Wake Me Up When September Ends

It always sneaks up on me.

I can go weeks without thinking about that time—those months a few years ago when life unraveled in ways I still struggle to put into words. Days pass with routine and normalcy. But suddenly, my chest tightens, my heart races, and panic sets in. Nightmares resurface. Old fears return like they’ve just been waiting for a quiet moment to pounce.

​Dear panic attack: hello, ol’ friend. I can’t say that I’ve missed you.

Much has been written about how the body keeps the score. (One of the most famous examples is a book by that title). I used to think of it as nothing more than pseudoscience. Now, I know otherwise: the body remembers.

Trauma doesn’t always obey a tidy schedule of recovery. Even when my mind tells me “that was years ago,” my body sometimes insists otherwise. A smell, a season, the (for me) bittersweet celebration of World Communion Sunday, a stranger that looks uncannily like a tormentor—and in an instant, it all comes flooding back.

My body aches with memory. The calendar turns, and suddenly September is here again. Somewhere inside me, my middle-school angsty Green Day self mutters: “Wake me up when September ends.”

Healing, I’ve learned, isn’t a straight line. It doesn’t move predictably from point A to point B. Much like the so-called stages of grief, it often appears more like a spiral. It circles back, revisiting familiar pain from new angles, sometimes with fresh strength and sometimes with unexpected fragility. And while it can be discouraging to feel the panic return, I remind myself that the spiral also means movement. Even when I come back around to the same place, I am not the same person who was standing in that place before.

There have been days when I wished it would all disappear. Days when I’ve tried to outrun the panic or power through by gritting my teeth and muscling through. But ignoring it doesn’t make it vanish.

And strangely—though I would never wish these fires on anyone—I can’t deny that who I am today has been forged in those fires. And the scars they left behind, though painful, have also become a kind of testimony. My authenticity, my advocacy, my capacity to stand with others in their pain—I am who I am because I’ve been where I’ve been.

So when does healing come? In part, it already has. I breathe through the panic now in ways I couldn’t before. Therapy and SSRIs have helped me find stability. I talk openly about grief and fear that once stayed hidden. I’m learning to trust that my body’s memory, while painful, is also part of my survival.

And I cling to this hope: that healing isn’t only about erasing the pain of the past, but about discovering how to live more fully in the present. Even when the old wounds resurface, healing comes in small ways. In resilience. In breath. In community. In love that refuses to let me go.

The scars don’t vanish, but they testify. Like prophets, they tell the truth about what I’ve endured. They bear witness to the fact that I’m still here. Still breathing. Still becoming. And somehow, that is healing.