I've started writing about my trauma. It is so cathartic, I can't understand why I did not do it before. I mean I did do some stuff before, while I was in therapy, but it was weird and I'm a bit ashamed of it. Or am I embarrassed? Both. I'll have to look through the big box of journals in the basement, buried under cat bedding and discarded reenactment costumes. Maybe burn them. I don't know--because I don't remember what's in them or writing them.
I just finished writing another section in my trauma journal/memoirs. Again. SO CATHARTIC. Here's an excerpt. This part I wrote about PTSD and how it makes me feel. Here it is:
My ears are ringing so loudly now. I have triggered myself, undoubtedly. The ringing, which is deafening, is like a warning buzzer, or more like an air-raid siren. It lets me know – ‘hey, there’s some deep, darkness, dripping from the inner crevices and corners of your subconscious that you have buried for fifty or so years, which now will bubble and pop to the surface over the next days, or weeks, or months, or even years and years’ disrupting your life and making certain things impossible. That’s my PTSD. That’s how I experience it. I have had the crazy flashbacks. The one that made me go on medical leave from my job, where I ran out into a field because I suddenly smelled pipe smoke while sitting at my desk and then went into a full-fledged panic and ran, headlong, out of the building and into the tall sharp grass to the west of my work building, which was in the country. Those ones were very scary. I ruined pots because I would forget about them on the stove. Lost my job. Lost myself. It changed me, remembering. And there was a lot to remember. I became a new person – born again. I lost my mask. I wore the ugly bruised face for the whole world to see. I became apart from society. Society did not want my trauma. Society needed me to be fully functioning, working. Working. Operational. Able. Able bodied? No. Able minded. But I wasn’t anymore. Now I was broken. Split. There was the before and the now. The now became the then and everything else was just the past. What I remember now is the past, but what I am learning is that the past is who I am even if I don’t remember it. And I don’t remember a whole lot. I can no more separate myself from the trauma than I can separate myself from myself. It is who I am. What made me who I am. Phew. That’s big. Huge. Gigantic! In the end, however, I survived. Therefore, I am a survivor. Also, even if I remember what happened in the past, if I don’t feel the emotions associated with those things, did they really happen to me. Are they suspended in time and space somehow, in my psyche, waiting to be triggered into full blown feelings—while I’m at work sitting at my desk? Like the funerals, where I did not cry. I could not mourn. I did not feel. Now I will cry a bit, again, and then I will shower and get on with my day because it’s a pandemic and I have to pick up groceries.
Trauma:
a disordered psychic or behavioral state resulting from severe mental or emotional stress or physical injury.
Trauma is the biggest piece of business I need to manage if I'm going to change my life. It's a tough one, because it is me, but it is also limiting my life so much, that I barely live.
Take care,
Faith
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