Did You Give Me the Fire Just to Show Me the Light?

Reflections on Surrender, Survival, and the Parts Of Ourselves We Lock Away

Wendi Kehn/Hellbloom Haven (Also featured on Substack & Medium)

Dec 03, 2025

I wrote a reaction piece about NF’s new song “FEAR” last week, and honestly?
I haven’t been able to stop listening to it since.
I’ve watched countless reactions to the video, played the song on repeat, and not once have I made it through without crying, and not just a few tears, either.
Full-body, soul-level sobbing.

That’s partly just me, I’m a feeler. I cry easily, and I’m not ashamed of that.
But this song cuts deeper than most.
It reflects back so much of my own journey and pain.
The imagery. The lyrics. The emotion.
It all mirrors things I’ve lived, felt, broken down over, healed through, and still wrestle with sometimes.

If you haven’t listened to the song yet, I highly recommend it.
And if you’re curious, go back and read my original reaction piece, too.
But in this article, I want to take a different approach.

I want to talk about what the song represents, and how it speaks to a truth that so many survivors, healers, and helpers experience but rarely say out loud:

Sometimes the only way forward… is back through the fire.

Not the literal events. Not the people or places.
But the pain, the frozen parts, and the numbness.
The stories you told yourself to survive, the silence you swallowed and
the grief you buried.

This is what FEAR captures for me.
The Lie That Escaping Equals Healing

When you’ve been through trauma, especially early and repeatedly, your first instinct is simple:

Get out.
Get away.
Survive.
Escape the pain, the chaos, the people, the patterns, whatever it is that’s hurting you.

And when you finally do, when life starts to feel calmer, more stable, safer, it can feel like healing.
And in a way, it is.

But there’s a quiet truth underneath that most people don’t talk about:

Just because you got out… doesn’t mean it’s healed.

That doesn’t mean you failed. It means there are still parts of you that didn’t get to come with you, fragmented pieces locked in the rooms we have chosen to try to forget.
The child who was never protected.
The teen who never got to feel safe.
The adult who had to hold everything together with no one to lean on.

Sometimes those parts are still inside you, frozen in time, quietly waiting for you to return.

That’s what I’ve come to understand in my own healing.

I’ve escaped a lot.
I’ve endured a lot.
And I’ve done a ton of inner work.

But every now and then, when life gets quiet or hard or overwhelming, I feel the pull of something older and deeper.
And it’s not that I’m “going backwards.”

It’s that I’m being asked to go back into the fire and darkness,
so I can bring those parts of me forward.

Escaping was necessary.
But it was never meant to be the whole story.

When Escaping Isn’t Enough, My Own Return to the Fire

By the time I was 26, I had survived more than most people will encounter in a lifetime.

CSA.
Depression.
Eating disorders.
Addictions.
Abusive relationships.
Being nearly killed during a domestic violence incident, and leaving.
Becoming a teen mom twice, just 13 months apart.
Chronic sleep deprivation.
Feeling misunderstood, overextended, unseen, and in a relationship, future, hopes, and dreams that were slowly fading and drowning under the pressure of life.

I had never really spoken about any of it.
Not to friends.
Not to family.
Not even to myself, really.
I just kept surviving, one crisis to the next.

But the body can only hold so much.

Eventually, everything I had swallowed and stored came crashing down. I had a complete shutdown.
I lost my vision for an entire month.
I developed head‑to‑toe pain.
My skin hurt to the touch.
And every doctor I saw looked at me like a puzzle they couldn’t solve.

Finally, one of them said something that changed everything:

“Your body can only hold so much trauma.
When it’s full, it will manifest physically.”

He gave me an ACE test.
He suggested therapy.
And I finally, for the first time, spoke my truth out loud.

I sat with a counselor, trauma‑dumped my entire life story, and by the end of it we were both bawling.
It was the first time I realized how much I had carried.
How much I had minimized and how much I had never processed.

That was the beginning of my real healing.
Not the escaping, but the returning.

Around that time, I discovered CBT, psychology, shadow work, and inner child healing.
And because I’ve always been someone who isolates and handles things alone, I leaned into tools and practices that worked for me personally.
(I always encourage working with a trained mental health professional; they have knowledge and resources that solo healing can’t always access.)

But for me, the turning point was this:

Visual meditations where my adult self sat with my younger self in the exact moments she was hurting, replaying everything with presence, compassion, and protection.

I went back to the rooms I had locked.
I sat with the versions of me who were alone.
I gave her what she never received.
And it didn’t happen just once.

I’ve had to revisit those rooms many, many times since.

Because healing isn’t a straight road out.
It’s a journey back, with new strength, new eyes, and the ability to finally hold the parts of yourself that were left behind.

The Rooms We Lock, and the Parts of Ourselves We Leave Inside

Much like NF’s “Mansion”, both the song and the visual metaphor he revisits in FEAR, I believe we all have one of our own.

A kind of inner house.

Built from every experience we’ve had.
Every heartbreak.
Every trauma.
Every disappointment.
Every moment we didn’t have the tools, support, or space to fully feel and process what was going on.

And inside this mansion are rooms.

Some are open.
Some are beautifully lit.
Some are filled with things we’ve healed, remembered, embraced.

But some?

Some are locked.

Some are boarded up, ignored, buried beneath years of silence and survival.

Because we decided, whether consciously or not, that it was safer that way.
Safer not to remember, or to feel.
Safer not to open the door.

But here’s the truth:

Every time we lock away an experience we couldn’t face…
we also lock away the version of ourselves that lived it.

The 5-year-old who was scared, unheard, hurt, and didn’t understand why the things that happened kept happening.
The 14-year-old who was angry and alone and felt pushed away and misunderstood.

The 17-year-old who thought she found Prince Charming, only to find a beast.
The 22-year-old who changed who she was over and over to be loved and accepted.

They’re all still in there.

Frozen and waiting.
Not for us to re-live the pain, but for us to finally walk back in with the light, perspective, and knowledge we didn’t have the first time.

That’s what healing is.

It’s not unlocking the room to suffer all over again.
It’s unlocking it so you can reach the fragment of yourself still waiting inside,
and bring them back with you.

Until we do that, we will struggle to feel whole.

Because those parts, the ones we locked away to survive, are still there showing up in ways we don’t notice.
And they are still hurting and want to come home.

The Illusion of Peace and the Pain of Having It Ripped Away

There’s a line in FEAR that completely gutted me the first time I heard it:

“Give me a false sense of peace just to show me what peace really is?”

I had to pause the song. Sit in it. Breathe through the ache it hit in me.

Because I know that feeling.

That moment when you finally start to feel okay,
when things seem calm, aligned, safe for once,
and then, out of nowhere, it all comes crashing down.

For me, that moment came after my divorce.

I finally had my first place of my own, three floors, filled with everything I had always wanted but could never have. I turned the basement into an art studio. I stayed up late watching movies just because I could. I took a bath and a shower every damn day, because the freedom to choose that, to take up space, to be in control of my own environment… it meant everything to me.

I loved that home.
I loved creating it.
I loved who I was becoming inside it.

And I still struggled.

I spent so many nights curled up on the floor, bawling, asking God why things had happened the way they did. Why me? Why now? What was the point of all that pain if this was where I ended up?

Not even three years later, I injured my back. I could no longer work in healthcare, the only field I had experience in. I couldn’t find a job that allowed me to be with my kids or accommodated my physical needs. I had to move back in with my ex because I couldn’t afford my place anymore.

That didn’t work out right away either, so I left my kids there while I bounced between sleeping in my car, on friends’ couches, and in a spare room at my aunt’s. Then I lost my car. Lost everything I owned. Because I couldn’t afford to keep it. I built a business with my laptop and creativity and willingness to learn, it flopped in six months so I cried about it and rebuilt again. Here I am back to stay with my ex again.

Six months later, things between us have improved.
There is peace, at least for now.
But I’m still not much closer to being out on my own again.

And that line from NF’s song?

“Give me a false sense of peace just to show me what peace really is?”
It haunts me, because I lived it.

I thought I had made it.
But life had more lessons, more losses, more breaking down ahead.
I had to watch the life I was building go up in flames, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.

That’s when the old survival tools came back:

• the isolation
• the numbness
• the self-blame
• the habits, addictions, and poor coping mechanisms that once helped me survive

It all felt like regression.
It felt like I had failed.

But now, I see it differently.

That version of peace I had tasted wasn’t fake, it was real.
Just not fully integrated or sustainable yet.
It gave me a glimpse of what’s possible, it gave me something tangible to imagine and look forward to, and showed me what still needed to heal.

The fire came not to punish me, but to illuminate the places still aching, still afraid, and still holding on to old grief.

So when NF asks that question, “Was it false peace just to show me real peace?”, I feel the weight of it in my bones.

And my answer is:
It was real. It just wasn’t the end of the story.

Because the peace I felt wasn’t the destination, it was a signpost.
A preview of what I’m capable of creating again, this time with more depth, in a more sustainable way, through resilience, and with more truth.

And the only way back to it?

Through the fire.
Through the locked rooms.
Through the patterns and pain and hard truths I used to run from.

That’s how healing happens, in spirals, returning to the same wounds with new eyes and the strength to finally face them fully.

Is This What You Wanted?

There’s a part in the song, the section where he’s crying out to God, asking “Is this what You wanted?”, that absolutely breaks me every time.

“Make all my hopes and my dreams come to life just to lay them to rest…”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dropped to my knees in exactly that kind of desperation.

Begging, crying, and praying for the pain to stop.

Asking:

• Why did this have to happen?
• Why couldn’t I save the people I love?
• Why wasn’t I enough?
• Why couldn’t anyone love me the way I needed?

I’ve had moments, raw, holy, guttural moments, where I wasn’t even sure who I was praying to… only that I needed to be heard. Needed to be held by something bigger than me.

And while I can’t say I always received the answers I wanted, I did receive understanding. A quiet knowing that rose from somewhere deeper than words. A kind of clarity that softened my rage, even when nothing outside me had changed.

That’s what spiritual development has given me. Not easy answers. Not perfect healing. But presence.

And when you’ve felt alone your entire life…
The presence of anything sacred, Spirit, God, Jesus, the Divine, Buddha, Source, Angels, becomes everything.

I don’t know what you call it. I don’t care what name it goes by for you.
But I do know this:

I wasn’t alone, even when it felt like I was.
And I don’t want anyone else to ever feel alone in their darkness either.

Even if all you have in a moment is the whisper of something bigger…
Even if all that’s holding you is breath and belief and one thread of hope…

That is still something.
That is still sacred.

I’ve screamed at God.
I’ve cursed the sky.
I’ve wept in my car and into the floor.
But what I know now is this:

Presence matters.
And somehow, I was never as alone as I thought.

This is why I want to do what I do.
Because if I can be a voice, a space, a presence that makes even one person feel less alone in the moment they need it most, then what a blessing that is.

I believe God, Spirit, Love, whatever name you give it, lives within us.
And how magnificent is it to be able to embody that love… and offer it outward?

To become a vessel of warmth, of truth, of comfort,
not because we’ve never suffered, but because we have… and still choose to show up with softness.

That’s what I want my work to be rooted in.
Not perfection or performance.
But presence.

Surrender Isn’t Losing, It’s Choosing to Return

At the end of the video, NF collapses. The darkness takes the keys.

At first, it looks like fear wins, like everything he fought to overcome pulls him back under.

But I don’t see it as defeat.

To me, it’s surrender. Not to despair, but to the truth: we will never outrun what still needs healing.

It will surface in our relationships.
In the way we respond, shut down, or lash out.
In how we interpret others.
In the stories we tell ourselves.
Even in the pain and illness that lives in our bodies.

Avoidance doesn’t make it disappear.
It just makes it louder in places we’re not looking.

Sometimes surrender is the moment we stop running.
We stop resisting.
And we choose to go back, not to suffer all over again, but to reclaim the parts of ourselves we left behind.

That’s what the keys represent to me.
A readiness to return. To face the fire with new eyes and steadier hands.

Some wounds may always be tender.
But with time, presence, and care, they stop defining us.

Surrender isn’t the end.

It’s the beginning of becoming whole.

Thank You For Reading

Wendi Kehn

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