trauma

It’s been a weird week. cw: sexual assault, miscarriages, dead bodies, cops being bastards

It took me a long time to accept the trauma I had been through in my life. I had a very easy life. I had two parents who got along, and loved my brother and I dearly. We were poor, but they were young and fit and able to work hard, and grow, and succeed, and build a life. Between effort and luck, we were not poor for long. I had friends, though just a small handful. I was picked on at school, but just run of the mill teasing – Not the kind of horror stories you sometimes read about in media. My life was full of many privileges. By the time I was in junior high, we were firmly middle class. I went to one of the ‘nice’ public schools. I was able-bodied, white, and only a little weird. Nothing terrible ever happened to me.

I had not lived through enough bad things to justify the serious impact trauma had on me. I couldn’t have any real baggage. My trauma felt… unearned, like I did not deserve the right to claim it as my own. It was an insult to people who had seen “real” trauma (as I was in fact told by my ex husband, before we were even dating. that’s a piece of a whole different story.)

Trauma is strange. It’s easy to try and judge the severity of a trauma by the nature of the event. See someone get murdered? That’s a trauma. Get an arm ripped off? That’s probably a trauma. Get beat up real good? Eh, that’s kinda rough, could be a trauma. And when I looked at it that way, I felt like an impostor for being so messed up. Trauma didn’t make me this way. I just… am this way. I can’t cope with the same world everyone else can. I’m weak, I’m broken, I’m not made for life. Nobody else feels as trapped by the past with so little to be trapped by.

Trauma doesn’t work that way, though. You can’t measure it by how grand and dramatic it seems on paper. You can only measure it by the impact it’s had, and it took me a very long time to be ok with that. Someone might witness a terrible car crash and not have a mark left on their soul from it. Someone else might step on a bug and spend years anxiously watching every step they take, just in case. Trauma is weird.

Trauma has roots, too. Sometimes trauma is a seed that gets planted, and it takes time for the impact to set in. It can grow, and change, and spread out in to parts of you that you would never expect. Sometimes, it can be almost impossible to see why you are the way you are, why you do the things you do, why you feel the way you feel – That trauma has become so invasive, you can’t even see where it started. It’s just who you are.

And there’s Big Event Traumas, and there’s death-by-a-thousand-cut traumas (or ptsd and cptsd I suppose, though I’m sure it’s more complex than that,) and it can also be so difficult to understand those thousand cut traumas. Each little bit is so insignificant, you may not even remember most of them. But it accumulates, it builds, and it rewires you.

Anyway, it took a long time for me to accept most of my trauma. I’m a big pile of cptsd, and it took me a very, very long time to understand that. I grew up with undiagnosed moderate to severe combination type adhd, and parents who tried their best to make me feel better about the struggles I was going through even though they didn’t understand that I was, in fact, fundamentally different. Every challenge I had was met with love and support in the form of “this is normal, everyone goes through this, don’t worry.” It’s very difficult to see the trauma in that. All I knew was that hearing everyone went through that made me feel worse. It stung, badly, but I couldn’t articulate why at the time. And to hear over, and over, and over again, hundreds of times that everyone is dealing with the same struggles you are, and to know that it’s killing you but not even bothering everyone else, that will ruin you after a while.

Trauma is sneaky.

I had lots of death-by-a-thousand-cut traumas like that. The biggest one is that whole ‘If everyone goes through this, if everyone feels this way, if this is perfectly normal, why is everyone else thriving when I’m in agony? Am I that broken? Am I just that pathetic? That bad at life?’ one, but that was still just part of a big, complex mess I was in.

There’s a lot of things like that. I didn’t mean for this to be a documentation of all my trauma, I just wanted to illustrate the point when it comes to those little things. I remember a lot of them. I think, as an adult looking back, it’s important to really consider what it is you remember. You don’t remember things for no reason, or at least I don’t. I remember things because they were tied to strong feelings at the time. If something seemingly mundane is burned in to my mind, there’s a good reason. That’s where I started trying to lay the groundwork for tracing my trauma, and figuring out where those roots go. It took a long time to start connecting dots. So many things seemed so unrelated. But some things were obvious, I could remember exactly what part stung.

I’m not sure where I’m going here, I just needed to talk about trauma.

CPTSD is most of my deal. It’s my entire personality. It’s almost all of me. I have no idea who I would be if none of these little things happened. But I have some big traumas too, and those are a lot easier to understand and track. They can still grow some strange, invasive little roots though.

There are medium traumas, too. Single traumatic events you can recognize, that you are often reminded of, but they don’t completely mess you up. Get enough of those though, and that can be hard to deal with. But what I actually wanted to write down and put in to words is some bits about Big Trauma.

I have three Really Big Traumas. And while I am sure this is not the case with all Big Traumas, mine happen to have some medium traumas swept up in them. On one case, a lot of small and medium traumas escalated in to the Big Trauma, and in another, the Big Trauma kept getting poked at and prodded and triggered and everything just got swept up in the masses.

I really struggle to talk about the first big trauma, though I can think about it fluidly and pick it apart now. I do not like to feel like a victim, at all. It’s not my jam. I was 16 when I had my first real relationship, and it was just a bad scene. Six months of systematically breaking down my self esteem and any belief that I had value, rather effectively. I don’t even think he knew he was doing it, it was second nature. And, as one might joke for the sake of only being able to talk about it in a light-hearted fashion because they can’t accept the things that have happened to them, this was all of course an attempt to get in my pants. Ah, a tale as old as time. Luckily, I learned in that relationship that I do actually have a breaking point. You pull on to desperately-attempting-to-de-escalate street, exit on to pleading crying hysterics avenue, take a turn down hardcore dissociation street, and it turns out eventually that dead ends in to Absolutely Lose Your Shit And Punch The Guy Taking Off Your Pants. Anyway, still enough to absolutely fuck me up for life in ways I’m still learning about.

Then we had my big adventure in ectopic pregnancy, but that was at least a very simple trauma. It was almost entirely a physical trauma. I know for most people that would be an emotional situation, but like I said, trauma is weird. That one will sometimes trigger me if I have a weird pain or if my body does something strange, but the trigger is a very physical “I am about to die” feeling and not a bunch of turmoil or shit worth writing about.

The last, most recent one was finding a dead body in a river, which hey, at least that one is easy to explain. That one was particularly unfair, because it was definitely a trauma, but it did not need to be as traumatic as it was. The actual event was fucked up, but it didn’t scar me badly. It pissed me off, made me hate cops very badly, made me feel the weight of the massive injustice done to the family of the victim I found (he was missing for months and they family were pretty sure he was in that river, the cops just made no effort to find him. Oh, also, they’re the ones who chased him in there but whose keeping track, right?) But it could have just been a sad story in a paper and a thing that weighed on me from time to time.

No, what made that a Great Big Trauma was my ex. We found those remains while working to clean up a river blockage from our kayaks. My ex was absolutely obsessed with this. I was not, but hey, it’s my job to serve and I was honestly excited we were just doing something together. You’d think after I found a body in the big blockage that would be it, but no. My ex wanted to go back almost IMMEDIETELY to keep sawing through logs, moving trash, and digging through this massive amount of debris where I had just found heavily decomposed remains. He mentioned that he wanted to go finish cleaning up the blockage, and I told him I was extremely not ok with that. He relented, and said we should at least go kayak that river again because if we put it off it’s just going to get harder the longer we wait. I more or less pleaded with him that we should not do that, but he insisted, and my desire to avoid upsetting him was stronger than whatever should have stopped me from going I guess.

So we went back to the river. And after a while, I started insisting we head back to the dock, I was getting very uneasy. He kept insisting we not, just a bit further. I got more and more distraught, he ignored it. And we got to the blockage, and then he insisted we start working on it. By that point, I was pretty much completely dissociated so I just did. We spent probably two hours there, literally right where a week before I’d found myself a few feet from a rotting human body, squinting closely at his face before I suddenly realized what I was looking at. We were digging through trash, roping off and dragging big logs, and I just spend the entire time absolutely certain that there were probably more corpses just out of sight waiting to be stirred up by our actions, just like last time. Good times.

THAT was actually the big trauma. Being forced to go back, being forced to ignore my own internal screaming to severely that my brain and body just went completely in to compliance, I was just completely broken.

We got through the blockage, kayaked a bit further, I don’t really remember how far or what was there. I do remember at one point he asked if everything was alright (he was well aware it was not, but liked to play oblivious) and when I quietly said no, he just kind of laughed it off and said “But we did it! That’s great, right?” or something like that.

I didn’t go back to the river with him again. He wanted to go again like a week later, and I did refuse. He got mad and huffy about it and went by himself. I had been so excited we had found something to do together, kayaking, after years of me having all these outdoor interests that he took no part in or interest in. And he made sure to ruin that well and good. That was three years ago.

Anyhow, I wanted to put some of these thoughts in to words because it’s been a strange week. I started taking two different anxiety meds like ~6 months ago, and they reduced a lot of my trigger responses pretty dramatically. I can have sex now which is cool, genuinely wasn’t sure I’d be able to do that again without being severely triggered. Started kayaking again. Therapy is great, but sometimes meds really are what you need.

But it’s been a strange week. I’m single and pretty ok with that, I’m casually seeing someone I’m quite fond of and that’s satisfying enough for me right now, but I’m a glutton for torturing myself so I sometimes scroll through dating apps more or less to think about how all these people would never be interested in me. Yeah, that’s not super healthy, but that isn’t the point. Sometimes it’s an ego boost too though, it’s not all bad! Plenty of people seem interested in me. I don’t talk to any of them, I don’t actually want to. I’m good where I’m at, don’t need any more socializing in my life. But it’s nice to know there is a market out there for traumatized neurodivergent weirdos like me.

Anyhow, I made a tinder account which is an app I’d never bothered to use since it’s mostly for hookups anyhow which, as a person who is pretty often triggered by sex, not an ideal platform. Almost immediately got a like on my profile, and t he first person who liked my profile was… my first shitty rapist boyfriend from back in high school. I’ve gone to great lengths to avoid thinking about him for, uh, almost 20 years. So that was weird. And as soon as I realized it was him, I like… braced for impact. I wasn’t sure how I, how my little trauma centers, were going to react to this. Sometimes it takes time for things to soak in. No impact happened though. It was just… a thing that happened. It was almost funny. I was a bit insulted that I had to have his face burned in to my nightmares for ten years, and he didn’t even remember what I looked like! Probably barely remembers me, I was almost certainly an insignificant moment in his life. He definitely doesn’t have the balls to swipe right on me KNOWINGLY, he’s a fucking coward. So that was my response to this. It was an almost sarcastic laughing offense. How DARE. I entertained the idea of matching him to open a dialog just to say “wow, pretty offended you don’t even remember what I look like, damn” or something. It was a brief thought because I think if I actually interacted with him, that probably would push that back in to the trauma zone. But as it was, just this dumb little thing – It’s fine. I’m totally fine. I didn’t anticipate being fine. I always kind of thought if I ran in to him again, I’d go off the deep end, run him over with a car and then kill myself or something. But nah. He’s just some pathetic lonely guy on a dating app. Not worth my time caring about it. He’s not the kind of person I would give the time of day to nowadays.

I also happened to find the kayak I’d wanted this week (my ex kept both the kayaks when I left him.) So hey, now I can kayak again! And fueled by some sort of strange hubris that resulted from my previous trauma defiance a few days prior, I said fuck it – let’s go kayak on That River Where I Found A Body Once.

And I did that today. I thought to myself, I just want to test my kayak, I’ll go the other way on the river. And I went in little steps, waiting between each to see if I was about to start having heart palpitations or getting squirrely. I drove to the dock, and I sat a bit. And I carried my kayak to the dock, and I sat a bit. And I got in my kayak and waited there for a bit. And it was weird, but it was fine.

And I decided to head the direction I’d always gone. And it was weird, don’t get me wrong. But it was mostly just weird because of all these associations with my ex. It was ok though. I kept going, slowly, trying to be very aware of how my felt with the intention of turning around if anything even started feeling a little bad. But it was fine. I kept going, and going, and eventually got to the place where the blockage was.

And it was ok. The blockage was cleaned up; Last year, the city sent in crews and it was a giant effort. It had downed power lines in it. They had found another body literally a few hundred yards further back the day after I had found a body (no joke, if I had somehow MISSED the first dead body and we kept going, I STILL WOULD HAVE FOUND A DEAD BODY. ) So this place I was seeing was completely different. Clean and new.

I didn’t expect this to be a significant or healing trip, just a weird thing I was trying to prove to myself for no reason. But I sat there, in my kayak, right where that young man had laid for months until I found him. And the area was clean, the trash was gone, the signs of what had caused me so much grief were faded away. And I sat there for a long time, just absorbing everything. And I felt ok.

I eventually headed back, and I stopped at the one spot you can put out besides the dock. It leads to an abandoned lot, about five acres, with some remnants of foundation. It’s completely overgrown and derelict. My ex wanted to buy it and build a house there (which actually is a whole different story about trauma, but it’s not really important. It’s just important that this place was also significant and not great for me.) We’d hung out on the lot poking around a few times. There was an old white hard hat that we found, I took a picture of it that I still have as my computer background which is probably the only reason I remember the hat.

I decided to poke around again today, continue my weird little meditative journey of letting go of some of the toxicity I’ve held on to over this river. And I stumbled upon the hard hat again. Except this time, someone had written “HOPE” on it. I’m not sure why, but I’ll be damned if that didn’t feel a bit eerie, like someone wrote it for me to find.

I got back to the dock, loaded up my boat, and drove the short drive home. I drove home in one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve seen in maybe years. Seemed a fitting end to this weird-ass day.