Trauma Is Weird

Trauma is weird -

On some levels, I’d been miles ahead of my peers;

emotional intelligence, “common sense”, knowing when to be quiet and reserved, well-behaved;

In other ways, I’m a hundred steps behind -

I’m scared,

I never went out and did the things most young people do,

I didn’t go to prom, or homecoming, or have a group of friends I hung out with;

I dropped out of high school because of a mental breakdown caused by my trauma.

My trauma.

Like I have to own it or else it’ll own me,

Like it’s part of who I am;

The trauma is too distancing -

like I’m in denial, like I’m separating myself from what I went through,

like I’m deluded into thinking it wasn’t that bad so I don’t have to think about it

because thinking about it hurts and I don’t want to hurt any more

and pain makes me spiral pain makes me scared I’m tired of being scared im tired of being hurt being worried of second guessing myself and everyone around me what if this is it what if it never goes away what if im just like this for the rest of my life-

Trauma is weird.

A panic attack might be just around the corner,

so I have to be aware of my triggers.

At the same time, if I focus on it too much it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,

and the awareness turns into obsession turns into anxiety turns into panic,

and suddenly I’m gone again.

How do I avoid hyper-focusing when at any moment I could get hit with a wave?

Zoloft helps.

Zoloft lifts me up a bit.

Brings my baseline from the ground up to knee level -

lets me wade through it instead of drowning in a foot of water.

Sometimes I think I got wired wrong. Or maybe somewhere along the way my wires had gotten tangled or cut.

My therapist would say it doesn’t help to think that way;

She’s right - why spend my time lamenting my metaphorical wires?

They’re not even real;

I’m a person with mental health issues, who experiences life in a way most other people don’t.

And I guess that has to be okay, because there isn’t an alternative.

I wouldn’t even accept it if there was.

Maybe that’s the trauma talking, too.

Therapy also helps. My therapist tells me I should work from home - says some people are better suited for jobs they have more control over, in environments they’re most comfortable in. I find it hard to believe everyone doesn’t thrive the most at home - quarantine has been a blessing aside from the whole global pandemic thing. Then I see people I know making posts about how much they miss work, how they just want things back to normal so they aren’t stuck at home all the time, and it clicks for me that people really are wired differently.