there is no hierarchy of pain

trauma is trauma. it is not a contest, not a hierarchy, not a scoreboard where only the “worst” story earns comfort, care, or compassion.

if you have ever swallowed your pain with, “i shouldn’t feel this way,” or “other people have it worse,” i want you to hear this with gentleness: that thought is not truth—it is a survival reflex. it is what we say when we’ve been taught to minimize ourselves, to stay quiet, to be “easy,” to act like our hurting is an inconvenience. but pain does not need to be catastrophic to be real. it does not need bruises to be valid. it does not need a dramatic headline to leave a scar.

trauma is not only what happened. it is what happened inside you when your nervous system got overwhelmed—when your body learned it wasn’t safe to relax, when your brain started scanning for danger as a default setting. sometimes trauma is one explosive moment that splits your life into before and after. sometimes it is a slow drip: chronic stress, emotional neglect, unpredictable love, humiliation, abandonment, instability, betrayal, being parentified, being blamed for having needs, being forced to grow up too fast. sometimes it is the thing that happened. sometimes it is what never happened—protection, safety, consistency, softness, someone showing up.

and here’s the part people miss: two people can live through the same event and carry it differently. what breaks one person might not break another. what devastates you might look “small” to someone else from the outside. that does not make you weak. it means your body did its job—felt what it had to feel to keep you alive. trauma is deeply personal, deeply contextual, and deeply shaped by what you had (or didn’t have) to support you while it was happening.

so no, we cannot rank it. we cannot compare wounds like trophies. we cannot use someone else’s suffering to silence our own—or use our own to dismiss someone else’s. there is room for multiple truths in the same breath: your pain matters. their pain matters. neither cancels the other out. compassion is not a limited resource.

if you are carrying something heavy, you do not have to prove it is heavy enough. you do not have to earn the right to be tender with yourself. you are allowed to take your hurt seriously. you are allowed to name it. you are allowed to heal it—without apology, without comparison, without shrinking.

you deserve care, not a debate.

with ink + bloom, 🌻