, and the sky is still there—still whole.

And that, to me, feels like the perfect metaphor to close this episode. Because you are not just what’s happened to you. You are not just your trauma or your hardest days. You are the sky—the steady, unmovable backdrop. Your pain, your healing, your messy middle—it’s all weather. Real, yes. Powerful, yes. But temporary. You are so much bigger than the storms you’ve lived through.

Alright, friends—let’s land this plane. Today we talked about what it means to acknowledge the storm without crowning it queen. You are the sky, not the weather. Your past can roll through like thunder, but it does not get to file change-of-address paperwork in your identity. The work is in the “and”: I was hurt, and I’m healing. It was hard, and I still choose joy. It shaped me, and it doesn’t get to script me. That’s not denial—that’s authorship.

If any part of my story today pressed on a bruise for you: take a breath, drink some water, do something gentle. And if today cracked a window you’ve kept closed, that’s okay too. You get to open it at your pace. Remember, this whole healing thing is a series of small, stubborn choices. Change a line of self-talk. Practice a moment of micro-bravery. Notice the patch of sunlight on the floor. That’s momentum. That counts.

Now—administrative magic with the Algorithm Gods. If you got anything out of this episode, please offer up your ritual sacrifice:

• tap Follow/Subscribe,

• hit 5 stars (because you’re generous and hot),

• and drop a review with your favorite line.

It costs you nothing and it feeds the tiny goblins who decide whether this show gets seen by real humans.

Also, I want to hear from you. If you’ve got questions, hot takes, or a story you want me to unpack in a future bonus episode, email me at Michelle@ONeilCounseling.com. Put “Bonus Episode Question” in the subject line so I can find you fast, and let me know if you want to be anonymous. I read them. I really do.

If you’re new here, welcome to Shrink Wrapped—irreverent brain talk with receipts. If you’re returning, I adore your resilient little nervous system. Either way, thank you for spending time with me today.

Take care of your body, tend your nervous system, and remember: storms pass; skies stay. I’ll see you next week.