The Pounding of My Heart....

Some may think that I didn't struggle for long, because I escaped so quickly.  What is not understood in that single story is that I have been trying to escape in my mind for 20 years.  They are in my thought, over my shoulder, and in the shadows of my mind.  I was not a hero, there was no grand exit just an escape to 20 years or so of silence.  My heart pounded as I fled China and it didn't stop till I found sanctuary in relationships of healing in peer support.  Healing surrounded by other fleeing something inside too.
My story of escape became surreal and in the crevices of my mind, always hiding from them inside.  Hiding my story until age 43, when I made a video on my trauma story that I never published.  Hearing the videographers exclaim I was a survivor of human trafficking changed something.  This gave a name for what happened to me.  Now that I have found a whole group of survivors, I hope that they will accept me.  My moments of captivity were so few compared to the suffering of others and compared to the suffering of the women I left behind to escape.
As I try to connect with a new group of peers.  I know one thing, peer support has always been there for me and always will be.  It is my career, my life, my connection to sanctuary.  Without this sanctuary, I wouldn't have my family today because I never would have been able to trust on this level.  May this new group of peers in my life only deepen my trust in the earth's people.