Our Nervous Systems Need PTO Too 😉

🥣 Post-Combat Childhood: The Sequel Nobody Asked For 🇵🇷

Some of us didn’t come home from a war.
We came home to one. 🪖🛋️

Not everyone had a chancleta thrown at them with Olympic precision, but if that rings a bell… bienvenido.
This doesn’t read like a guide — more like a mirror.
The kind that didn’t hang in our homes.
Just a small flashlight in a hallway nobody walked down with us.

This one’s for the kids who became bodyguards without signing up. 🧃🫠

Maybe papá yelled at things no one could control. 🌪️
Maybe mamá cried while stirring arroz and said, “I’m fine.” 😭🍚
Maybe everyone around us kept performing as if nothing happened — even when everything did. 🤡

We didn’t put on armor.
We turned into it. 🛡️

So yeah, there’s flinching when someone slams a drawer.
Guilt for saying “I’m tired,” even when the exhaustion is loud.
Explaining ourselves — over and over — because silence used to mean something else.
Not because we’re dramatic.
Because our bones remember. 🦴

The cuerpo keeps what the brain tried to file away. 🧠💾

It doesn’t show up in thoughts.
It shows up in habits.
Like sudden enojo. 🧨
Or scanning the room for peligro that’s invisible now. 🕵🏽
Or going mute when things feel too kind, too safe, too still. 🎭

This doesn’t read like weakness.
It reads like a nervous system that’s been clocked in for years with no lunch breaks, no coverage, no HR. 🔒🧃

Some folks call it trauma.
Our inner niño calls it Tuesday. 📆👶🏽
Because chaos once wore a nametag and tucked us in.

We pour our pain into each other, call it “closeness,” but most days, we’re intimate strangers. 🪞💔

Two people trauma-dumping, calling it bonding.
Meeting a stranger, telling them everything, feeling “close.”
Yet we barely know ourselves.
Wearing masks that whisper “I’m good.”
Exposure mistaken for intimacy. Call it love, but it’s often mirror fog.

We aren’t healing to be shiny or sacred.
We’re noticing the guerra isn’t playing anymore,
yet our body still holds the remote. 🕊️

Some of us keep moving even when there’s nowhere to go.
Some of us keep guarding a door nobody’s walked through in years.

And sometimes, something gentler finds its way.
A shift.
A switch.
The internal sign that says:
“You don’t have to guard the door today, corazón.” 🧷🚪

Agüita might feel easier to sip. 💧
The panza might soften, just a little. 🫃🏽
The nervous system might unbutton its collar and sit down. 💤

We made it.
And we still flinch.
That’s not failure.
That’s survival memory. 📼

Maybe that’s not weakness.
Maybe that’s proof we survived.
🥣

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