by Samantha Syrnich ©2025
Last night, I fell asleep exhausted — the kind of exhaustion that sits in your bones, the kind that comes from years of surviving instead of living. I didn’t even realize how tired I was until my body collapsed into sleep.
But for people like me, sleep isn’t rest.
It’s where the trauma hunts you.
I had a nightmare so real it felt like evidence. It wasn’t a dream — it was a flashback wearing a mask. The kind of nightmare that doesn’t ask permission. It just drags you under.
In the dream, it was happening again.
The retaliation.
The danger.
The fear of systems that were supposed to protect me.
The same nightmare I’ve lived awake far too many times.
And my body believed it.
When I woke up, I didn’t wake gently.
I jerked awake — already in a panic, already breathless, already drowning in terror that wasn’t imaginary. My body was shaking before my eyes even opened. That’s what PTSD from real danger does: it reacts faster than consciousness.
I didn’t know where I was.
I didn’t know when I was.
I didn’t know if the nightmare had actually just happened.
For long seconds, I was suspended between two worlds —
the memory and the present,
the trauma and the room,
the threat and the safety I couldn’t feel yet.
Then I saw my dog.
Her big, gentle eyes staring into mine.
Her warm body pressed close.
Her presence slicing through the fog like a lifeline.
And only then did my brain realize:
I made it through another one.
It was “just” a nightmare — but not really.
Because my body didn’t know that.
My body was already reacting as if it was happening again:
• my heart racing
• my chest tight
• my limbs heavy like concrete
• my muscles trembling
• my breath short and uneven
• my mind confused
• my throat closing
• my whole body flooded with adrenaline
This is what retaliation trauma looks like.
This is what happens when the danger was real.
This is what happens when systems harm you instead of protect you.
Your body never stops scanning, even in sleep.
I woke up already exhausted, already shaking, already in survival mode — before my feet touched the floor. It’s a kind of tired that people cannot understand unless they have lived through systemic betrayal.
People think PTSD is “just nightmares.”
They think trauma is “just memories.”
But this is what retaliation does:
It rewrites your nervous system.
It steals your rest.
It hijacks your dreams.
It turns sleep into a battlefield.
It makes your body wake up fighting a war that never ended.
Retaliation doesn’t end when the event ends.
It echoes in the body.
It lives in the muscles.
It breathes in the lungs.
It shakes in the hands.
It races in the heart.
I didn’t choose this life.
I didn’t choose these nightmares.
And I didn’t choose to wake up every morning already exhausted from battles no one else sees.
But I survived another night.
I survived another ambush from my own mind.
And every time I speak the truth about it, I take a little piece of my power back.
This is what retaliation does.
This is what survival looks like.
And this is why my story must be told —
not to dwell in the pain,
but to make sure the world understands what this kind of harm truly costs.
©2025 Samantha Syrnich
All Rights Reserved
The Phoenix Quill: Words Born of Fire, Inked in Truth 