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musings

Trauma Thoughts: Unedited

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I am not fully healed from the trauma I endured. (And why should I be?) Or perhaps I should say, I have not been freed from the effects of my trauma.

I kind of hate saying “my trauma”. Why is it mine? Why do I have to hold it? I didn’t want it to be mine. I don’t want it to be mine.

I don’t have flashbacks and shake and cry and have debilitating body memories….well, not as much as when I was in college, at least.

But things can subtly affect you, you know? Sneak into your thoughts and your actions and your decisions and your reactions and your choices without you even realizing because you just think that’s you and your personality and your preference. But maybe it’s not.

How do you untwine it and pull it apart and cut the right threads?

How do you know what’s you and what’s not?

I feel like a teenager every time I write or talk about this all.

It’s almost harder now, in that it’s not simply (it wasn’t simple) speaking the words and being released and moving on. It’s smaller and more intricate and less obvious now but it’s there. 

Just because you’ve “healed” doesn’t mean you’re healed. Doesn’t mean it’s gone. Doesn’t mean just because you talked about it once, you’re fine.

When things are happening and before you’ve talked about it, everyone is in full support to listen. But once the story has been told, the secrets have been released, it isn’t over. Sometimes you want to, you have to, say it again, over and over. But you feel dumb and silly. Sometimes people even say, “You know you’ve told me this before, right?” And you know, but you need to keep talking about it. You need to go through it again. You need to set it free again and again.

We replay and discuss our happy memories all the time so why not the hard ones?

Why I’m not writing

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Every day I have a desperate urge to write and every time I sit down to write, nothing comes out. It feels like more than writer’s block.

When I first started blogging, I wrote about my work with kids on the spectrum. Not a lot of people were writing about that wonderful population at the time, and many reached out and said they got helpful ideas from what I wrote, and that made me happy.

Then I started writing about my life with anxiety during a time where nobody was writing about anxiety, and I was this big Truth-Teller, and people came out of the woodwork to tell me how brave I was, that they had anxiety too, that they could relate, that my bravery in sharing made them feel less alone and less stigmatized. And that was amazing. Except now – anxiety is just something widely accepted, that everyone has, that every celebrity talks about, that people admit to, that really isn’t stigmatized much at all anymore. So, why bother writing about it?

And then, again, I became this Brave Truth-Teller when I started writing about sexual assault, and yet again, people came out of the woodwork to tell me “me too” and share their experiences and say that me writing about it helped them talk about it or acknowledge it, and it was amazing and I connected with people and felt like again, I was making a difference. Except now, again, everyone is talking about it. Between the “me too” movement and the Kavanaugh hearings, and the USA gymnastics, and Time’s Up Now, it’s EVERYWHERE. And that’s amazing too, and I’m glad it’s so public, and while I know that there are still plenty of people keeping it a dark shameful secret, it’s so out there in the media that is there really any point to little tiny insignificant me writing about it more?

And so now I feel stuck. Blogging to me used to feel like this exciting, brave thing I was doing, because I knew how many people I was reaching and impacting. I would sit down and think, “What would one of my younger selves – my 7-year-old self, my 15-year-old self, my 28-year-old self, need to read?” and then I would write it. Because nobody else was. But what do I write about now? Do I stick with those same topics and carry on, hoping there are still people out there who will benefit? Do I write about boring and mundane topics like the fact that I’m still a sensitive person blah blah blah and motherhood is amazing and exhausting blah blah blah and here is how I’m managing my anxiety blah blah blah? Or do I stop? I really just wonder if I did my thing, made my difference, and now it’s time to let this blog go.