A Lesson in Failing

by: E.B. Johnson

For the last 4 years, I’ve been doing a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes to work through my own history of dysfunction and trauma. From therapy to self-awakening, I’ve re-routed the entire course of my life in a number of years. Not from a desire to be anything or anyone, really. But simply from a desire to survive without the agony of being haunted by a past I couldn’t control.

Along with this healing has come a lot of revelation, though. And there are few things more painful than revelation. Even in the bible, revelation is not a message of hope. It’s an ending of things, and beyond that an absolute acceptance. Healing childhood trauma is nothing if not absolute acceptance. Accept who you were through the experience, and who you are now because of it. Beyond that, though, we must accept the people that surrounded you in childhood — and who they chose to be too.

Digging into the surface level.

When you’re the child of trauma, you’re often brought up to believe that your life is all-things-glittering. That’s how abusers cover up their abuse. They gaslight you (yes, even as a child) by telling you that your suffering isn’t suffering. “Be grateful,” they shouted a million times. “There are children in Africa that don’t even have a roof over their heads.”

Despite this conditioning for suffering, some of us — myself included — made the choice to wake up. We decided we couldn’t live with the suffering anymore. But that also came with looking back at some hard truths that we didn’t want to acknowledge.

As I got deeper and deeper into my healing journey, I realized the only place left to go was into my childhood. I had to take a magnifying glass back to everyone and everything I could remember, so that I could try to piece together some of the harmful patterns and beliefs I had internalized. The traumatized child in me saw abuse-after-abuse, and the inner-critic immediately kicked in.

“Why did you do that? How embarrassing? No wonder they hated you so much. No wonder they treated you that way.”

But that self-critical child was wrong. Getting to the surface level of this outdated trauma, I was confronted with the ultimate truth: I was a child, and every single person around me was an adult with more knowledge and experience than me.

That teacher that I adored? I told her everything. I told her about the mold-filled house, the beating with a belt until I vomited on myself. I told my chemistry teacher about my mother kicking me out in on the back roads and calling me a whore; I told all of them about my brother and his baseball bat and his threats. They all did nothing.

Hundreds of people witnessed me suffering as a child, and they did nothing. The adults that were supposed to love me? They spent more time fighting over their egos, in front of me, than worrying about what they were teaching me about life and healthy ways to soothe and thrive in a chaotic world. The teachers sworn to look out for children like me? Well, ruffling feathers would have been a lot of paperwork.

The more I heal, the more I realize that I had been failed by so many people. But that was only what I scratched on the surface of my journey back into childhood failures. The greatest failure was still yet to be realized.

The hardest failure to accept.

I grew up smack-dab in the middle of pure dysfunction and trauma. The project of a lost woman’s wild night, my parents’ relationship was already on the outs by the time I came into the picture. When they adopted me, my mother was a woman that hated herself, and my father was a man that was in the middle of a chaotic place. He was who he was, and she was who she was. And we all turned out the way that we did because of it.

It forced my father out when I was 8, and I stayed behind with my mother, who quickly descended into a cesspool of depression and hopelessness. Her health deteriorated and so did our lives. The roof of our laundry room (and her bedroom) caved in and water began to flood the halls and bathrooms of the house.

Shortly after, a pipe busted beneath one of the bathrooms. The carpets of my mother’s room became so soaked by waste water that she shut the door and simply boarded it off (rather than getting anything fixed). She told me to wear shoes when I took a shower or went to the bathroom. The hallway to my room flooded daily. Everything smelled like mold and piss.

As her pain and suffering grew, so did the number of animals in the house.

At one point, we had 9 cats living in our house, along with at least 5 dogs and several birds that filled the air with dust and anxiety-inducing screams. Everywhere you looked, there were piles of animal waste, boxes of old books, magazines, junk from the 70s.

I went to school with clothes that reeked of cat urine and feces. I was always picking animal fur out of my mouth, and fleas out of my hair. Looking back now, I realize I must have been the butt of many jokes. I thought I was pretty and popular. In reality, I was probably just “the smelly girl.”

My mother was one of the first grand failures in my life, and she continues to be the hardest for me to accept. The lessons she taught me will never leave me. As a matter of fact, they'll haunt me for the rest of my life.

Making something out of the mess.

Out of every stage of my healing, this has left me (perhaps) the most catatonic. Realizing that your childhood was so different from what you were promised is painful. It’s like waking up from a dream, only to realize it has kept you trapped inside of a nightmare the whole time. Even while my current chaos began to make so much sense, my inner child wailed with the understanding that she had never been loved the way she deserved to be loved.

But that’s really the power in the entire experience. Even as I uncover additional pain and new betrayal, I also learn that I am a stronger person than my mother; someone who is more aware of what people are and what the extent they will go to for others. More than that, though, I’ve discovered this beautiful little soul inside of me that has only ever wanted to be loved for what she is.

There’s something freeing in accepting that no one really cared about you. My inner child feels somehow safer, and I feel freer to be the person I want to be.

Others have to learn this lesson the hard way. They struggle for years, investing in people who never give anything back. But I came into this world unwanted in any real sense. I have known that (when push comes to shove) I am expendable to every other person on this planet. Why? Because some people are awful, and the rest are doing the best they can to keep their own heads above water. That’s okay.

If we’re lucky, we find someone that breaks these rules. When we’re really lucky, they prove it to us time-and-time-again without being asked. I don’t know if I’ve been that lucky so far in life, but I certainly think that I’ve found the exception to the rule.

After all, each one of us just really wants to be seen and accepted wholly as we are. We want to be able to drop the walls, stop sucking in our guts, and just be entirely flawed, and broken, and passionate. We want people to see us inside and out and love us, regardless. But we’ve got to work through some failures to get there.

That’s okay. When we fail, we learn. And when others fail us, we learn even more about our own humanity within the experience.