I have a confession to make. When I set out to write a series of essays that dealt with trauma, pain, death, and everything else that’s bad in the world, I thought that the inspiration would come easily. I have my own traumatic story to tell, and I’m sure that anyone reading this does too. None of us are strangers to emotional pain. I imagine that most of us have experienced the pain of violence inflicted upon us, or the overwhelming guilt and shame that often accompanies sexual assault. When I set out to write a series of essays about traumatic experiences and the subsequent thoughts and behaviors that might follow, I didn’t think it was going to be this difficult to start. I am a rape victim, and I have experienced violence that I never knew could even exist, and for the past four years I erroneously felt that I had some kind of expertise in the subject, as if one could practice at suffering and get better at it. I knew that notion was ridiculous even as I still battle with it. The more I thought about writing this treatment, the more pretentious I felt.  How can I possibly tell someone else about what they may have felt? How can I offer advice and suggestions about dealing with trauma when I take anti-depressants and anxiety medications?  The drugs that have been prescribed to me have worked wonders, but not without side-effects that I live with day in and day out -–fatigue, lethargy, malaise; sometimes I wish I could just go back to having panic attacks than to take my meds.
In light of this, in light of the fact that I cannot possibly understand what anyone has gone through and that my own experiences with pain are just as different and unique as anyone elses. Soon after all of this silly guilt that I was feeling about writing a blog, my revelation struck me. It wasn’t expected, as most revelations aren’t. I wasn’t searching for an answer; it’s these times that the answers always seem to come. No, I was merely driving home after picking up my medication, sucking hard on a cigarette and listening to the ambience around me – the squeak of my windshield wipers, the woosh of passing cars, the birth-pangs of a thunderstorm off in the distance. It was a rather drab afternoon with a greyish white sky and some darker gray in the distance; it was a little chilly and rainy. I didn’t notice any of these things as negative though – they were just part of the place where I was at the moment. As my mind cleared, there it hit me. A flood of inspiration poured into my consciousness and for a short time I felt absolutely blissful, as if my car was floating aimlessly, peacefully down the road. Of course reality hit me and I had to come back down to earth. When my metaphorical feet hit the floor, I was deep in thought. If I was going to write a blog about trauma and violence, victimization and recovery, all I could do was marvel at the beauty of being alive and attempt to express that to anyone interested.
For so long have I felt to be the victim of a brutal event that happened to me half a decade ago. Those memories of being brutally assaulted stay with me today as if they happened last week; smells, sounds, and sights are always just around the corner in my head, waiting to spring forth and crash against my rationality as an angry mob throwing rocks and pushing ever closer.
For so long have I been a victim. Or so I thought. That moment of joy that I experienced put a thought into my head that grew into an entirely new concept of what it means to be the victim of violence. “When,” I thought to myself “do I quit being a victim and start being a survivor?” As if a self-help book had suddenly sprug forth into view, I merely caught the thoughts as they swirled around rather than consciously generating them. “Just by being alive, just by existing after going through someone so horrible, that’s what makes anyone a survivor.” Just by living and continuing on with life even when you feel like it’s no worth the effort; just by staying alive are we becoming victorious in our battles with depression, anxiety, post-trauma stress disorder, and any other number of vicious symptoms one gets when traumatized. By simply living, I have won the war. It was then the battles that had to be fought – addictions that had developed, painful memories that surfaced, understanding feelings like anger and shame; those battles had to be fought, but simply because I was alive was the war already won. It seemed to be some backwards kind of logic at first -–how can you win a war before the battles are won? – but then I knew that if I kept living, the opportunities to improve myself would always be there. By giving up and giving in, by skipping out and taking the route of complete self-destruction – that path ensured that I would have no opportunities to improve, grow, and become free of my suffering.
I then knew that all of this time I had been looking for answers as if the solution to all of my problems were like a set of keys misplaced. The answer had been in my hand the whole time; I just hadn’t thought to assume that I already had it. I could see a vision of myself working my way through life. I pictured myself as a sculpture. Everything that was good and beautiful about me was already in place, and as the layers of suffering and shame cut chisled down and cut off, my own image would become clearer and clearer to myself and everyone else.
There is nothing more I can write at this point. I’ve already repeated myself about a hundred times and I apologize to any readers who suffered through that. Thank you for reading; this is very personal stuff for me but it capitalizes on my passion for understanding through mutual communication, something I’ll touch on in a later post in this series.