Trauma work is hard. At its root is the stark realization that the bad things will never go away. They happened. To ignore the new hand of cards you’ve been dealt is to accept desolation and contempt.
Last night, I was running. Graceful. Powerful. Arms and lungs pumping in perfect synchronicity. My perfect legs carried me through the perfect scene of a perfect grassy field, sunlight beaming down from a sky of blue like ribbons of gold…
It’s always a huge disappointment when I wake up from a dream like this and I remember I can’t run anymore. Most mornings, I struggle to stand and stumble into my wheelchair. But I never let the bastards get me down.
“Keep sending it, brain,” I whisper. I’ll relish every moment. I’ll wake up refreshed and renewed, ready to face my new reality head-on, with joy and conviction and zero self-pity. Keep it coming.
It’s times like these when our trauma tries us the hardest. Our brains want answers. And when they don’t get them they sometimes resort to fantasy, to foolery, to lies.
I can’t be mad at my brain. It’s just a hunk of meat. An organ. Not much different, really, from my heart, liver or kidneys. It’s not designed to care. My brain doesn’t realize it’s hurting me when it conjures up achievements from the past, things I can’t do anymore. It doesn’t know that by sending me into an artificial dreamworld it’s only holding me back from the dark spaces through which I need to move in reality.
Trauma work is hard. At its root is the stark realization that the bad things will never go away. They happened. To ignore the new hand of cards you’ve been dealt is to accept desolation and contempt.
I won’t do that. And neither should you.
The memory of your trauma will never go away. That’s just the way it works. Your brain uses these memories to send you sharp, jarring reminders of how terrible things can get, in hopes that you won’t ever allow that to happen again. It doesn’t know that it’s not your fault and it doesn’t care. That’s not its job. It just wants you safe. And a big part of that safety is to run like hell whenever a similar set of circumstances appear that resemble what happened during that terrible time.
Hiding is part of that. Running away feels good. Lying to yourself provides a saccharin comfort. But there’s no scalability in delusion.
Your life IS what it is now. Accept it. Embrace the hurt. Find the basement of your soul and sit down there for a while. This has to be done. It has to start here because you need a base, however shitty it feels, from which you can start stacking iron blocks of confidence, gratitude, serenity and resiliency up higher and higher, until you one day find yourself so high that what happened in the past has zero effing power anymore. THIS is how you win!
Your trauma isn’t going anywhere. But you get to make it live in the basement.
Choose to refuse. Joy conquers pity. Every effing time.
TU