Wow! I just checked my stats and I had over sixty views this past Wednesday!
Hi!!! You're real!
This can't be all my boyfriend ;* hi babe
Maybe people actually like me?? It's just that I had a YouTube channel – well I still have one but I never post anymore – and that never went anywhere. But this looks like it's climbing!
On that encouraging note, let's talk about emotional trauma!!! :D
Okay, so let's be totally clear. Up until recently I was not acquainted with emotional trauma. I was not equipped to talk about it and I had a pretty good life. There was a death in my family but I was so young that it didn't affect me the way it might have someone older. I often think of that as a blessing that I was so young. I avoided all the pain of my parents divorce by not understanding why that would be painful for anyone. I was very lucky as a kid to live in a great neighborhood and go to a good school. I reached 16 basically unscathed, the worst things I had gone through were in my nightmares – although they were pretty horrible – and that's nothing to speak of, although I didn't know it at the time. Then I met my husband. A couple years into my marriage that all changed and I was never the same again.
To be even more clear: it could have been worse. It really could have. There wasn't a day I went to work without my eyes puffy, but they weren't puffy from being struck. The man never laid a finger on me without my say-so. Never even got in my face. Never looked at another girl around me.
He had this horrible sense of chivalry. He'd open my car door but he'd scream at me the whole way home if I told him I was disappointed that we were late to my sister's concert. He'd never ask my parents or my family for a dime, ever, but he'd tell me they were secretly ashamed of me.
He would say anything, promise anything, scream anything, to win the argument, but never stand by a thing he said. He'd get angry if I brought up anything he had said before. Like I wasn't allowed to listen but if I didn't listen he'd scream.
The monsters in my nightmares had nothing on a man whose words had no meaning. You start wondering if you're going crazy. If he never said the things he says he never said. If you made them up. If you're really a bad wife. If you're trying to get him in trouble.
It left me unstable. I still am in a lot of ways. When I met my boyfriend, I had a hard time doing anything near him for fear he would turn into that creature with black eyes and balled fists. I'd ask him to repeat things and I'd repeat them back to myself, hoping that my mind would hold onto his words, trying to remind myself these had meanings and I had better listen. I was afraid to move around his space, to move anything, to touch anything, to ask for anything, to say anything. There were times I would just sit there, and six years of experience told me not to open my mouth, or everything would come crashing down like it always had.
He got me talking. He helped me practice, by moving things on his desk and putting them back, by turning up the heat or the AC, by wearing colors I'd been too scared to wear, styles I had been told didn't work for me. I started wearing makeup again, and perfume, and I was finally losing weight.
But there are still times when he'll make eye contact – something my husband wouldn't do, not even when things were good – and I can see that he genuinely is listening to me. And something in my soul starts to cry. Not even because it feels nice. I'm overwhelmed with guilt. What did I do. To deserve anything less than this. Why would someone hurt me like he did. Why couldn't he have been this way. I could have been happy. I would have stood by him through anything if he could have looked me in the eyes.
My boyfriend always has a hand on me, on my hand in the car, on my back when we're walking. He's always looking at me, always asking me questions about what I'm doing, if I'm having fun, if I'm excited for such and such a thing we have planned.
In the beginning I was excited. But sometimes now I just feel bitter. All this joy I feel now only throws into sharper contrast the six years I lost. But I am a kindhearted person and the rage spills over into tears before I can let the wave crest. Mixed with my sense of abandonment, I can barely hold myself together, and my eyes tear up and he's sitting there having parked to go into the McDonald's instead of going through the drive through because he knows it gives me anxiety, and wondering what he did wrong.
I wasn't allowed to ask for things like that, and he offers them freely.
It's so painful. Sometimes it's more painful than what I went through. Like I've been so low for so long, I've been so hurt and so scared for so long, that my heart can't even handle being lifted up. And it can't, some nights.
I still cry sometimes, randomly, when I'm lying in bed. I don't know if it's because I learned that crying is a necessary part of falling asleep, or if I've forgotten that I'm safe now and that he can't hurt me anymore, or if it's that twisted grief for my marriage that I still feel, sharp as ever. That heartbreak that will never leave me.
I suspect that it's all of these things. And I know I never had to see someone die, but I wanted to die some nights. No, I didn't. I wanted him to see me die. I wanted him to know it was his fault and live with that pain forever. I realized our marriage couldn't work around the time I realized I was fantasizing about his pain. About showing him how things feel. That maybe I didn't love him all that much either.
So: the reason I'm writing about this stuff is because there will always be emotional and mental tribulation in everyone's life. More for some than for others, but we have all been in pain. We've all been broken. Again. Some more than others.
I experienced a pretty standard brokenness for the world, but something world-breaking for someone with my past.
I just think it's important these days to remember that we have a lot of say about how things turn out after things happen. You hear a lot of people these days using their trauma as an excuse.
My ex husband went through the worst thing that can happen to a person. His life was the most miserable thing I had ever heard. He had been put through every single one of the worst traumas I could imagine, and it showed.
He let it show. He used it as an excuse. He hadn't grown from it – he had let it consume him.
Why are you yelling at me? My mom hit me when I was a kid. I'm violent. Why are you telling me you don't love me? I lived on the streets for a while after I ran away – I know how to lie really well. Why are you calling me horrible names? I was abandoned by my family and no one wanted me. I was in the foster care system and I had to believe that no one would ever help me. I got mean.
Why don't you ever want to sleep with me? I was raped when I was eight.
I stopped caring, I'll admit it. I found that eventually even those weren't good enough excuses. You're over thirty – you need to have dealt with this trauma by now.
Maybe I should have been better about it and gotten him help sooner. Maybe I could have held it together long enough. Here come the what-ifs my dad warned me about if I got a divorce. He told me I'd always wonder if I could have helped him.
But there came a day when I didn't care that he'd been raped twenty years ago – you don't treat people like that and stay married. I think I said that to him once.
Maybe this has caused me trauma. Certainly the fact that I can't hold in my panic attack sometimes when I'm asked what I'd like to do this evening indicates that I'm not alright in my head. I already had anxiety. Now I panic easily. My boyfriend doesn't mean to – he really means well and I love him. But he doesn't understand why I'm not just happy the way I say I am. Because I am. You just can't tell sometimes because the happy HURTS. It hurts so fucking bad.
I wonder if I'll ever be the same.