I have committed to healing my trauma, and boy has it turned against me countless times. Because I’m not just healing, I’m threatening everything my mind and body built to survive. The very survival responses that once kept me going have fought against the thing required to heal them.
The fear of abandonment has whispered, Don’t do this. You’ll end up alone again.
Shame hisses, You’re not ready. You’re going to fail. Nothing ever fucking works out.
Fear tells me, Not yet. This isn’t the right time. Get your shit together first.
Betrayal screams. Don’t you dare trust anyone again and let them in. You know what happened last time.
And loss has whispered something perhaps even more frightening. If you let go of all this pain, who the hell are you without it?
Every one of those voices has sounded like truth because my body still remembers danger.
And there are times I still dissociate, numb myself doomscrolling, hide at home because I don’t want to be seen and have disappeared from a world I once wanted to be part of.
And I fucking hate that, because I remember being a social butterfly.
I recall being awkward and quirky and probably inappropriate, a lot! Freaky. Bizarre. Too much. Whatever.
But I remember being me.
Then somebody told me it was all a mask.That this person I remembered being wasn’t authentically me at all. And somehow I allowed another human being to tell me who I was.
Why?
Why did their interpretation of me become more powerful than my own memory of myself?Why did one comment, delivered with such vehemence and malice, have enough power to make me start hiding parts of myself?
And now I wonder whether it was ever really about me? Was it projection? Was something in me holding up a mirror they didn’t particularly want to look into? Did my lack of inhibition disturb something in them? Was my weirdness, freedom or willingness to be seen illuminate something they had learned to suppress in themselves?
I don’t know and maybe I never will and I don’t actually need to know what their mirror was showing them.
What I do need to understand is why I took their reflection and made it my problem and identity. Because now I hide the very things I once expressed without thinking.
I have felt it in the shaking, the trembling, the jaw clenching, the tightness, the frantic energy surging through my body and that overwhelming urge to escape from something I can’t even see.
There have been countless times when my body has completely freaked out just as I thought I was finally getting somewhere.
And maybe that is getting somewhere?
Because now, when it gets loud, I am learning not to run, although often I still do.
I scroll. hide, shut the front door and don’t want anybody to see me. Healing hasn’t magically removed those things.
What has changed is that I recognise the patterns ( autistic pattern recognition genius - 😜)
I can now feel my feet on the ground, put my hand on my heart and allow my breath shake instead of holding it hostage inside me, and return, again and again.
To know that trembling isn’t failure and neither are the days I disappear. That my body freaking the fuck out doesn’t mean healing isn’t working, it just means I am asking a body that learned to survive through vigilance, bracing, disappearing and protection to experience something entirely different.
To stay, feel and be seen. That I matter, all of me and perhaps eventually I will feel safe enough to be fucking weird again without wondering whether somebody else approves.
I’ve got to keep telling myself, It’s okay to just feel. You don’t have to protect me like this anymore.
Because I’ve committed to this. To staying with myself even when every old survival response tells me to disappear.
Not to becoming some improved, regulated, socially acceptable version of myself, but to finding the woman underneath everything I was told about who I was supposed to be.
Maybe a load of it was masking and some of it wasn’t? Perhaps human beings are far too complicated to have an entire identity explained away with one bloody nasty word? Oh there wasn’t just one word, there were many over decades!
What I do know is that I want my freedom back. The freedom to be awkward, quirky, loud, shy, quiet, social, solitary, bitchy, freaky, bizarre, visible and whatever the fook I happen to be in the moment, that day, without somebody else’s voice inside my head telling me I’m doing myself wrong.
Perhaps this is what healing actually looks and feels like? Not becoming someone new, but slowly unlearning all the reasons I became afraid to be seen, until I can recognise the difference between an old survival alarm and what is actually happening now?
And underneath all the noise, remember the person who existed before somebody else convinced me she wasn’t real.
