I turn 44 in three days. I’m a September baby, but my mom tells me I was many weeks late.

When the doctors grew concerned and took an x-ray of me (they did that back in the day), my bones were beginning to calcify, and my mom had to be induced. I guess I liked it in there.

Like my fetus self, I seem to take my time with things, preferring the comfort of where I’m at over the great unknown.

And also, just like my fetus self, I sometimes need to be unceremoniously pushed into the next phase of my life.

A breakdown pushed me this time. If you’ve been following me for the last few months, you know the story. Some bad stuff went down on social media, and this, coupled with fresh grief, was too much for me. The stage was set for some lifelong issues to finally boil to the surface in an uncontrollable way. It was as ugly a time as I can remember. I broke, and I almost didn’t make it.

That breakdown – that dark, horrific time I wouldn’t wish on anyone – would end up being one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. Not the circumstance, of course, but the outcome. Like my mother’s induction, it was my catalyst for change.

That was fifteen weeks ago today. I told myself about 10 weeks ago that I’d stop counting. Apparently, I was lying. I still count every week. But Saturdays no longer hold the pain of what happened. Instead, they’ve become happy days. Today I woke up early, spent three hours listening to music and cleaning the house, worked out with my eldest, had coffee with some friends (socially-distanced, of course), made a deep dish pizza, and retreated to a quiet spot to write this.

It’s been a beautiful day, not eclipsed in any way by what happened that not-long-ago Saturday. A true sign of healing.

I’m different now, and those who’ve been around me can see it. They comment on it, sometimes hesitantly, still trying to figure out who this new person is. That’s okay, my loved ones. I’m still figuring it out too. But I can tell you that I like who I’m finding.

This woman is stronger in every way, right down to recognizing the issues she still needs to work on. She’s apologetic when she makes a mistake, but completely unapologetic about who she is and what she stands for. She has boundaries in place and has stopped the toxic cycle of people-pleasing. She doesn’t base her self-worth on how others see her, but instead in how she sees herself.

Oh, sure, she fumbles sometimes. That’s the humanity in her. No one is perfect, and new skills take time to learn. But learn she has. She completed eleven weeks of intensive trauma therapy and isn’t looking back.

This is the new me.

Triggers, which used to happen often for the entirely of my life, are now non-existent. I’m no longer controlled by my PTSD/C-PTSD. The other morning, someone ran a stop sign and nearly plowed into the side of our car. I stopped just in time, probably saving some serious damage to my lovely wife. I was shocked, sure, but it didn’t morph into something bigger and all-encompassing like events such as this used to. Within a couple of minutes, I was back to singing bad pop songs and making jokes. My body is no longer waiting for the next catastrophe, my brain no longer hypervigilant every day. Without getting triggered, my world is completely different.

And I mean different. I won’t go into detail here to spare other survivors, but when I was in therapy, I remembered a sexual assault from my past that shook me to the core. I had always known something had happened, but my mind had reframed the experience, rewritten history to protect me.

But my body never forgot. I’ve carried extra weight my entire life, and I’ve known for a while that this is, in part, to keep me safe. It’s extremely common for victims of assault – especially those who were assaulted when we were younger. We subconsciously build a wall as protection.

In the last couple of weeks, that wall has started falling away. I’m not actively trying to lose weight – hell, I’m a big proponent of beauty at any size. But it’s like a metabolic switch has been turned on and things are working differently now. I eat about half as much as I used to because I’m simply not hungry most of the time. Foods I used to love now hold no interest; some don’t even taste good anymore. After a lifetime partnership, even chocolate and I have broken up. I never thought I’d see the day when that would happen. It was my comfort food, and I guess I don’t need that kind of comfort anymore.

I have no idea where this will go, but it doesn’t matter. I thank my body for doing whatever it felt it needed to do to keep me safe all this time, and I thank it for whatever it’s doing now. The mind-body connection is an incredible thing we don’t fully understand yet.

My psychiatrist told me she believed that if I dealt with the trauma, my anxiety and depressive mood swings would get better, too. She was right. With support, I’ve gradually stepped off of my anti-anxiety medication, and while it’s still early days, things are very manageable so far. I have a stash of them in case everything goes south, but my gut tells me it likely won’t. (Side note: please never do this without medical support.)

In short, I’m happy, full of energy, laughing often, crying when I need to, feeling all my feelings and handling them pretty well. This is the new Amanda, and she’s pretty cool. I like her.

Fifteen weeks ago, I almost died. Since then, I’ve spent every day working on myself, learning who I am, owning my place in the world, and helping others like me see that there is light at the end of tunnel. We can feel like we’re drowning in mental illness and trauma. I’m here to tell you that after barely keeping my head above water for four decades, I’m swimming laps across the lake.

And if you had asked me a few weeks ago if that could be possible, I would have laughed. I would have told you I would always be anxious, triggered, sad, and scared. I would have told you there was no hope for me, that was I too damaged. That some things run too deep to ever heal from.

My birthday gift this year is how wrong I was about that. And my wish when I blow out the candles on my not-chocolate cake this week is to pass this gift of hope on to the next person who needs it.

Maybe it’s you. And if it is, I look forward to the day when we race across the lake together.