The Damsel’s Truth: When Rescue Comes From Within

Perseus rescuing Andromeda

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For much of my life, I believed I needed saving.

Not the fairytale kind—no knight on a white horse—but still, I waited.

Waiting for someone stronger, steadier, to find me in the wreckage and make sense of the chaos.

(BS alert: I wanted that fairytale rescue like a child wants a mother’s hand on the Ghost Train.)

It was stitched into me—a quiet, unshakable truth—that I could not survive alone.

So I learned to perform survival: over-functioning, bending, staying too long, just to be chosen.

But those patterns were ghosts masquerading as personality—people-pleasing, perfectionism, the hunger to be seen. Beneath them lived a terrified child, exhausted and too small to hold herself.

Childhood cracked me open.

Love became a riddle, safety a ghost.

When the arms meant to hold me were absent or cold, I believed I was broken beyond repair.

I learned to read others before I learned to read or hear myself.

To understand people was to stay safe—but I never learned to expect the same for me.

My psychotherapeutic training was my rescue attempt—organised, deliberate.

But no one pulled me from the wreckage.

They walked beside me, watching as I reclaimed myself piece by piece.

The instinct to comfort (rescue) is natural for many of us, but it can smother.

We must ask—am I saving you, or saving myself from discomfort?

Am I meeting your needs, or mine?

Beneath the defenses is the child crying for help.

Your survival strategies weren’t maladaptive—they kept you alive.

But some no longer serve you.

Letting go means allowing the fragmented cracks to bleed.

But that bleeding is truth calling to be heard.

I offer no fixes, only presence.

When I softened toward my brokenness, I realised that I didn’t need to be saved.

I needed to stop abandoning myself.

There’s a strange grief in giving up rescue.

Quiet.

Heavy.

Tender.

No one is coming to rescue you—not because you’re unworthy, but because this work was always yours.

In the absence of external rescue, we find inner steadiness.

Softness.

Strength born from scars.

Self-trust.

Wisdom.

It might not be the ending you wanted.

But it is a beginning.

Your beginning.