Born Tired: Where Survival Meets Healing

Eirene: [00:00:00] I didn't grow up surrounded by love. Not the kind that feels warm, not the kind that feels safe in my house. Love was unpredictable. It came with conditions. It disappeared when you needed it most. But I did have one woman who kept showing up for me. In the quiet places nobody else noticed.

She didn't come with speeches, she didn't come with grand gestures. She came with presence, with the kind of love that doesn't need to announce itself because it's too busy doing the work. She was my godmother. She became my godmother at my baptism, a role that meant protection, guidance, and unconditional love.

And she didn't save me in the way people imagined saving. She didn't magically erase what was happening. She didn't stop the dysfunction from existing, but she gave me something I didn't have in my own home. Effort, care, consistency, protection.[00:01:00]

She was the one who made sure I was remembered, the one who made space for me, even when no one else did. The one who noticed when something was off, even when the entire family was committed to acting like it wasn't, and when the danger got too loud to ignore she didn't look away. She chose me. This is a story of my godmother, the woman who broke the silence and paid for it with her relationship to her own sister. Because sometimes the person who loves you most isn't the person that gave birth to you. Sometimes it's the one who tells the truth, even when the truth costs them everything.

This is Born Tired, Where Survival Meets Healing. A podcast for those of us who grew up in survival mode but are ready to heal and speak our truth. I'm Eirene, a cycle breaker learning what peace feels like after years of survival. Every episode is an invitation to rest inside your truth, to feel seen, and to remember you are never alone. [00:02:00] This is what it sounds like when silence finally breaks.

Before we begin, I want to share a gentle reminder. This episode includes stories and reflections about domestic violence, childhood trauma, and abuse. Please listen in a way that feels safe for you. If at any point you need to pause or step away, honor that. Your wellbeing matters more than finishing the episode.

If you or someone you know is in danger or needs support. You can reach out to the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1 800 7 9 9 7 2 3 3 or visit the hotline.org for free. Confidential help is available 24 hours a day, and if you're listening from outside the US you can find international hotlines and local resources @findahelpline.com.

You are not alone. Take care of yourself while you listen.

Some people love you enough to do the thing no one else will. To break the silence when everyone else has grown comfortable in it. To act when [00:03:00] pretending would be easier, to carry a truth that doesn't belong to them because no one else will. My godmother was that person for me. She was my mother's older sister, the eldest daughter. The one who carried everyone's burdens before she learned how to carry her own.

My grandmother was still in the Dominican Republic, so my godmother became the matriarch by default. She made decisions, solved problems, and tried to hold her siblings together across an ocean. That kind of role, it never really leaves you.

It shapes the way you love, the way you protect, and the way you carry guilt that was never yours to begin with. She was the kind of woman who always showed up to every birthday, every crisis, every unspoken emergency. She moved through the world like it was her job to hold it together.

She had a quiet strength. The kind that didn't announce itself. You could feel it in her presence, in the way she [00:04:00] listened, in the way she sensed what you needed before you ever said a word. And even though she had two daughters of her own, she always made room for me.

She loved in the small ways that ended up being the biggest ones. She paid attention. She noticed what my mother didn't give me, and she tried to fill those spaces in her own quiet way. A small gift here, a soft word there. Moments that said, I see you.

. And I mean that literally because my father never cared much for gifts, not for birthdays, not for Christmas. But she made sure my sibling and I never went without, every Christmas she made sure we had a gift. Even if nobody else cared enough to make it special, she did. And when you're a child in a house like that, you don't forget the people who made you feel remembered. She gave me proof that I mattered, that I wasn't invisible.

For my 15th birthday, I didn't have a quinceanera. There wasn't a party. There wasn't a room full of family [00:05:00] celebrating me. There wasn't that traditional moment where a girl becomes seen, but my godmother, she found a way.

She took a time to make a dress for me herself, with her own hands, her own time. Her own care stitched into every piece of fabric. And she paid for me to have professional photos taken because she understood what it meant for a girl to have something that said, you are worthy of being celebrated.

And I look back now and I realize that wasn't just kindness. That was her giving me a memory that didn't belong to pain. Something beautiful to hold onto. Something that didn't come from survival. But even strength like hers has a cost, because when you're the one that holds everyone else up, there's rarely anyone left to hold you.

She wasn't perfect, but she saw things others refused to see. The distance in my mother's eyes, the way love skipped over me in that house. The way I smiled too hard just to make the air feel safe. And when the [00:06:00] chaos became too loud to ignore, she was the one who stepped in. She made the call that changed everything, the call that made her a hero in my eyes and a traitor in my mother's.

I think about that often, how love and betrayal can share the same heartbeat. How doing the right thing can still break your heart. After I told her what my grandfather did to me, I know she carried that guilt deep in her bones. Like maybe she could have stopped it. Maybe she should have known. I could feel the sorrow in her. That ache never left her.

My sophomore year of high school was the hardest year of my life, not because of school, because of home. By then my father had completely spun out of control. Every night was chaos. The yelling, the tension, the violence, the fear that lived in the air like smoke. We hadn't slept in weeks.

Every night I stayed alert, waiting for the sound of something to break, for [00:07:00] the next explosion. I used to hide the knives before bed because I honestly believed one day he might kill us. I even reached out to my grandparents, my dad's parents. I told them what was going on, that we needed their help, but they didn't help. At some point, my mother told my godmother what was happening. She said she was afraid. Afraid my father might kill me. And my godmother, she didn't hesitate. She called Child Protective Services. One day they just showed up at the house. They spoke to my sibling and I separately.

I remember my hands shaking, my heart racing so fast I could barely breathe. The woman asked if everything was okay. She asked questions about my parents, and I lied. I told her everything was fine because I was scared. Scared they'd separate my sibling and I, scared of what my father would do, scared of what would happen next.

I didn't understand the system, but I understood fear. After that, the [00:08:00] physical abuse stopped, but the emotional and verbal abuse, they never did. And my mother, she never forgave her sister for making that call. She couldn't trust her anymore. That one call changed everything, but my godmother, she sacrificed her relationship with her sister to protect me, and I will always be grateful for that.

She even offered to let me live with her, but I said no because I knew my father, he would've shown up drunk, banging on her door, bringing the chaos with him, and I couldn't do that to her. As I've gotten older, I've realized something that still stops me in my tracks.

Women like my godmother don't just show up. They hold whole worlds together. They become the glue, the bridge, the translator, the shield. And what makes that kind of love complicated is that it isn't always soft. It isn't always wrapped in comfort.

Sometimes love looks like doing what nobody asked you to do, [00:09:00] taking on responsibility that was never yours. Carrying people who never learned how to carry themselves. Sometimes love looks like being the person who ruins the illusion. The one who makes the call, the one who says this isn't normal.

The one who refuses to keep smiling in public, while suffering in private and in families like mine, that kind of love doesn't get rewarded. It gets questioned, it gets punished. It gets rewritten into betrayal. Because the truth is in dysfunctional families, silence is loyalty.

Protecting the image is loyalty. Pretending is loyalty and anyone who disrupts that becomes dangerous. Not because they're wrong, but because they remind everyone else of what they've been avoiding. I think about that a lot when I think about my godmother, because she wasn't just protecting me from my father.

She was also challenging a whole system that had been protecting [00:10:00] itself for years. And that kind of choice changes your life in a permanent way. People think bravery is loud. They think it's shouting, fighting, slamming doors, making scenes. But the bravest people I've ever known were quiet.

They moved carefully. They watched, they listened. They loved in ways that weren't always visible to outsiders, but were lifesaving to the people inside the story. That was her, and it wasn't just the big thing she did. It was a small, consistent way she refused to let me disappear because when a child grows up in emotional neglect, the deepest wound isn't always what's happening.

It's what isn't. It is the absence, the lack of warmth, the lack of celebration, the lack of tenderness. It's realizing you're growing up in a home where love doesn't land on you and learning to act like you didn't notice.

And my godmother, in [00:11:00] her own imperfect way noticed anyway. She paid attention to the gaps. She filled them when she could, not because she had to, but because she chose to. And sometimes that's what heals you first, one person quietly showing you that you're worth the effort, that you're not too much, that you're not hard to love, that you're not invisible.

And I also think about what it cost her because women like that don't walk away untouched. They carry guilt that doesn't belong to them. They carry resentment that was never earned. They carry the weight of being misunderstood even by the people they tried to save.

And still they love. Still they show up. Still they try. That's what makes this story sacred to me. Not because she was perfect, not because she fixed everything, but because she was willing to be the bad guy in someone else's story if it meant I got to [00:12:00] survive mine, and I will never forget that.

There's a certain kind of grief that comes from growing up in a family that teaches you to stay quiet. Not just the grief of what happened, but the grief of what you were forced to normalize. The grief of being a child and realizing you have to become emotionally fluent in danger. The grief of learning to read faces, footsteps, tones of voice, because your nervous system is always trying to predict what's coming next. And the hardest part, so much of that becomes invisible. People look at you and they don't see it. They don't see the hypervigilance, they don't see the way your body learned to brace. They don't see the way your heart learned to shrink. They just see what you became: responsible, independent, strong, but strength isn't always a gift. Sometimes it's a symptom. And in families like mine, [00:13:00] the ones who survive, are often the ones who learn how to carry when no one else will. The ones who learn to turn pain into function, to turn fear into productivity, to turn silence into self-control. And that's why I keep coming back to my godmother because her love didn't look like perfection.

It didn't look like an ideal childhood. It didn't look like a movie ending. It looked like a woman who refused to let a child disappear, and I think that's the kind of love that deserves to be named. The kind that doesn't always get celebrated. The kind that doesn't always get thanked. The kind that quietly keeps people alive. There are people listening right now who know exactly what I mean, because you had someone like that too. Maybe it was an aunt, a teacher, a neighbor, a friend's mom, an older cousin, someone who didn't have to care but cared anyway.

[00:14:00] Someone who gave you a glimpse of what safety could feel like, someone who made you believe even for a moment that you weren't asking for too much. And then there are others listening who became that person. The one who checks on everyone. The one who notices what's wrong before anyone speaks. The one who keeps the family functioning, the one who does the emotional labor in silence. The one who carries the unspoken responsibilities, the one who becomes the protector because no one else will. If that's you, I want you to hear me clearly. You were never meant to carry it all alone. You were never meant to parent yourself. You were never meant to be your own witness. You were never meant to be strong at that cost. And I also want to say this, especially for the cycle breakers, especially for the truth tellers, for the ones who finally make the call, set the boundary, speak the truth, [00:15:00] step back, walk away, you will be misunderstood.

Not because you're wrong, but because your honesty forces people to face what they've spent their whole lives avoiding. Silence protects the system, truth threatens it, and sometimes choosing truth will cost you closeness. It will cost you comfort. It will cost you access. It will cost you the version of family that only existed as an idea .

But here's what I've learned, and I learned this through women like my godmother. Some love is so real it's willing to be hated for doing what's right. Some protection doesn't come wrapped in tenderness. It comes wrapped in courage. And if you've ever had someone like that in your life, I hope you honor them, not just with gratitude, but with transformation. By refusing to repeat what broke you, by [00:16:00] refusing to keep what harmed you. By refusing to call silence peace because the truest way we repay the people who protected us is by building a life where we no longer need that kind of protection. And that is how cycles end. People like her don't always get memorialized the way they deserve.

They don't always get credited. They don't always get thanked out loud. Sometimes they just keep going until the world moves on. But I'm not moving on from this. I'm naming her. I'm honoring her and I'm telling the truth about what she risked because this is what happens when you're raised in a system built on silence.

The truth becomes a kind of offering. Not to reopen the wound, but to stop pretending it wasn't there. And I think that's what this podcast has always been for me. A space where the untold stories finally get air. A space where the people who held us get seen.

So if you're listening right [00:17:00] now and this episode brought someone to mind, someone who protected you, someone who tried, someone who stood between you and what could have destroyed you, I hope you honor them in whatever way you can. Maybe it's a message. Maybe it's a prayer. Maybe it's simply saying their names out loud and letting your body remember what safety feels like in their presence. And if you've never had someone like that, I want you to know something. You deserve safe love. You deserve consistent love.

You deserve to be protected without having to earn it. And I hope this episode reminds you that love should never feel like something you have to survive.

If this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who might need it, and take a moment to leave a review wherever you listen. Your review helps more people find the podcast and reminds others they're not alone. Don't forget to subscribe or follow the show so you never miss an [00:18:00] episode.

You can also join me on substack, where I share weekly reflections and gentle reminders to help you feel less alone on your healing journey.

You'll find the link in the show notes if you'd like to connect beyond the podcast you could find me on Instagram @borntiredpodcast. I'd love to hear what resonated with you, and if you'd like to support the podcast, there's a link there to buy me a coffee. Thank you for being here, for listening with an open heart. Most of all, remember this, your story matters. Your voice matters, and you are not alone.

This episode was written and narrated by Eirene Torres. Audio production by Carlos Torres. Original music composed by Carlos Torres.