Emotions in Color II
Recently, I had a friend ask me to stop doing something. It wasn't a big deal. He was both totally nice and totally reasonable about it. What wasn't at all reasonable was my response.
Oh, not externally. Externally I knocked it the fuck off, and went on with things. Internally, though, I felt... awful. Just really awful. Scared and tense and a little bit sick. Like catastrophe was about to strike. Like I needed to crawl in a cave and wait for things to get better.
Later he explained--still nice, still reasonable--that it tickled. That was all. He'd asked me to stop because it tickled. And I was left to wonder... why the hell had I reacted like that?
Confusion
re-posted from wordpress
One of the worst things about emotional trauma is that it can be hidden even from the person who is experiencing it. Physical trauma is more direct. It's hard not to notice a gunshot wound, or the way your feet look and feel when you're a ballet dancer. Emotional trauma can be hard to spot when it's happening, and even once you realize it's there it can be hard to heal. There's no bleeding to staunch, or bones to set. It's just there, and sometimes the only way you discover it is when you suddenly find yourself feeling sick and broken inside, with no idea why.
Lemme tell you, that shit sucks.
If you're lucky--and I say lucky because skill truly has nothing to do with it--then the best you can hope for is that when one of those ingrained, uncontrolled reactions comes along, you have a sliver of sanity that points out that the pain you're feeling is totally disproportional to the incident. Then you get to pick your way back along your mental trail, trying to pull apart your own snarled emotions, digging until you find the kernel of hurt that set you off in the first place. I wouldn't say it's fun, but it's better than the alternative. You have to find the kernel. It's the only way you can root the damn thing out.
Girl on Fire
Of course, that little bundle of misery isn't sitting, nice and neat, waiting to be removed cleanly. It's part of the confusing maze of memories and reactions that make up who each of us are. It's tied into you by threads of emotion and knowledge, all of which are connected to your trauma in some way, and the longer that trauma went on the more threads there are. There may be hundreds, or millions.
One for each time you got hurt.
One for each minute you were afraid.
One for each justification you made.
They really add up.
And in order to excise that bundle of pain--the one that is tied so deeply into you--you have to break those threads. It seems so simple, but they aren't just made of pain and fear, they're made of other things, too. Love, maybe, or a sense of comfort. Certainly a sense of who you are. Our traumas are as much a part of us as our joys, and if we let them go--if we truly cut them out, and refuse to let them shape us anymore--then in some ways we are destroying part of ourselves. At the very least, we are irrevocably changing things.
And when we finally free that dense knot of pain--when we cut all the threads and let it go, to dissolve into the ether--then we are left with a hole in our lives. When we have destroyed part of what made us who we are, then the question becomes, what do we want to fill ourselves with?
Who do we want to be?
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