trauma

Marking Time

~ storm257 ~ 1 Comment

Another year. Today, like last year on this date, I reflect on where I have been and where I am now.

Last year, however, I was in California facing the real possibility that a person I love and admire would lose her life to cancer. It felt completely unfair, because disease does not care about fairness, and that piece of her experience, discussed in private moments, over tea and toast with Marmite, that part of us that wants there to be reason and rationale for the horrible things that occur, struck me then, and now, as the element of my own path with depression (oh, and life generally) with which I struggle.

Deep gratitude to my family, my partner, and most of all my friends, who have listened and helped me through the darkest moments, or the times when I was stuck in a loop of pointless thinking, unable to get out of my own way, unable to release worries that cannot serve me. Deep gratitude to my therapist, who has seen me through times when I could not articulate complete thoughts, through blind rage, tears that do not stop, and sees me now, as we move into a new place where I may actually find some understanding, not of my reactions to various things (we work on that all the damn time), but what is at the root.

What I know about myself is that I do believe there are reasons for most things in our lives. I don’t mean in a transcendent sense, though perhaps that too, but in that sense that we all have things we choose not to or cannot face, and those experiences, relationships, or memories, do impact how we live. Maybe you are someone for whom this does not apply, however, I’ve yet to meet someone with that much clarity or unity to their life. We’re all imperfect and life gives us some scary shit to bear. Leonard Cohen said it best, ” There is a crack, a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything), / That’s how the light gets in” I feel I am ready to look at those cracks a bit closer and maybe find where they begin.

This last year has held so much change and letting go. I am not living the life I thought I would be; I’ve had to accept that some things will not be. I have pushed boundaries for myself. I have been intolerant and patient. I have been angry and have felt my heart open in unexpected and welcome ways. I have faced moments when my mood has dictated my actions and others where I have exercised control. Most importantly, I have felt all of these things and faced my life with strength that I did not possess two years ago.

This is me today:

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Remodel

~ storm257 ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been seeing my new therapist for several weeks and today faced uncomfortable truths, which I find difficult to write about articulately.

A student of mine wrote an essay this last week in which she narrated her personal experience with bullying and the trauma caused by these abuses. I too was victim to bullies as a child – both the physical “school yard” variety and the menace that is middle school cliques, whose psychological torment seems to be almost exclusively the tool of girls in early adolescence. While cyber-bullying has created a new sphere of isolation for victims and a grander stage for hateful, damaging abuse, the impact for the victims is much the same. Those who survive relentless teasing, rumors, threats, or actual physical attacks, are left with years, if not a lifetime of insecurities and a severely limited capacity for trust.

I am thankful in many ways to have grown up before social media existed. I cannot image the difficulties young people now face when negotiating this, seemingly unavoidable, omnipresence in their lives. My bullies were necessarily limited by the confines of school buildings and adjacent playgrounds.

However, something in the voice of my student – the urgency leading her to share her story – spoke to a part of me I have long sought to, perhaps not forget, but certainly silence.

The truth is the girl who survived daily abuse at the hands of other young girls, from third grade through middle school, has lived within me, jealously guarding my fragile self-identity, while I have grown and strengthened my resolve to never need the approval, or trust the apparent approval of others. I have built my life carefully, nurtured trust slowly with a few, long-term friends, whom I love with an unquestionable ferocity. I give to these few all that I can and there is nothing dishonest in these relationships.

When it comes to matters of my own needs and, more to the point, my own ideas of what I deserve – my own value – I am not so resolved.

We all have places where our edges are sharp and ragged. Within each of us there are wells of shadow, places we know exist. Sometimes we move toward the vastness to lean in, but more often we stay away. One of my wells holds my younger self: who feigned illness to avoid attending school; who got in fights with other outsiders to try and disassociate with otherness; who wanted so desperately to be left alone to continue to be strange, thoughtful and anonymous. The well she inhabits has also filled with abilities I know I should have: vulnerability and self-love, the resolve to trust that those who love me truly see me and the person that they see, can be allowed to be vulnerable and understand that she is worthy of this love.

You see, it is one thing to know that you can love another. It is entirely more complex to understand, with all the splintering and holes, the shadows and protections, the walling off and silencing of experience, that the person I AM – all of it – is worthy of being loved.

How do we become this complex? Years of constructing – careful design in some ways – self-preservation resulting in varied forms of harm and misdirection. But, ultimately we are the architect and can discover where we need remodeling – an opening of space – windows – a library – to fill in a well.

This path will lead me somewhere. This is me today:

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