Tag Archives: Childhood Trauma

Fuzzy Trauma Llama Dreams of the Past

*CONTENT WARNING! Common themes of this blog include, but are not limited to, PTSD and abuse, sexual and otherwise.*

[written on June 2, 2012]

Here’s to hoping June is better than May! As of this morning, I believe I consider May 2012 to be one of the most difficult months of my life. Not necessarily the saddest or the most destructive or…something. Maybe not the worst? If not the worst, only because I think I have more tools to deal with difficulty, now.

For the past ~4 nights, I have had nightmares. They aren’t sexual, they just involve me being stuck in a violent or threatening situation and having to escape. Last night was wholly different and unexpected. Last night I dreamt about E again, but not like I usually do. This time, all I wanted to do was talk to her. She was so angry in the dream — she wanted nothing to do with me at all. When I finally did talk to her, I wanted to tell her that I’m going through this process now.

By the end of the dream, I think I finally had some subconscious info about our relationship because I think I kind of understand what went on there. I think it’s interesting I never put all of this together before, but as soon as I told E explicitly some of what happened to me (in real life, not in this dream), and she was the first one I ever told that to, I think I knew, somehow, that we weren’t going to work. I think E is the relationship I had to sacrifice in order to do this whole healing thing. For the last 4 years, I’ve been talking or thinking about hate crimes* as the reason our relationship didn’t or couldn’t work. I kept thinking and feeling like I just wasn’t getting the support I needed from her. I think that was and is true. I don’t think she could have supported me from ALongDistanceCity and I also don’t think I was ready for this healing, but knew somewhere along the line it was going to happen. It’s like, once I had the courage or impulse to say out loud what happened, it was the first step in dealing but I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. There must have been something inside of me that knew this was coming and knew E wasn’t the one to do this with me, if anyone was. I think hate crimes provided this trigger-like response — they created an unsafe and violent sexual environment which awoke the part of me that had felt the same ways before. I don’t think I realized at the time, but I think I was asking E if she could stand this sort of pending struggle, and something about her response told me she couldn’t.

In some ways, I think she actually did help me along this road — if all of these choices are first steps, then she helped me start. 4 years later I feel like I’m really doing this. I am healing and clearly coming to a greater understanding about how all of these seemingly dissociated events are  linked by the fact that they’re all my experiences. It’s clear I don’t understand how my life fits together yet — I still feel overwhelming pressure and sadness and confusion and exhaustion on a lot of days. I still feel like I am not living a life in which my experiences are unified. I am still working to understand what it means for me to be healing from childhood sexual assault and what that means for the overall thread of my life.

But, after 4+ years, it seems like I’m finally starting to understand how my whole life is affected by my childhood, and once I figure out how to live that full experience, I really do believe there’s greater understanding and the “end” — not just about me and my life, but about how my life and experience is connected to all of the violent norms in our society. This isn’t just a fight for my own life back. This is me trying to gain something that leads to a deeper understanding of pain, struggle, trauma, identity, recognition, and individual agency with respect to the choices we make for ourselves. The resolution will be amazing, whatever it is. I just have to keep trying to get there. Along the way, I think I’m going to learn a lot about myself I didn’t know before.

Here’s to June.

-FTL

*I was a target of anti-queer, anti-gay hate crimes in the early months of 2008, during my final semester of undergrad. It pretty much sucked, and E, my girlfriend at the time, was living across the country.

Fuzzy Trauma Llama Feels All Mixed Up

*CONTENT WARNING! Common themes of this blog include, but are not limited to, PTSD and abuse, sexual and otherwise.*

[written on May 31, 2012]

This, friends, is what I like to call Sucking it Up. I say sucking primarily because I have felt pretty sucktastic the past week or so, and also because I’ve avoided writing the entire time since I fear the suckage of writing, as well. Thus, Sucking it Up. Embark:

This sucks. I know, I know, it was ~20 years ago, blah blah. This fucking sucks. This week, it’s been sadness, nightmares, disrupted sleep, exhaustion, and crying. And more crying. Including on my Wednesday morning walk to the train, which turned into a cryfest+pep talk+going back home…. In fact, I stayed home Tuesday and Wednesday this week & honestly hardly made it through today. My seemingly perpetual cycle of headache vs not headache is enough to make me crazy. I feel like there have been so many fucked up emotions this week, I’m just utterly overwhelmed.

I was searching for info about coping with a job or other daily activities today and came across this thing people who are healing from sexual assault/rape are supposed to read every morning (http://www.pandys.org/articles/readthiseverymorning.html, from Pandora’s Project out of Minneapolis, MN). At the very beginning, it says if you get out of bed, you’re doing well. If you have a job, you’re doing amazingly. It continues for a while and the very last one says (or, rather, toward the end) if you’re only able to exist, there are people waiting for when you’re ready to live again. Honestly, some days I feel like it’s enough to ask myself to just be awake. Other days, I feel like if I could just be awake, and do nothing else, it would be the most productive day. I’m having a hard time stringing thoughts together tonight.

Sometimes, and a few times in the last month, I have simply (err…) felt as though the only way to deal with the anger or sadness or anxiety or exhaustion is just to feel it all. All the weight and might and pressure — ride it out. I think that’s another component to my need for time. It’s like I need to get to a place where I can let go and have some of this backlogged stuff run its course. Sometimes it is just too damn hard to be in the same world as everyone else. I mean, sometimes it’s just too damn hard to begin with, but lately this feeling has been building, like I just don’t operate in the same reality as other people. It’s as if the sadness and pain and all this healing is just too much to fathom in most people’s reality and it is such an unmistakably huge part of everything in my life right now, I feel like I’m moving in a different realm.

Ugh, there are too many things going on in my head right now. I can’t keep my thoughts straight.

I am so tired.

Also, I read the average for this process is 3-5 years. Ok.

-FTL