Funny how the simple act of starting a new bingeable series can spark a chain reaction of understanding. Five minutes into Euphoria, a character's panic attack ripped the veil off my own past. The "migraine" I had at nine years old was not a migraine at all. It was a full-blown panic attack. The diagnosis had been wrong for over four decades.

At nine, during the tense and unstable years before my family's world exploded, I had what everyone called a migraine. It was so severe I screamed my way through the school halls and woke up on a doctor's table. It became a family joke. "Remember," they would say, "when she told the doctor her head had been hurting for three years?"

Three years. That was not a punchline. It was my body's exact and honest record of dread.

Decades later, the recognition was a gut punch. That was not a migraine. It was my entire being screaming what I could not say: I am not safe.

The anger that followed was clean and sharp. It was anger for the child who was medically missed and emotionally dismissed. It was anger for the "what if" of a childhood that never was.

But my healing did not arrive in time to protect my own children from the fallout. They were adults before I found my way. That is a truth I hold in my hands every day. It is heavy.

I have done the work. I have taken accountability where it is due. I have said the sorrys and meant them. I have looked at the past with eyes that no longer look away.

And then I had to learn the final, most difficult lesson: accountability is not a life sentence. My amends were genuine, but my penance was being demanded in perpetuity. The goalposts kept moving. The conversations looped in a circle of pain that began to feel less like healing and more like a new kind of captivity.

I realized a profound thing. I could not rebuild myself if I agreed to live forever in the wreckage of the person I used to be.

So I said the hardest word: enough.

I said it to the endless rehashing. I said it to the scripted apologies that were less about forgiveness and more about control. I said it to the idea that my value now depends solely on the worst of my yesterday.

That version of me is gone. She drowned in her own survival. The woman who emerged is someone I have fought to become. She is sober. She is present. She is responsible. She is sorry. And she is finally, fiercely, protective of her own peace.

Setting that boundary did not feel loving. It felt like failure. The old tapes played: You are selfish. You are abandoning. You are the bad guy.

But here is what I know now. That boundary was the most loving thing I have ever done for myself. It was the declaration that my healing is not a public forum. It is my sacred ground.

My story is no longer just about what was done to me, or what I failed to do. It is now about what I choose to do with my one wild and precious life, right now.

The child I was screamed for three years before she broke.

The woman I am has finally learned to speak. She says: I am here. I am not back there. This is who I am now. The door is open, but I will not be living in the hallway.

The light is on, inside of me. And for the first time in a very long time, it is for me. #reflections