A Perfect Little Life

*Trigger Warning: PTSD, Sexual Assault, Suicide
Warning: This may be challenging to read for many of you.
Warning: The below writing may be extremely validating, or invalidating to your experience of trauma.

There’s a part of me that wants to hide this from you, a part that believes I am supposed to shelter you from the pain and trauma I have experienced, that in some way, I am supposed to keep you safe, from me.

...and, based on experience, I’ve also seen doing exactly that, kill people.

So, this is my story.

My understanding of trauma is this:

It’s not actually something you will ever get over or heal from. What happens to you, the experiences you have, they can’t and won’t ever just go away.

They are a part of “you”.

And your ability to recall them, is often just a short trigger away.

Life may, however, become easier, the triggers, more bearable to navigate. The noose around your neck, a little less tight.

Over the past few years I’ve toggled with my marker of identifying as someone who has severe trauma vs, just a “little bit”; what classifies it really? What classifies the level of pain you hold inside your soul, the nightmares that keep you from sleeping for days, weeks, years on end. The flashbacks, day dreams, and altered perceptions of reality that you just can’t seem to run from no matter how hard you try. How the hell can you measure or compare that?

The event is not what marks the extent of the trauma, the symptoms are.

Can we stop placing other peoples traumas on a spectrum? Can we stop giving 1st, 2nd, and 3rd ribbons to those who aren’t “hurting as bad as we are”? Can we stop shaming ourselves for our “overreactions” to the events in our lives?

I’d like to say that therapy works, that immense EMDR, trauma therapy, talk therapy, somatic experiencing, etc. work.

But they didn’t for me.

At least, not in the ways I thought they would.

They did however, make my life just an ounce more bearable, they made the triggers, a bit more manageable, and my world, a little more bright, and, at the time, that's exactly what I needed to stay alive.

But like I said I don’t think you actually ever really “get over it”, I think you rise above it. I think you, somewhere down the line, decide that it hurts bad enough that you finally decide to do something to change it. To change your perception, your reality in some way, you do something to change the internal vibration and frequency that controls the experience of your internal world, or,

You kill yourself.

At least these are the two “outs” I have seen in my immediate reality.

At the age of 24, I have had 8 friends kill themselves. These 8 fit into the 25 other close friends that I have grieved in my short 24 years.

I’d like to think that the way things work is different, I really do. But it wasn’t for me.

What gave me freedom, was just not thinking about it.

Not exactly the route you may be thinking, I’m not referencing the “stuffing it” method, most of us know how well that works.

I’m talking about the concept of thinking about something else instead, simply, shifting your focus.

(Trust me, I know, easier said than done right?)

This is a concept that was gifted to me through extensive use of psychedelics and plant medicine ceremonies. For the first time in 22 years, I went a week without a nightmare, then two weeks, then a month, then a year, then two. I could go out at night for a walk, without needing someone to come with me. My altered perception of reality and shift in consciousness completely dissolved all symptoms of my PTSD. I started feeling positive, saying affirmations on my own that just bubbled out of me, and focusing and loving on the things I enjoyed about life, all without trying.

I started feeling happy, I started feeling free.

“Change the way you look at things, the things you look at will change.”

I still experienced a range of emotions, but they were not nearly as intense. It was the first time in the past 8 years that I went more than a month without thinking about killing myself. It just simply stopped crossing my mind.

This concept however, is one I have resisted my ENTIRE life.

I didn’t want to be told that I should just think about something different, that I just needed to “decide” to be happier, or focus on the positive, and the truth is, I just wasn’t ready yet.

I wasn’t ready to accept that I can not, in anyway, control the things that happen to me, (the thought of accepting and surrendering to that level of powerlessness was terrifying), but that I CAN however control the way I show up, the way I interact with the experiences I have and my perception of reality I have in front of me in every given moment.

For most of my life, the way I showed up, felt like the only way I could.

I was 17 the first time I was raped. A man I barely knew had sex with me on the back of a truck while I lay unconscious. He had not been drinking. I had.

Was that hard to read? What are you experiencing in this moment? Do you want to keep reading? Do you want to look away?

These. Things. Happen.

They have for centuries.

Queue a feminine, desperate to drink her pain into numbness,

and a masculine, so starved of connection, he has to take it.

...and there are things we can do to begin building a different world, but first we must acknowledge the one that we have created.

And for fucks sake, it doesn’t mean it doesn't hurt like hell.

I notice even writing this the part of me that wants to be sure to give you every detail, just so there’s no possible way you could think that I am trying to mislead you on what actually happened. Isn’t that seriously fucked up?

I know what happened because I had friends who were there,
friends who saw,
friends who stood by and did nothing.

Friends who video taped me unconscious with my pants around my ankles in the car ride home.

Friends who laughed when I couldn’t get myself out of the car.

I woke up in my own bed the next morning, yet felt unsafe, unfamiliar, and disoriented. I was sore, and covered in bruises,

I rolled over and asked my friend “What happened last night?”

“You had sex.” She said.

Sex. That’s what she called it.

And in 7 years, I have told 2 people about it.

Both times I was told I was raped,

Both times I denied it.

You see, I had been prepared for this for years. Conditioned. Taught. To be silent.

Since the first day of 4th grade, where two boys in my class filled my desk with dirt, grass, and over 100 crickets and worms.

My teacher yelled at me, assuming I had done something to “make them do this”, she told me to be quiet and sit in my seat when I tried to get away from the bugs that were crawling all over me. When I started crying, she sent me to the office.

I was later charged for a textbook upon return because it had squished bugs in the binding.

I can tell you a hundred of these stories, but I’m sure you’ve already read them,

Or lived them.

That was the first rape, you see after the first, my mind started to blur together the “appropriate term” I should use in each scenario. I was taught that the term I chose to use needed to be based on a few things:

• How much I had to drink
• How sexually active I was with others outside of this scenario
• How many times I actually said No
• How loud I screamed No
• How many times I tried to get away
• What I was wearing
• Was I willing to ruin another humans future?
• If the man I chose to spend time with was trustworthy or had a bad reputation already (Let me give you a hint, if he was known to be trustworthy you’d be met with, “Oh trust me, he wouldn’t have done something like that.” If he wasn’t, “You should have known better than to be alone with a guy like that.”)

Experiences like these used to control my life, as well as my perception of reality and my absolute knowing of “the way the world worked”. Now, they are just things that have happened. You can feel angry. I can feel angry. I can let myself REALLY “feel it all” down to the core.

And,

It’s not going to change what happened.

What will

is

starting to build a life,

Around other things.

Beginning to focus,

On the things that bring my soul peace.

Beginning to say No,

to anything that doesn’t.

Putting my foot down,

To what others say I need.

Being an advocate,

For my own story and truth.

Fulfilling my own needs,

Whether they are toxic or pure.

Putting myself first,

Even when it hurts.

Finding my fuck yes,

And never settling for anything less.