I was born in a region called Tidewater, because in that area all the rivers, marshes and other bodies of water connect to the ocean, and rise and fall with the tides.

It's an area ruled by the moon cycles literally. I was an adult before I realized that this is not the case everywhere – that all rivers are not brackish saltwater with tides that flow with the moon. Geography, culture, and trauma conspire to shape what we believe is possible, expected, or true. And growing up in that region influenced me so deeply to assume things about the world that are not universally true.

Being in a place that operates on cycles in such an overt way, one thing I assumed about the world is that everyone expects there to be cycles, rivers with bridges, storms that come and go where people work together to keep each other safe and plan for emergencies collectively, and that people have a sense of the history of the place they live and the people who lived there before them. All of this was normal where I grew up, but I have come to learn in my travels across my home country and through nomadic life and immigration – these are unusual. They are the culture of my hometown region but the place I was raised was unique culturally.

This is very important context about my worldview. Worldview is one of the four tasks of Intentional Peer Support (IPS) – particularly being aware of one's own worldview, and being curious about others'. Curiosity serves the purpose of reducing assumptions, turning towards another and desiring to truly know them, and of making people more aware of and sensitive to power and privilege and the ways this influences our worldview.

What is this all about? I've been quiet for the past few months because I realized that I was in a relationship with someone who had a deeply incomplete understanding of my worldview, while I did not understand theirs at all. I assumed they, too, believed in cycles. Instead I have faced the slow, sickening realization that I have been standing in a room with someone, building a life on what I thought was common ground, only to discover they were never in the same room. Some of that was the result of dishonesty and manipulation on their part, and some of it is the result of assumptions that we shared a worldview on my part. But I've spent the last few months in the fallout of this relationship collapse, retracing my steps to understand how I came to stand in the spot I found myself where I did not recognize my surroundings, and the safe reality I thought I was living in turned out to be something treacherous and deadly.

As I stand in this wreckage I remember how it felt to stand in the streets after a hurricane, surveying the damage and meeting wide eyes with neighbors who are witnessing alongside me. I feel the presence of these ancestors with me. Ecological grief and personal grief are not separate catastrophes. They coexist.

I also have been thinking about how the chronic trauma of abuse, particularly in childhood, can cause someone like me to drift unaware into participation in a harmful worldview that does not align with my values now. How familiar dysregulation can feel like home. How old patterns can reassert themselves as the predictable tools of a nervous system trying to navigate the present with habits from the past. This pattern of control, danger, and fear felt familiar to me at an earlier time in my life when I had less agency. This is an undergirding and manifestation of immune dysfunction: where my body allows a dangerous vector to redirect how my system operates. Reality is painted over with illusion. Safety and danger are redefined as their opposites. Over time I am made to act against my own wellbeing, not protecting myself from harm but submitting to abuse, appeasing the abuser, and living in fear.

And I wonder how I can safeguard myself against slipping into that pattern in the future without living in suspicion of people who have not yet harmed me. Because isolation is deadly, and its not my desire to be without community. This is the central dilemma of any survivor who wants to belong to ourselves and others again. IPS is helping me to explore naming fears courageously while turning towards hope and possibility and staying in relationship (of course, only if safe to do so).

I have more questions than answers at this point.

And yet.

• I was accepted into the O.P. Jindal University School of Public Health Masters of Science in Global Health and Human Development beginning September 2026.

• I was invited to present on Climate Somatics for Disaster Preparedness at the Caribbean Urban Forum conference in Jamaica, June 2026.

• I am in the second cohort of Energy Body Clearing, after completing Energy Body Mastery, a spiritual somatics course taught by Langston Kahn through the Last Mask Center. This will be the third somatic modality I am trained in.

• I have completed my second peer support certification and am now a Certified Intentional Peer Support Specialist, in addition to a Peer Wellness Specialist.

• I got a scholarship to attend my first professional astrology course.

These are personal and professional goals that I did not see on the horizon 6 months ago. Some are opportunities I won't be able to take advantage of yet, but I still celebrate the accomplishment. Others are opportunities that I didn't even realize I was seeking until they landed at my feet. And all of them came during a time when I have been re-evaluating the direction of my life as a result of a catastrophic loss of safety and stability.

I am reminded in another familiar somatic sense that abundance does not wait for stability. Growth does not pause for grief. The tide does not ask permission to rise.

A character on a show I watch for guilty pleasure said, "Sometimes when you're on the wrong path, it leads you to where you're supposed to be." –Mel, Virgin River

When I heard this, it resonated with my experience the past few years, and especially in the past year. And it has led me to a place where I understand this is another cycle, a painful one yes, but a cycle that will abate and change just as the tide rises and falls on the James River where I was born. Even though I don't know what's going to happen next and when the tide will rise again, I know that it will. And I know that I am facing the right direction-- the flow of life. A flow that is leading me where I want to be once my boat rises again.

James River Bridge and Crab Shack is a photograph by Jerry Gammon which was uploaded on October 21st, 2025.

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