Fierce Grace Advocacy

The Exits I Built

For a long time, my evenings had a ritual.

Sometimes it was because I wanted it. Often it was because I needed something, and wine was there.

I didn’t think of it as self-medicating. That phrase felt too clinical, too dramatic, for what was really just a glass of white on the couch. But looking back with the kind of honesty that only becomes available once you’re standing at a little distance, I can see it for what it was: my nervous system reaching for regulation. A signal I was sending to my own body — You’re home now. You’re off the clock. You’ve made it through. The wine wasn’t really the point. The ritual was. The exhale was.

There were other things too. Cake, sometimes. Hours lost to a video game, building a simulated life that asked nothing of me and rewarded every small action with a satisfying chime. Law & Order SVU marathons that stretched past midnight, knowing I had to be up at six-thirty, choosing the numbness of the screen over the vulnerability of sleep. Chronic lateness to a job I didn’t want to go to in the first place — a job that had slowly, steadily, made me feel smaller. A dozen different ways of leaving myself — of stepping outside the edges of my own experience just long enough to stop feeling the weight of it.

I wasn’t failing. I was coping. And there’s a difference — though for a long time, the shame I felt made it hard to see that.

The shame was always there, low and steady, like something growing in the dark. Every glass that turned into two. Every night the serum sat untouched on the bathroom counter. Every morning I made it to noon before realizing I’d forgotten to eat breakfast again. These weren’t dramatic failures. They were small, quiet ones — the kind that accumulate without fanfare and leave you feeling, eventually, like someone who doesn’t quite follow through on her own behalf.

I didn’t know, then, that the reaching-outward was the point. That when we don’t feel safe — truly, somatically safe — we look for exits. We look for anything that takes us outside ourselves, even briefly. Even imperfectly.

I didn’t know that the healing would feel like the opposite.

What Coping Mechanisms Are Really Telling You

There’s a concept in trauma-informed care called the window of tolerance. It describes the zone in which our nervous system can function — where we feel regulated enough to think, to connect, to make choices that reflect who we actually want to be. When we’re inside that window, we have access to ourselves. When we’re pushed outside it — by stress, by fear, by the accumulated weight of feeling unseen or unsafe — we don’t.

And when we’re outside it, we cope. We do whatever our nervous system has learned will bring us back to baseline.

For some people that looks like movement — running, cleaning, the compulsive need to do. For others it looks like numbing — a drink, a screen, a game that asks nothing and gives just enough to quiet the noise. Neither is weakness. Both are intelligence. The body is always trying to regulate itself, always looking for the fastest route back to something that feels like okay. It doesn’t stop to ask whether the route is good for us in the long run. That’s not its job. Its job is survival, right now, tonight, on this particular hard Tuesday.

What I reached for wasn’t failure. It was a nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do in soil that couldn’t sustain it. The problem was never the coping. The problem was that I needed to cope so often, so reliably, that the coping became its own kind of overgrowth — crowding out everything else, taking up all the light.

And underneath all of it, running quiet and constant: shame.

This is the part worth sitting with, because shame is supposed to be a corrective emotion. It’s meant to fire when we’ve acted against our own values, to signal misalignment and motivate change. But chronic shame — the low, steady kind that becomes ambient — stops being useful. It becomes the thing that poisons the ground before you’ve even planted anything. It tells you that you are the problem, rather than that you’re in one. And that distinction matters enormously, because you can change a situation. You can’t change your very self.

I didn’t need to simply fix myself. I needed better conditions. And those were different projects entirely.

And here is where the story could have gone wrong.

Because the obvious move — the move I had made before, the move most of us make — is to turn on the coping itself. To decide that the wine is the problem, that the midnight television is the problem, that the cake and the lateness and the hours lost to a video game are the problems. To make a resolution, track a habit, check a box.

That’s not recovery. That’s tending the leaves while the roots are rotting.

The shame I felt — low, steady, persistent — was never really about the wine or the cake or Olivia Benson. It was a signal. A tell. It was the body’s way of showing me that something beneath the surface was wrong. That I was dysregulated. That I was living, chronically, outside my own window of tolerance. That I didn’t feel safe — not in my circumstances, and not always in my own body.

The coping skills weren’t the problem to be solved. They were keeping me alive while I figured out what the problem actually was.

And once I understood that — really understood it, not just intellectually but in the tired, honest way you understand things at the end of a long struggle — I knew what I actually needed to do. Not tend the symptoms. Tend the roots.

Tending the Roots, Not the Symptoms

I didn’t wait for things to get better. I want to be clear about that.

There is a version of this story where the conditions shift like weather — inexplicably, mercifully — and the person inside them simply opens. That’s not what happened with me. What happened was that I took the signals seriously. The tell had been there for a while and I finally stopped long enough to read it, and what it was telling me was not you are weak or you have no discipline. It was: something is wrong. And you know it.

So I did what I needed to do. Not tackle the coping — the coping was never the enemy. The wine and the cake and the Sims and the Law & Order SVU marathons were keeping me functional while I figured out what actually needed to change. I left them alone. Instead I went deeper.

I found a new job. One that gave me room to grow, that offered encouragement instead of depletion, that didn’t require me to make myself smaller just to get through the day. I let go of a friendship that had been drawing from me for longer than I wanted to admit — quietly, consistently, in the way that certain relationships do, until you realize you always leave them more depleted than before. I made time for volunteering — work that I knew, in some deep and uncomplicated way, would feed me. Work that connected me to something larger than the circumstances I was trying to escape.

And slowly — not all at once, not dramatically — I found myself able to breathe again. To feel the ground beneath me as something solid. Something that could, perhaps, sustain growth.

And this is the part I need you to understand, because it runs counter to everything we are told about self-improvement and habit and the architecture of a better life.

I had tried before. Lord knows I had tried. The morning routines I couldn’t make stick. The water intake I tracked and then abandoned. The wine I told myself I’d cut back on, starting Monday, starting the first of the month, starting after this particularly hard week that somehow never ended. I had tried to tend these habits with real effort and real intention, and they had withered every time, and I had concluded, in the way you conclude things when you’re exhausted, that I was simply someone who couldn’t follow through.

I was wrong. I wasn’t undisciplined. I was trying to grow things in concrete.

Because once the conditions changed — once the roots had been tended and the soil had shifted — I didn’t have to fight for any of it. The good things came on their own. Quietly, without fanfare, without a single resolution or tracking app or stern conversation with myself in the mirror. The exits receded because I no longer needed them. And in the space they left behind, without my having to plant them deliberately or tend them anxiously, the nourishing things simply — grew.

Into that growing came different impulses. Smaller ones. Gentler ones. I started drinking water at my desk. Eating breakfast — actual breakfast! Yogurt in the morning, eaten slowly before the day began. Going to bed at a reasonable hour. Reaching for the sparkling water instead of the wine on a Tuesday night, pouring it into a wine glass, dropping in a slice of lemon, because the ritual was never really about the wine. It was about the permission. The signal to my own body: You’re home. You made it. This time belongs to you.

And then something unexpected dawned.

I felt proud of myself.

Not dramatically. Just a quiet, private opening — look at that! I did that for myself! Eye cream before bed. SPF in the morning. A full glass of water before I opened my laptop. Small things. Unremarkable to anyone watching. But each one felt like tending — a small act of care toward something I was finally ready to cultivate.

And here is what I have learned about this particular kind of quiet, earned pride: it seeds itself. It reaches forward. One good choice makes you feel like someone who makes good choices, and so you make another. The yogurt leads to the water leads to the SPF leads to a lemon slice in the water tumbler – and suddenly you are a person with a morning, with an evening, with small rituals that belong entirely to you.

This is the direct mirror image of the shame spiral. Shame poisons the ground — one failure makes the next more likely, because you already feel like someone who fails. But tend the soil — even partially, even imperfectly — and the whole thing reverses. Suddenly there is room in you for someone who puts on the eye cream. Someone who chooses the sparkling water. Someone who was never incapable of these things.

She was just trying to grow in the wrong season. In ground that couldn’t hold her.

The season changed. She changed with it.

What Grows When You Finally Feel Safe

I put a slice of lemon in my water this morning.

It sounds like nothing. It is, objectively, nothing — a small yellow wedge floating in a glass, a gesture so minor it barely registers. But I noticed it. I noticed myself doing it, the deliberateness of it, the tiny vote it represented. I am someone who does this now. Not because I resolved to. Not because I read about the benefits or followed a program or held myself accountable to anyone. But because the ground is right, and this is simply what grows here now.

This is what nobody tells you about healing: that it doesn’t always arrive as transformation. Sometimes it arrives as a lemon slice. As an early bedtime. As the quiet pride of having chosen, for no reason other than that you wanted to, something that was good for you.

The shame is quieter now. Not gone — I don’t think shame ever fully vacates the premises — but quieter. And in the space it has released, something else has taken root. Something that feels, on the best mornings, remarkably like belonging to myself.

I spent a long time trying to leave myself. I am learning, now, how to stay.

The garden, it turns out, was always waiting. It just needed the right conditions to bloom.