I’m wondering if anything has really changed or healed since I started this memoir a year ago….whether the little girl in me is unfrozen from time and released from the anguish she’s been trapped in for decades. I pondered last year when I started the blog: ‘I wonder where I’ll be a year from now”, “‘will I be any more healed?” And here I am. It’s not a straight line from A to B line but a big, fat, messy pencil scribble on a page – that’s what healing feels like.
I don’t really know how far I’ve come – how do you measure inner healing? A bruise transforms from deep purply-green-ish to yellow-ish to fading; a flesh wound you can see healing over – from squidgy and bloody to a crusty scab whilst the skin forms underneath and then one day, it magically pops off and you didn’t even realise it had gone. Swellings decrease and diminsh in time tranforming from lumpy deformities back to your natural state.
But what about internal wounds, invisible emotional scars, wounds that you can’t see? How do you know when trauma stops screaming and bleeding? How do you measure the healing process? Unfortunately as I sit here and ponder, I haven’t got the answer, not yet anyway.
At this particular moment in time, however, I feel quite serene and much more resilient. Not the fake resilient but more ‘with it’, like I’ve knitted myself together, and it’s the most ‘together’ that I have felt in months. Of course I had that shit legal situation to deal with, which ended five weeks ago and dealing with the frayed ends of that kept me on my nerves for the weeks following. Once I let go of that concrete-like tension, I crumbled into a heap. And after a few weeks of depression that followed, which needed to be felt, motivation and inspiration grew like green shoots from within the rubble to greet me again, and creativity that was crumpled has unravelled itself and floated to the surface like a bright paper lantern, tugging at me to be expressed. Right now, I have a new found energy which has a strength and boundless vibrancy about it. I can’t explain it. I do hope it lasts.
The only thing that has changed that I can put my finger on is that I’ve started chanting, every day, for the past two weeks. Not for long, just 4 minutes, but it’s been consistent for two weeks. So I’m wondering whether this Buddhist chanting has made a difference to my sudden serenity and energy: 4 minutes of nam myoho renge kyo every day for 2 weeks. They do call it the miracle mantra don’t they? Perhaps it is doing something. It worked for Tina Turner didn’t it? I’m thinking this change of energy might also be to do with the fact that I’ve actually written about the root of my pain recently which has allowed me to start processing that pain, finally.
Until now, the validation of that period of my childhood has never been fully acknowledged as one the most painful times in my life, that shaped the wrong choices and decisions, carved the wrong path and ultimately ruined the formative early part of my adulthood. And I’m not saying this in any kind of victimhood way. You have to tell it like it is that it DID fuck up my late teens and early 20’s by sucking me into a vortex of rageful bewilderment and discombobulation, the fragments of me whizzing around in a typhoon that never released me. I was lost in the wilderness of my pain, my grief, my rage, laced with shards of bitterness and weighed down by toxic shame of having no family, part of no community, abandoned and isolated in a shits-ville of an area, betrayed by those who supposedly loved me, deeply insecure and maladjusted. That’s where I started my young adult life, living on my nerves, although I was oblivious to the fact that I was a young adult child. I was so fragmented and drowing in the vortex that I just grappled at anything that came my way, whether low level jobs or low level men, undermining my worth and the gifts that lay dormant within me. All I really wanted and needed was someone to hold my hand and guide me and say “this is the way….”.
I was desperate. Desperate for love and connection. Desperate to have worth and feel worthy. Desperate for money and success. Desperate for support and guidance. I never got that though. But the desperation repelled anything good away. That’s how life works. The angst-ridden furnace of rage within had incinerated my truth to ashes…..
I was an empty, lonely confused girl, crying out for connection; crying out for someone to take me under their wing and show me the way. I started to chase love and money but looked under the wrong rocks and wound up down the wrong roads finding myself in between rocks and hard places where I stayed for far too long. I wish I could have lived that decade all over again, from 18-30. I wish I had listened to my wisdom back then. If only…small words, big pain. Pain is not a good guide in life especially for a 20-something who had no other guides apart from her mother, a shattered heart and seriously dysregulated, fucked-up nervous system (from living in fear for over a decade).
Perhaps it’s a combination of writing about that past and chanting that’s brought me to a feeling of calmness that is, quite honestly, alien to me. Or perhaps I’m finally accepting what happened.
Unfortunately the anger does rumble up usually when some bastard on the road annoys me. It happened yesterday with passengers as well. Highly embarrassing when I shrieked out loud at the top of my voice at the back seat driver, or should I say, my mum sat in the passenger seat who got alarmed (because she couldn’t see what I could see). You know one of those moments when a passenger shrieks out, (because they can’t see what you can see and you know that you’re in control and there’s no danger) but their sudden vocalised alarm makes you jump out of your seat and that’s when a real accident can occur!. It was one of those moments and I screamed out loud telling her to shut up as I slammed my breaks on. But then it spiralled with me honking my horn getting even more explosive with a bout of obscene tourettes at a complete numbskull of a not-roadworthy-driver who should be banned for life pulling over on a dual carriageway (where there is nowehere to stop). And I descended into a tirade of abuse, f-bombs a plenty (I don’t know what the other passengers made of my tantrum-like eruption which left me apologetic and embarrassed).
But the anger has changed shape. It’s not coming from the same rage. I can feel it. It’s like the anger has a sponge of calm over it and it has to poke itself through because that is my modus operandi that I’m so used to. The anger is habitual. But I can safely say that it’s not the same anger. It’s coming from a different place. The anger feels different: it has a different body and shape and tone. There’s a push-me-pull-you feeling with the anger.
I’m not going to get all blasé and allow this serenity to catch me off guard thinking that I’m suddenly healed (because I know I haven’t, not when I found myself pouting like a 9 year old girl at fitness class earlier in the week when I couldn’t get the hang of a few body weight moves). But it’s okay. I’m allowing these child parts to be seen and recognised and not villified for being who they are. They are a part of me and one day will melt into me, hopefully.
Coming back to “how much have I healed in a year?” I don’t feel as raw about certain things right now that I did last year, so I guess that’s progress 🙂 And although I can’t measure it, I have learned a huge amount through IFS therapy in learning to how to regulate myself, how to validate and comfort the wounded child parts that live within me. I’ve been having therapy since around early December 2024. So that’s two regular things I’ve actually committed to for myself – writing this memoir and having regular IFS counselling. Which is unusual because I don’t do things for myself when I’ve needed to having been very fickle and flighty, with incomplete projects scattered around me, perhaps a reflection of my scattered mind. To think that I can often be really ADHD with starting and not finishing things (I’ve had so many unfinished projects over the years and often I don’t let the grass grown under my feet, hastily starting projects without thinking them through). So it is huge progress that I’ve made this commitment to myself and stuck to something over a sustained period, apart from a 3 month or so hiatus last August where I didn’t post.
Just another thing about commitment: I’ve never committed to something like this before and it’s a strange feeling to have chunk of my life, a very significant chunk of my life out here on the world wide web. A 12 month stretch of the story of my life, my heart on my sleeve and my soul laid bare for all to see. One 49th of my life. What is that as a percentage? It wasn’t pre-meditated to start writing this; I needed to write, just for me and ‘out there’, whomever ‘out there’ is; whether or not anyone read it or not was inconsequential, although I have, only within with last month, actually shared one or two posts with people I know. It was literally one of those moments last June where I woke up one morning and decided that it would be a good idea to document this journey of healing my childhood trauma so I can look back one day and see how far I’ve come. I wanted to write in an unhibited way, just for me, something that comes to me so naturally. These aren’t words from a self-help book or a Youtube video but my real-life journey unfolding in real time. What I really wanted to capture is what it actually took in the weeks and months and maybe years that followed when I spiralled into the dark depths of depression last February 2024, swallowed by the vortex of an abandonment wound so strong and gaping open that it sucked me into another descent.
It’s deeply cathartic for me documenting my story like this in real time as it happens. Of course I have the sanctuary of anonimity which helps. This is the story of my life. How my trauma affected me. I have my story. You have yours too. And no two stories are alike. No two stories can be compared either. How we heal through childhood trauma can never be pitted against another’s. It’s not what happened but how it affected you, what it did to you, how you internalised it. Your DNA is unique and that makes all the difference on how you heal. Your environment, your surroundings, your inner make-up, and maybe even ancestral trauma determines what parts of your DNA are triggered by the trauma and what parts remain asleep. That is only my opinion by the way! Which probably explains why some people heal quicker, some slower. It depends on the depth of the emotional wound and your inner landscape. It depends how big and strong your shadows are, making it harder to heal and holding you back. It depends how deeply the trauma is rooted and much it shattered your heart and splintered your soul. I think that’s what narcissism really is: when the soul or the Self gets consumed by the shadow aspect so much that it remains suppressed and repressed. That and arrested development. Because narcissism is borne out of childhood trauma isn’t it?
If baring my soul to you (and the world) has moved or touched a part of you in any way, then your support would be very welcome. To help me on this healing journey, perhaps you’d like to buy me a coffee (although mines a tea) via the link below:
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