Rise
I used to think survival meant running from pain.
Outpacing it. Outworking it. Outlasting it.
But survival isn’t escape.
It’s endurance.
I survived because even shattered, I still fought to put the pieces back together.
Not perfectly. Not cleanly.
But stubbornly.
The kind of pieces that slice your fingers when you try to lift them from the ground.
The kind that make you bleed before they allow you to heal.
The Ashes I Sat In
What broke me wasn’t just the abuse.
It wasn’t just the bullying, or the words that fell over the lips of people who had no facts to base them on.
It was the aftermath.
The silence.
The hollow ache of nights spent crying — but not in a way that released the pain.
In a way that demanded I keep it caged, my chest burning with sobs that felt like they might splinter me from the inside out.
Because I didn’t yet know how to grieve.
How to use the pain as a catalyst to guide my healing.
That wouldn’t come until much later.
That kind of pain radiates through you.
It sits in your ribcage like fire.
It felt impossible not to run from it.
Running felt safer — like I could escape the weight before it crushed me completely.
I remember the day I stopped running.
In Chicago, after dropping out of my 100-mile race, I sat in the tub looking down at my body, thinking:
How can you be this broken and still demand more from me?
The water rose around me, wrapping me in heat I could feel in my bones, soaking muscles that had nothing left to give.
It was the first warmth I’d felt all day.
My skin welcomed it. My body craved it.
And yet, it carried its own kind of cruelty.
Hours of vomiting had left me empty.
My kidneys were already failing, my body refusing every drop of water I’d tried to swallow.
Nothing stayed down.
Nothing stayed in.
The irony wasn’t lost on me — that water could hold me so gently while reminding me of everything it refused to give back.
Comfort and betrayal in the same breath.
The salt on my skin came from hours earlier — sweat, maybe tears before the dehydration set in — but by the end, I had nothing left to give.
I sat there in the quiet, the heat soaking through skin and muscle, letting the weight of the day settle over me.
For the first time in my life, I let it stay.
I didn’t run.
I didn’t fight.
I let the pain fill the space around me, warm and relentless, until the only thing left was the choice to keep going.
And that choice — to let pain exist instead of outrunning it — changed everything.
Blood, Sweat, and 65.97 Miles
Rebuilding wasn’t easy.
It wasn’t tidy.
It was blood, sweat, and tears.
The kind that costs you something.
Sometimes, it cost the tears that wouldn’t even come, my eyes dry heaving in their absence as the hurt coursed through my veins.
Other times, the tears came in floods — sometimes loud, sometimes silent — leaving salt stains on my cheeks like scars of what I carried.
The sweat came in miles.
Running became more than movement.
It became my teacher.
My mentor.
In Chicago, I vomited from mile 32 to mile 65.97.
I kept moving through it, clinging to the thought: It gets easier after mile 80.
But the heat that day was merciless.
Predicted highs of 67 climbed to 87 degrees.
The sun tore through the sky with no shade in sight.
I dressed for the wrong race.
And still, I kept running.
My body was already in kidney failure.
I couldn’t even cry when I dropped out.
Dehydration had stripped me of tears.
It wasn’t until New Year’s Day, months later, pounding out miles on a treadmill, that the floodgates finally opened.
I cried the tears I couldn’t cry in Chicago.
And I realized that race wasn’t a failure.
It was a lesson in grit.
In trust.
In myself.
65.97 miles may have been a DNF on paper.
But in life, it was one of my biggest successes.
Because I know now — if it hadn’t been for the years of obstacles, the bruises, the betrayals, the nights that hollowed me out — I might have quit after mile 3 when the ground hornets came for me.
The first sting ripped into the back of my leg.
The second got trapped in my shirt, hammering its stinger into me over and over.
My crew told me not to take the shirt off until the next aid station — afraid the stinger would disappear under my skin if I did.
So I ran.
Mile after mile, the fabric clinging to me, the sting swelling hot and angry while I tried to outpace its poison.
People were dropping from the race all around me — heat exhaustion, injuries, dehydration — but quitting never crossed my mind.
Because pain had trained me for this.
Every heartbreak.
Every betrayal.
Every sleepless night that left me hollowed out.
Running — like survival — is about the steps you take when your body and your past are both telling you to quit.
It’s about facing the things you never could have planned for, but moving toward the goals you never thought possible.
It’s doing the shot of Fireball at mile 10 to numb the stinger’s pain just enough to keep going.
The blood came in ways no one could predict.
Not from blisters or missing toenails.
I had tested every sock, every shirt, every hydration method, every fuel option.
I had prepared for everything I could think of.
But life — like running — doesn’t break you where you expect it to.
It comes for the places you didn’t even know to protect.
Ground hornets.
Kidney failure.
Unexpected heat.
The hardest hits are always the ones you don’t see coming.
But every mile, every sting, every failure whispered the same thing back to me:
Keep going. You’re still here. Don’t give up. Not yet.
The Work of Rebuilding
The work wasn’t glamorous.
Apologizing to myself for giving people access they never earned.
Cutting ties with what drained me.
Learning to say no without apology.
And somewhere along the way, I started writing.
I used to think writing would make things heavier — like putting pain on paper made it more real.
But I needed a container for what I carried.
A place to set it down.
To look at it in pieces instead of all at once.
What started as a two-month project became a body of work.
Emotional art.
A mirror I couldn’t look away from.
And through the words, I found myself.
A New Kind of Love
For the first time, I stopped searching for love in other people.
I deleted the dating apps.
Stopped pouring energy into empty connections that drained more than they ever gave.
If I was going to find love, it wouldn’t be from swiping.
It wouldn’t be from shrinking myself to be chosen.
It would come from living.
From running.
From writing.
From standing in the world with my eyes wide open, knowing the terrain beneath my feet the way I know the backs of my own hands.
I learned to spot red flags through the people who almost broke me.
I learned boundaries by giving access away too freely.
I learned self-respect by experiencing disrespect.
And slowly, I built a different kind of love story — one with myself.
I began to see myself as worth protecting.
Worth listening to.
Worth choosing.
And once I chose me, everything began to shift.
Gratitude in the Pain
It would have been easy to hate the pain.
But pain gave me grit.
It sharpened me.
It burned away the illusions and left only what mattered.
I am not grateful for the abuse.
I am not grateful for the betrayals.
But I am grateful for who I became through surviving them.
Tender.
Compassionate.
Awake.
Defiant.
Brave.
Awake, Not Finished
I am not fixed.
I am not done.
Healing isn’t a summit.
There is no finish line.
It’s a path you keep walking, even when your legs shake.
But I am awake now.
Awake to my body.
Awake to my boundaries.
Awake to the truth that I decide who earns access to me.
Mumford and Sons wrote a song called Rushmere:
“What’s lost, is gone and buried deep.
Take heart and let it be. Don’t lie to yourself.
There’s madness, and magic in the rain.
There’s beauty in the pain. Don’t lie to yourself.
Light me up, I’m wasted in the dark. Rushmere restless hearts.
There’s something we might miss, a whole life in a glimpse.”
Those words echo what I’ve lived.
Not because pain is beautiful.
But because facing it makes you unbreakable in ways comfort never could.
Closing the Circle
Maybe that’s what this whole series has been about.
The story has always been the same:
Assumptions that cut me down.
Words that carried more weight than I knew.
Love that broke me open.
Silence that almost swallowed me whole.
And the stubborn choice to rise anyway.
It was ruin.
It was reckoning.
And now, it is rise.
I survived because even broken, I still fought to put the pieces back together.
And there will never come a day where I stop fighting.
© 2025 Kimberly Beth Thomas. All rights reserved.
Thank you for reading The Berbly Project. This has been a journey through pain, silence, and survival — but more than that, through the grit of rebuilding. If this series resonated with you, I’d love to hear your reflections.
What did pain demand of you — and what did it give back when you faced it head-on?
🔗 Catch up on the series:
👈🏻 Part 1: The Weight of Assumptions: Words as Weapons
👈🏻 Part 2: The Danger of Inexperience, Broken Baselines and False Narratives
👈🏻 Part 3: The Danger of Deception: Lies, Silence, and Surviving a Prison of False Love