I was thinking about how flippantly I write about human rights issues, basing all my information on a fact sheet that I read or a few stories that I heard.
But for the girl who just escaped human trafficking, trauma isn't just a word used as a synonym in order to avoid redundancy in an article or academic piece. It's real. When she uses it, she owns the meaning of that word. Or a man back from war, diagnosed with ptsd. That isn't just a word found in a medical journal, used to define symptoms. For him, it's real. He lives it every single day, and not even sleep gives him an escape. The girl who gets made fun of at school, she knows what worthless feels like, experiences the emotions of that lie every day. When she uses the word worthless in the context of her perceived identity, the accompanying emotions will be strong.
However, when she gets healed, her story will hold the power of that history and that victory...something that can't be taken from her.
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