Little Traumas

We are not born judgmental, that is something we learn. We are not born angry, sad, happy, relaxed. The question is; how much of that comes from the outside, and how much are we born with?

Trauma is a tricky, misleading word. People automatically think of terrible experiences that cause PTSD or drive people to craziness. In a way, all traumas do that, but most traumas are camouflaged, some are disguised as lessons.

From the outside, people have profiles. We are classified humans with certain qualities and skills, some appear to have more strengths than weaknesses, others stand out more, and some could get by as shadows. From the outside we have very little control over who we want to be seen as. Since day one, we are judged by everyone else, meanwhile we see ourselves through our own eyes as us. How are we expected to know who we are, if who we are is a sum of our life? A life full of influences, existing structures and set expectations? How can I learn anything without filtering it through my own clouded judgement?

From the inside, we grow up with different styles of parents who carry their own baggage from life, some grow up without parents whatsoever. It’s a roll of the dice when it comes to where we end up sleeping at night. It’s also a roll of the dice when it comes to how we jump through hoops we didn’t know were coming all throughout our life.

So where do we begin with trauma?

As everyone else, I can only speak from my personal experience growing up and how I’ve interpreted how people saw me compared to how I saw myself. And before I get into it, I want to make it known that it has been a long journey for me to dig out these issues. It took a lot of thinking and analyzing myself to see where I am, where I was and how I got myself here. Traumas are usually hidden so deep inside ourselves that it takes a lot of emotional strength and vulnerability to dig them out and give them the much needed attention that they lack.

My first trauma is loneliness. I was never truly alone, however; I lived with my mom, dad, sister and brother. Our extended family lived close by and we always found ways to get together. At school I had friends, my teachers thought I was “popular”. So, why did I find myself alone? Well, I shared my mom with two older siblings, siblings who had their own traumas which came first. First come first serve. So they had my mom’s attention. My older siblings were tied to the hip the second my brother came along. By the time I was born, they already had a relationship, no room for a third. I define the term “third-wheeling”. Not every third child feels this way, not every youngest sibling has this experience, but loneliness has followed me, has taken over me, and has somewhat defined me.

From a young age I decided that I needed no one else to be with, I decided that I was enough. I played alone at the playground when I waited for my mom to pick me up from school, I played alone in my room when everyone was out and I had all of my sister’s toys to myself, and I slowly isolated myself from a codependent lifestyle. In my mind, everyone was alone. Friends, to me, were what made life more fun, like ice cream. I never thought of my friends as an essential resource, I thought they were more like accessories. I was young, creative, imaginative and needed only my own attention, or so I thought.

As we grow up, our parents are responsible for preparing us for the world, so to get the best preparation one must have a clean slate ready to take everything in. Being the youngest, I learned from my siblings. I watched them try and fail, win and lose, and I made sure to watch them closely so I wouldn’t make the same mistakes. This education rewarded me with independence and determination. This education also misled me to believe that I need no one, I can get by on my own and that silence goes a long way. Not expressing my feelings gave me the freedom to dream big and shut it down, without anyone’s judgement. Isolation from my family was my escape to be myself. I presented a clean slate at the expense of holding all the lessons on my shoulders, away from the outsider’s eyes.

But what happens when you think that all you need is yourself? What happens when you fail at something in silence, or when your dreams are secretly crushed? Who do you turn to when no one knows you—when you never let anyone get to know you? I built so many walls to keep people out of my business, away from my feelings, that eventually I became that wall. I turned into the person I created and had no choice but accept it. Me, myself, and I. No room for codependence, no time to worry about feelings or insecurities, just keep those locked in. No need to talk about it, no time for unnecessary attention. Loneliness is a trauma I live with, I no longer blame my failed relationships on outside forces. I now recognize that I am in the process of breaking walls and healing myself. Re-teaching myself a few lessons that as a loner child I had failed at—I didn’t even think these lessons were necessary.

Trauma II

As I got older, this mentality evolved. As I got older, many realities started to hit. The hardest one was the idea of marriage, it is still a mystery to me how people grow up thinking about this topic. For me it was trauma number two.

I grew up in a picture-perfect family. Mom and dad are beautiful, we have a big house and two cars and a dog, private school for the kids along with after school sport activities. Grandparents who we visit every weekend and delicious home-cooked food for dinner every night. Dad had an office job and mom was a teacher in my school. How could any of it be traumatizing?

Well, after nine years living the lifestyle I just described, my family moved to a different country (obviously, this created new traumas, don’t worry I’ll get to those later on). At nine years old, you’re still a kid. An overconfident, know-it-all kind of age. And when you take a nine year old to a different country—stripping them off everything they know—you better expect some traumas. This is the age of almost puberty, when things begin to make sense, and begin to make absolutely no sense.

Marriage was trauma number two. My beautiful parents, I have tried to dissect their brains to try and figure out what their motives were to be married, say married, and consider divorce. This topic is hard to think about because their relationship directly affected me in ways I didn’t realize until many years later. My parents fell in love with each other, got along so well that they took a chance and married. When you share the same dreams, same motivation, same values, and a similar background, then it’s no question whether it’ll work. They did what everyone does, at the time when everyone does it, and, like all marriages, it was not what they expected.

I see marriage as a jail cell. You are stuck, your life is no longer yours, and your dreams are no longer free for you to have. Now you’re committed to someone else’s dreams, someone else’s lifestyle and someone else’s traumas. My idea of marriage is so dark it scares me. I’m not against it, I have seen other married couples who live what seems to be a really great life. However, through my eyes marriage was translated as a prison.

I watched as my parents changed their lives for each other, challenged their beliefs for each other and forgot to set boundaries for themselves. I grew up my whole life thinking that marriage was something one had to escape—avoid all together. So why try? And it’s not like I thought every married couple went through this, but I lived with this scene for 18 years. I have too many years of my interpretation of marriage that I’m still trying to translate.

No family is perfect, no matter how whole they may seem from the outside. I lived with an audience thinking my life was perfect, while going home to plan my escape. I failed at every single attempted relationship. I struggled with being a teenager surrounded by hormones, I struggled to convince myself that dating would bring me happiness. I lived in a town where marriage was the goal, the ultimate beginning of life. I never bought into it, and I lived very confused. To this day, I have no idea what a healthy marriage should/could/might be like. The example I grew up with was little to no help. It’s hard to live in a world where your happiness does not seem to align with the happiness you should look for.

I’ve expressed this to my parents. I have shared with them my distorted outlook on marriage and how I want nothing to do with it. They know that my mentality is based on the example they set, and I wish I never told them. I wish I could’ve figured it out on my own without revealing to them how much confusion they generated in me.

It’s not their fault; we live at home with parents who probably haven’t worked though their own traumas. All they know is that they are parents, they have kids, they need money, and they need to be responsible. I’m lucky to have the parents I have, I am so privileged that expressing this trauma might not make sense to many people who grew up with less. But the issues I have with marriage are real, this trauma of mine is real and it affects me still.

My parents taught me many things, but the biggest lessons were the ones they didn’t know they were teaching me. They taught me that to want kids does not necessarily mean that you know how to have kids, how to talk to kids or how to raise them. No human is born ready to teach another human how to be—we are all constantly trying to figure it out. But, when we’re growing up, our parents hold all the answers, they know better and they are in charge. So how does a kid translate the actions of a dad who does not know how to express love? A mom who does not know how to set boundaries? Well, they result is kid who struggles to communicate with her father, and has no knowledge of how to set boundaries. When does this kid understand that her parents need help too?

Well, the kid never truly knows, but her adult self begins to figure it out with trauma number three; realizing that your parents are only human.

Trauma III

Our parents are only human, trying to survive this human life, while still creating their own human lives. As a kid, I saw parents as just that—adults who take care of children and drink bitter water and dress with no fun colors, and tell kids what is right and what is wrong. Once I started to see my parents as ordinary people, I realized how weak humans truly are. We are chained with guilt, regret, expectations, judgement and dreams. Our parents became parents, they were not born this way and most of the time they improvised.

My parents made mistakes, failed me sometimes, and also gave me everything. Something that took me a long time to find out was how much they gave up, how much they surrendered to put their kids first. Kids aren’t supposed to think of these things, which made this trauma even more disturbing. I was an adult when I counted all the opportunities my parents turned down, all the dreams they put on hold, and all the time they redirected towards me, my brother and my sister. They dedicated their lives to us, but we forget that they had dreams before us. Dreams they put on hold, dreams that turned into fantasies, dreams that are now long gone in their eyes. And the person they live with today is a person who has lived many lives; An infant life, a young adult life, a married life, a parenting life and a life with no more kids in the house. They’re only human.

I didn’t think of my parents as ordinary humans when I told them all the traumas they manifested on me. My selfish-self wanted to come out and tell them directly everything that they did wrong, everything they did alright, and what I thought they should do to fix their lives. I decided that I knew better. I decided that my judgement of how they handled parenthood was honest, true and they needed to hear it. I was egocentric enough to believe that my 20 years of being alive were full of wisdom beyond my parents’ years. So I did, told them everything, and I saw how my words, one by one, hurt them. I was destroying them with my opinions. I punctured them with my words. My traumas did all the talking.

In a way it was all true. Everything I said; how I felt, how they hurt me, and how it was okay because I found a way to accept my imperfect life. I blamed them for everything; for my loneliness, for my dark perception of marriage, for my failed relationships, for believing that life was so ordinary that nothing really matters and the best way to save ourselves was to be selfish. My traumas spoke for me. It was like the venom inside of me spilled out through my mouth.

Four years later, and I see how this affected them. How this revelation moved them, and I felt their guilt. I shamed them so much it breaks my heart. But, all this came from the mouth of a traumatized girl. A girl who had walls so thick that not one person could ever see past, not even herself. But she, also, is only human.

I didn’t realize how much my words affected my parents until recently. Part of me is happy because I actually said something. After years of never expressing any feelings, from hiding my life from them, and from judging them, they finally heard me. They finally listened to the third child—the third one who only absorbed leftovers of their attention, the youngest one who was completely independent, the one with no issues, no complications, the easy one they had never to worry about. They finally heard my voice heavy with trauma, I had their attention, and I began to deconstruct one of my many walls.

Being alone is challenging, even for me. Some days I think of my family and how great it was to belong to a pack. Other days, I think of all the times I wished I could run away and find people who would understand me better than my family. But something I realized over time was that when your head is full of confusion, you will attract people with the same confusion, and before you know it you’re surrounded by confused people who think they understand you and you think you understand them—but the only thing you have in common is that you’re confused. It’s a long road of trial and error after that. Meet someone new, become friends, reveal each other’s traumas, try to fix them, life happens, you grow apart, and repeat. We are all just looking for people who are as confused as us, and somehow we expect them to know how to get us out of our darkness, while they expect us to save them from their own darkness.

How much can we take? How much of ourselves are we willing to give everyone else, how far away will we run from ourselves chasing distractions and alternative lives? When will we finally wake up and see that this life we got is the one we have to nurture and heal?

I’ve spent years trying to recreate myself. I know that I am one thing, but people see the another. I know that I can’t change who I am, where I’ve been, where I come from. I do know that what I show to the world can be filtered, what the world sees does not have to include my insecurities and imperfections. I thought, “well let’s see what works”.

After moving from place to place, and after trying different shoes on with different outfits, I ended up where I am today. Years of pretending like I could change, years of pretending like in every new place I could be different, I found out that there is only a small percentage of myself that can truly change, and that’s my ego. I am my traumas, whether I like it or not.

Trying to hide myself from me is like trying to taste food with someone else’s taste buds—impossible. It’s not about what I’ve done in my life, it’s not about how exciting it has been, it’s about accepting that all the things I accomplished, I accomplished along with my traumas. All my best memories are mine, all my worst memories are mine, and I will never jump into a different body and abandon myself. It’s not fair to set such high expectations—to think that just because I’ve seen how people fail and how people succeed, that now I know all the answers. It’s impossible to know what could be, or what could’ve been. What I lived and how I dealt with it is the ultimate beginning of a new life.

I didn’t choose to be born last, I didn’t choose my parents nor my siblings. I had no say on many things, but these can’t be excuses. They are reason why I am the way I am, they are explanations towards understanding where I come from, but by no means do they draw a complete picture of who I am. Who I am is a person with a past, someone who accepted that her life wasn’t perfect, and that it didn’t have to be. That perfection is not even secondary, it’s not even on the list of priorities.

Families are complicated. As someone’s child, we are not responsible for fixing whatever may not be perfect about our family. What others see on the outside doesn’t matter, and how we see it from the inside deserves more attention. Traumas don’t have to be an extreme experience that is apparent to anyone. Traumas can be silent, sneaky and we may not realize that they’re there until we identify the key patterns. When we feel like we’re going in circles, making the same mistakes, over and over, again, that’s where they’re hiding. Traumas are experiences we never overcame, never “fixed”, triggers that go off at the most unexpected moments. Once we are able to identify the pattern, we can start to identify where we need to dig. After enough digging we find a fountain of emotions we forgot were there, and the healing begins.

This is all very new to me. I used to spend most of my energy shoving down emotions and puling the right strings like a puppet, in order to portray a certain character. I was a people pleaser, putting anyone before myself, and I was so tired. I was so emotionally exhausted that I dropped everything and surrendered to my own emotions, and I finally gave myself the attention I used to crave from everyone else. It wasn’t easy to realize this, but everything I need or want has to come from me—I have to be enough for myself. Now I feel free, the clean slate is there, every new day is a clean slate because I choose to life this way. There is way too much going on inside every person, we can not make ourselves responsible for everyone else’s happiness, our happiness has to be the priority.

There is no more time for hiding our insecurities, no more time for pretending. Do the work, explore the universe inside yourself and let it out, release that trauma.