Watching a video just now, from a woman dispensing advice on how we need to ditch the story, the story we’ve told repeatedly about a trauma, and process the emotion, the residue of that trauma that is left in our bodies.
She lays out an exercise that she says takes “all of ten or fifteen minutes, that’s all” to process the emotion and where and how it feels in the body.
Yeah.
Ow.
My counselor wants me to do a lot more of this. She calls this “re-parenting” and while it seems fine on paper, it’s a lot harder for me to tell my younger self that she’s fine.
Because she wasn’t fine.
She wasn’t reassured by her parents that she was fine, or would be fine.
She wasn’t reassured by her doctors that it’s possible some of her several chronic conditions may have been exacerbated by the trauma she experienced and which she was never comforted over at the time.
My younger, highly sensitive self was, in hindsight, positively crushed by a string of traumas that began at age four and continued in earnest until I was in my late twenties. And I spent a long time trying to deny how crushed I had been. But the truth showed up in my body, amplifying the various chronic conditions that were part of my medical and genetic heritage. I spent a very long time downplaying them, trying to power through them so I could live my life.
Getting the diagnosis of ADHD has forced me to acknowledge just how battered I’d been by all the traumas of my youth. And my body is letting me know just how much emotional and physical damage had been done.
I think that the older you are when you begin to get all the information about what is happening in your brain and body, the harder it is to imagine that you will ever be able to re-parent all the selves at their respective times of trauma.
And while that makes sense, when I ponder trying to do that with every emotion from the multitude of traumas, a lifetime of little traumas that came from not fitting in, from being regularly uprooted throughout my youth, from realizing that in some ways I was never fully rooted in my own family, all of that adds up to a mountain of wrong and hurt and pain held in my body and it’s overwhelming.
If you’re trying to do this in your twenties, you have a hope of dealing with most of it.
But when you begin doing this in your sixties, and you imagine being able to process even some of it, you quickly become confronted with the terrible truth that you’re getting rather a late start, and you will be lucky to process even a quarter of it before you die. When you start late, there will remain a lot of unprocessed, unresolved pain and grief.
So you make a deal with yourself.
You tell yourself you will try to do what you can, you understand that it will never all be healed because you got such a late start, and you try to give yourself a break for what you can’t do.
You do this because you live in a world that does not offer nearly societal support for people who recognize that they have been broken by all the reminders that they did not fit into this society neatly. You do this because in the end, the only people who will cut you the slack you need are people who have been through this kind of life themselves and have owned up to the truth of it.
You do this because, in a society where medical and therapeutic resources are scarce for people without means, you will not get all the help or support you need. The world has already proven that to you hundreds of times, over and over again. (For reference, please refer to Covid and the resulting medical shutdown of the last four years, from which we as a society have not recovered.)
You do this because life is short. Because you got rather a late start.
And because you got that late start and lacked resources, you know that you simply do not have the luxury of time and means to fix the larger part of what’s broken in you.
Life is short. And you know in your bones that you don’t want to spend whatever you have left of it feeling like a walking hospital zone all the time. So you give yourself permission to fix what you can, rest when you need to, and still try to squeeze a little joy out of your life if you can.
******
I’ll own that this is some of my anger talking right now.
But I’m not angry at me so much anymore.
I am angry at people who are dead, who I can’t go back and ask “what the FUCK” or tell them how I am now.
I am angry at a family tree and a history and a world that made my parents ill-equipped and unable to parent well, and cousins who want to explore our familial past with me so we can discover just how messed up our grandparents were.
No thanks.
Maybe if I were twenty, and had time and energy.
Maybe.
But I’m sixty-one and goddamn it, I need a break.
So when I can re-parent myself and feel the feelings, I will, and I know it will be beneficial for me.
And at the times when I cannot re-parent myself, I am going to give myself a break. I’m going to chase a little dopamine and drink my coffee and wait for a positive outcome from the disability panel. Because there are just too many days when I don’t feel optimal, and not enough days left in my life to make up for all that.
So I’ll do what I can do, and learn how to be at peace with being imperfect in an imperfect world.
Because I just don’t have enough spoons to tackle this any other way.
This found me on a day when I was exhausted and trying to recover from a better day when I blew up a ton of spoons, I expended a lot of energy. So everything feels closer to the surface. And the tears come more easily at times like this. So I just cry. And I tell myself to cry all I need to, to make up for the times when I was ridiculed for crying or for the times in adulthood that I finally learned how to close off my tears in order to be less vulnerable. Now, I cry when I feel the tears come, and I do not apologize.
And if anyone tells me I’ve become such a downer or needy, well, I’ll be done with them.
Because I’m older now. And life is short.
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