Yesterday I woke up feeling enormously sad. It felt reminiscent of darker days of my life some twenty years ago when depression was all I knew. As quickly as the tsunami of overwhelming sadness surfaced, I wondered what was happening. As I had learned to do many years earlier, I questioned my pain, trying to initiate a conversation with it, like a shy child at a new school.
What is going on Beck? Where has this sadness come from? Why do I feeling this agonising sadness and where the heck did it come from? After interrogating myself, it was my last question that answered everything. What has changed in the last 24 hours that has caused these emotions to surface?
Boom!
The night before, my mum messaged that she’d had her first epileptic seizure in 29 years.
Initially, I was glad to know she was alright but more alarming to myself was the immediate effect it had on me.
In that moment, my mind flew straight back to one of my more traumatic memories. The memory flashed upon my mind like a new motion picture does on a huge cinema screen. Bright colours, the torturous sounds, the screams the yelling, the loud banging noises. Everything in that one memory magnified. Though it flashed across my mind, the emotions, the trauma of witnessing my mother being held under cold water while having a seizure stayed with me all day. I huddled myself in from the rest of the world, for fear I’d burst into tears at any given moment. Even thinking about it now as I write still evokes a lump in my throat as I strive to contain the painful memory I have without bursting into tears
And yet the other side of me feels very much like the ‘imposter’, questioning all the work of trauma recovery in the last twenty years. The inner critic within wondering what happened to the strong resilient 40 something-year-old who had worked tirelessly to overcome her trauma and yet this one incident, completely out of the blue has shattered every part of my being and I’m struggling to understand why this is hurting so much.
There’s so many sides to this; the rational 40 something part of me, that knows an immediate strategy to work through this pain engulfing me, the inner child remembering the trauma, the memory and wanting to spill out the grief and agony she feels as she replays the scene in her mind over and over and the other side that wants to let the flood gates open and pour out everything, allowing the pain and the tears to flow endlessly without judgment, knowing it’s completely okay to feel this pain and resolve within. Knowing too that pain comes up for a reason and maybe this is a blessing I just can’t see yet. Everything I feel is conflicting with each part of me fighting to dominate.
In my quieter moments, I am aware that this is trauma. The complexity of just how intrusive, random and downright confronting it can be. Here is a layer, that in twenty years I’d never seen. I’d never known had existed until 7pm Wednesday night and it’s thrown me back to where I thought I’d never ever be again. Trauma that I thought I’d worked through. I find myself questioning the validity of my words, my story, my recovery as I struggle to contain how emotional and broken I feel right now. There’s a part of me that feels completely disheartened with all the progress I’ve made over the years, only to wonder, what I think all trauma survivors wonder: Will I ever be okay? Will I ever be free from every single moment, every memory? Will something always haunt me, always trigger me? If this one incident can bring me down, then what else have I missed? What other layers lurk beneath, ready to invade and disrupt me? It’s scary.
Each part of me has a different and equally important way of dealing with this unexpected layer of trauma. I will allow the tears to flow for as long as need be. I will seek the answers for healing and resolve and I will come through this just as strong as the last time.
It’s just a wound that never healed. Now it’s time to give what it needs to heal.