Look Both Ways

The summer my daughter learned to cross the street, I stood at the curb with her more times than I can count.

Look left, look right, look left again. She had the words in a week — could sing them back to me. But knowing the words and seeing the car are two different skills, and only one of them keeps you alive. So I kept standing there. Not because she hadn’t memorized the rule, but because the rule wasn’t the thing. The thing was slower: her eyes learning to actually catch the movement, her body learning to stop before her brain finished the sentence. That doesn’t come from a poster. It comes from someone standing next to you, again and again, until the seeing moves from your mouth into your bones.

I think about that a lot now, because it’s the closest thing I have to explaining how a person comes back.

We tell survivors to heal like it’s a moment. A breakthrough, a scene where the music swells and you finally understand and walk out into your new life. But that’s not what it looked like for me, and I don’t think it looks like that for anyone. What actually happened was smaller and far less cinematic: I had to relearn how to see. Not the world — myself in it. Whether the warmth in a room was safe or a setup. Whether my own read on a person could be trusted, after years of being told, gently and constantly, that it couldn’t.

And here is the part nobody warned me about: I could not do that alone.

It sounds like the kind of thing you should be able to do by yourself. Just trust your gut again. Just pay attention. But the faculty that got manipulated — the one that decides what’s safe, what’s real, what I’m allowed to want — is the exact same faculty I’d need to check my own perception. Asking it to referee itself is like asking a broken compass to tell you whether it’s broken. It’ll point somewhere with total confidence. It just won’t be north.

So I borrowed other people’s eyes.

That’s the least romantic sentence I know how to write about recovery, and it’s the truest. When I couldn’t tell whether I was overreacting, someone who’d been there would say: no — that’s your recognition coming back, listen to it. When I was about to explain away something that deserved a flinch, someone would catch the flinch I’d trained myself to swallow. Not therapists, necessarily. People. Other survivors, mostly, standing at the curb with me while I learned to look both ways again, saying it out loud until I could hear it in my own voice.

This is the whole reason I’m building what I’m building. Not because community is a nice add-on to healing — a support group you attend after the real work is done. Because it is the work. Recognition is a skill, and skills don’t get rebuilt in isolation. They get rebuilt in company, through repetition, with someone who can see the thing you can’t yet see and is willing to keep pointing at it until your own eyes come online. You aren’t broken. You were misaligned. And realigning is not a solo act of willpower. It’s a hand on the curb.

My daughter crosses the street on her own now. She doesn’t need me at the corner anymore — and that’s the point. Not that she was always fine, but that enough repetitions with someone beside her turned the rule into instinct. That’s what I want for the person who did everything “right,” who memorized every warning and still couldn’t see it coming. Not another poster. Not the shame of having missed it. Someone at the curb.

You don’t have to learn to see this alone. That was never the design. Come stand with people who are learning too.