14 🌱Farm Fresh — ❤️ Love, Trauma, and the Thin Line Between Healing and Hurt: How I Finally Learned to Love Myself

If you just read #13 From ‘Someday’ to Right Now, you know the Living Whirld is built to keep survivor voices alive forever.
But here’s the truth—none of that would exist if I hadn’t learned one thing first:
How to love myself.

And for me, that was the hardest love story of all.

Before the Funny Farm… Before the Healing…

Before I became a mental health advocate…
Before I wrote about PTSD, CPTSD, abuse, and recovery…
Before I built The Funny Farm into a digital sanctuary for survivors—
I was a woman who gave love away like it was the only currency I had.

I poured it into people who couldn’t or wouldn’t give it back.
I endured relationships that left me broken, betrayed, and believing I wasn’t worth more.
I thought if I loved them enough, it might fix the way they hurt me.
But the problem was simple and devastating—
I never loved myself.

The Poem That Mapped My Heart

Love…

Love is such a complex and powerful emotion.
Defined by a variety of feelings, both intricate and atrocious.
Yielding senseless inner peace, joy, chaos, and commotion.

Love creates seemingly impossible hopes and dreams,
That may strengthen burning desires and futile hostilities.
Distorting perceptions of what should and shouldn’t be.

Love is everywhere, all of the time,
Elusive, free, and easy; but also hard to find.
It conquers all, yet is blind.

Love takes complete and total control,
Of everyone, each person as a whole.
Seizing the heart, mind, body, and soul.

Love warms the heart, then melts it before it turns to stone.
The mind grasps only what it’s been shown.
Every love is different and unique, rendering it unknown.

Love makes the body yearn, just to end up being used.
The soul cries out because it’s so confused.
Always trying desperately to determine real or ruse.

Love can become a game; ugly, one-sided, and unfair.
Causing deep pain and sorrow beyond compare.
Real true love is beautiful, lasting, and very rare.

I’ve learned to understand and even appreciate,
The thin, fine line between love and hate.
One is willful, one is fate.

The Turning Point

Love was my teacher, my captor, and my rescuer.
It gave me the highest highs and the lowest lows.
For trauma survivors, love is never “just romance”—
It’s a test of resilience.
A reminder of the deepest wounds.
And sometimes, the push we need to finally heal.

The turning point came when I stopped chasing love that hurt me—
And started giving love to the one person I’d neglected my entire life.
Me.

Once I began loving myself, my boundaries changed.
My voice got louder.
My healing got real.

Why This Matters Here

I share this because The Funny Farm was built on this truth:
If you don’t learn to love yourself, the world will write your story for you—and it won’t be kind.

My mental health survivor blog isn’t just about surviving trauma—it’s about reclaiming ownership of our lives.
It’s about writing our truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.
It’s about showing love in all its forms—the beautiful and the brutal, the healing and the harmful.

If you’ve ever been stuck between love and hate, between healing and heartbreak, you’re not alone.
Here at TheFunnyFarm.online, we don’t just survive love’s lessons—we use them to fuel resilience, connection, and a movement that doesn’t end.

🔊 This Is Farm Fresh

It’s not curated.
It’s current.
It’s the now inside the never-ending.
It’s radical recovery.
It’s neurodivergent survival.
It’s sarcastic grief.
It’s digital resurrection.
It’s the audacity to still be here.

If I can scream it out loud and still hit “publish”—so can you.