500 Days of Safety

Today marks 500 days of safety in my life.

For the first time in my life.

I built a safety counter, a simple app and widget for myself to count my days of safety. And last night, I stayed up late to watch 499 change to 500.

I don’t know much about how feeling safe all your life feels, but I finally know how feeling safe long enough for it to feel real feels.

There weren’t sparks or fireworks. I saw the counter turn 500 at midnight, and there were tears. There was joy. There was pride. And there was also grief and mourning.

Something came up that I hadn’t ever mapped before.

I used to be in bed a lot starting around 15-ish. I used to feel exhausted, like moving around took so much effort. Then other moments I had mapped months ago with my neurologist came up too: loss of sweat in my limbs around 13–14 years old; significant sweating in my palms and feet between 14–15; and then that stopped soon after.

There was a lot my body had been struggling with since I was very young. We knew that by now.

What surfaced as the counter struck 500 was this feeling of realizing what my body finally got to set down when it found safety.

February 5, 2025 was the day I was safe and felt safe for the first time, inside and out. And there I was, a few weeks later, unable to function.

I remember explaining it like this when I talk to people:

Imagine you’re running from danger, constantly in threat, so you keep running even if you are wounded, even if you are bleeding out. And then you enter a safe house. Before you do anything else, your body collapses. Not because safety caused you to collapse, but because safety allowed your body to finally release from survival mode.

I am proud of my body, you know?

Five hundred days of safety will not change the harm that came before it. What it does is much more real: it reminds my nervous system that we built safety, and that we are in a place where it doesn’t have to brace for what comes in the next moment.

My lived reality is complex. My medical reality is fragile. My financial reality is critical. My circumstances are chaotic.

None of those are magically erased by safety.

They are made livable by safety.

I don’t collapse into my circumstances because I know within me that I built this safety brick by brick and decision by decision. I know within me that I am here because my body kept fighting for a very long time to keep me alive, and I am finally able to meet it and protect it with safety.

So, yeah.

Five hundred days it is.

Not uninterrupted, of course. I paused the counter on February 4, 2026, for 21 days after calling the cops and after a severe event happened. What matters to me is that I took steps to protect my safety with everything I had, and I rebuilt safety with what was left.

I was talking to someone today, and they essentially said:

“I hope, eventually, being safe will stop feeling like a novelty.”

It made me tear up.

I hope it does too.

For now, I am grateful I am here. I am grateful I am safe. And I am very much grateful I get to share what it feels like to be here.

Not fireworks.

Just knowing that the 15- or 16-year-old me would be grateful too. Grateful that I am in a place where what she experienced might not have been laziness, as they called it.

And grateful that I am here now, as a 31-year-old, taking care of her needs the way she always deserved.