Trauma

So, lately, I have been thinking about trauma. I have started seeing a counselor due to an emotional breakdown I had recently due to being overly stressed. I have only had one meeting with her so far, so I haven't really gotten much done. But it has caused me to think about things. I went through in my mind all the different traumas I went through since getting married and I really thought them over and I realized that I never really allowed myself to grieve over them. Often I powered my way through them and then bottled up my emotions because they were too difficult to deal with at the time and never really allowed myself to take them out, air them out and deal with them. I just bottled them up and shoved them down deeper and deeper. But this last year with everything that happened it was just too much too fast, too many things flying at me to bottle them all up and keep them all down without going a little crazy.

So I started thinking about trauma and about other traumas I have had in life. I was talking with my mom today and she asked about trauma I had as a child, and I couldn't really think of any. Then later I was thinking about coping mechanisms and things that I do to help keep myself sane, and how many of them seem to be an escape to other people. So then I thought to myself, well what did I do when I lived with my parents? Well, I ran off into the woods and spent some time alone with nature. Well, I just told Mom that I couldn't remember trauma from my childhood, so what was I running from? Bullying, that is what I was running from. The stress of being bullied. I was bullied from preschool till my senior year in high school. But I talked about it with my parents. I had a good friend who went through it with me and who was my confidant. I was able to process it because I worked through it, I developed strategies against it. Did it leave me scarred? Sure, but I grew stronger from it.

But you can't run away from cancer, you can't run away from fertility issues, or heart surgery, or your own autistic children. And all of those things are also often taboo subjects. They make people feel uncomfortable, they make people feel uneasy. They are often difficult to understand if you haven't experienced it yourself.

I was 19 when Kevin was diagnosed with cancer, I was still basically a child, and yet...widowhood stared me in the face. I didn't know how to deal with trauma like that. I didn't know how to handle it. So I took my cues from Kevin. And he was amazing. He didn't flinch, he was cheerful, and ready and was just so tough through all of it. And I, I was falling apart inside but didn't think I could show it.

I found my old poem book, one that I made before he was diagnosed and started writing poems in. It contains the poetry I wrote while he went through cancer. I read through it tonight, wow. I moved myself to tears. What I wrote then, oh I feel the same thing now. I expressed then things that I still feel about current traumas. Current frustrations. Here is one I wrote:

Life kills me from the inside this time
I saw it coming years ago.
Have you seen my play?
This time I have learned
the part far too well.
Backstage my smile does not stay.
How can I hold up again?
Alone, I sit and watch my heart die.
I can feel it ripping me apart.
Thinking of us I cry,
but not where it is seen.
Life hurts so much
I don't know if I can endure
Yet for you, I must.
Help me to survive this,
I don't know how long I can last.

The stress, the fear, the pain, when it is your life you can't really run from that. So I found escape methods. I found ways to ease the pain, found ways of ignoring it until it went away. I got good at not feeling things, especially if I didn't want to feel them. No wonder lately I feel numb. I often think of my life and I don't feel a lot. My body has all these things it keeps doing that are screaming to anyone who knows how to read the signs that I am under overwhelming stress, but my outward disposition is such that people can't tell. People don't know because my mask is too good. What I think is part of the issue is that I have tried to share my sorrow, my pain with others. I have tried to process it so many times. And yet, it is not a comfortable topic. It is not something that people want to hear about. So they shut you up, and they get you to move on, and things never get processed. And so here I am. Scarred, and yet falling apart still, from the inside, and there is not enough tape to hold me together anymore.