Honoring
“Decide what kind of life you want, then say no to everything that isn't that." - The Most Popular Quote on Pinterest.
Every person must ask themselves an important question on their healing journey: "What would my life look like if I honored all that I have been through instead of pretending it never happened?"
In times of struggle, our bodies and minds protect us from feeling the weight of what happened to us.
Our coping mechanisms kick in, and we dissociate, laugh inappropriately, and, in extreme cases, if we are lucky, we simply survive.
We work to distance ourselves from the most challenging moments, whether in therapy to heal what happened or to move on with our lives as if nothing ever happened.
But even years later, when our surroundings have changed, and our lives appear safer, our bodies still hold onto the memory of our painful past.
And when we are sent signals that remind us of all we have endured, we must face whether or not we make choices each day that honor or dishonor our history.
I was nineteen the first time another person physically assaulted me. Even though I had grown up around violence, it had never directed itself at me.
I had broken up with my first-ever boyfriend weeks earlier. He was furious when he found out I went away for the weekend to celebrate my birthday with someone new. He stopped by my apartment under the guise that his autistic younger brother had gotten me a gift and asked me to meet him outside of my apartment to receive it.
I'll never forget thinking to myself as I strode to the door, "I shouldn't be wearing flip-flops; I should have sneakers on." I didn't know what would happen, but something inside knew enough to set off alarm bells.
There was no gift; my only "gift" was a punch across the face as his friend barely attempted to hold him back.
I knew instantly that if I hit him back, it would justify what he had done and that if I didn't retaliate, he would regret it for the rest of his life. He wasn't the genuine and kind-hearted guy I knew at that moment. Instead, he was the product of the pain others had caused him throughout his life.
As I struggled to get the door open and inside the safety of my apartment, all I kept repeating to myself was, "How can people actually hurt others in this way?".
Even though I had seen it with my own eyes enough times throughout my life.
I play on Saturdays in a local flag football league here in Austin. It is one of the three sports I play recreationally, and I absolutely love it. Sports, especially contact sports, have always allowed a part of myself that usually hides in the shadows to be expressed. It is the part of me that loves competition, a challenge, and when you have to dig deep to find something in yourself that you didn't think was there previously.
This past weekend, early in the game, I caught a pass and immediately had someone twice my size run through the side of my face. I knew immediately upon contact that it would leave a black eye. I spent the rest of the game thankful I somehow avoided a concussion. Overall, I chalked it up to an unfortunate accident I was lucky to have walked away from relatively unscathed.
It wasn't until I got home that my emotions swelled, and the voices inside me started to speak up. My mind knew I had experienced contact from playing a sport, but my body couldn't tell the difference from the last time my right eye went black. Physically and emotionally, my system was brought back to standing outside of my apartment and being struck by someone I loved.
I sat for hours alone in my apartment, holding back tears as the parts inside of me shared the pain they had been holding since that day at nineteen. No matter how many years have passed or how much therapy I have done, once the walls came down, the wound still felt fresh, and the message from my system was clear:
"Why would you put yourself in situations where this could happen when we have already been through so much?"
There was a period in my life where I identified with my trauma, almost as a crutch. Being diagnosed with CPTSD and getting to say that I was traumatized allowed me to account for all of the ways I couldn't show up in the world like everyone else.
The day I finally got a brain scan to show how differently wired I am was one of the most freeing of my life. It was the first time in my life that I realized I wasn't a broken person but instead someone whose past left marks that still needed healing.
Over the past six years, I have worked in therapy to heal the remnants of my trauma in every way possible.
From talk therapy to CBT (Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy), EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), and Neurofeedback, the results have been life-changing. They have given me a future instead of living my life stuck in the past.
But no amount of distance or healing can change what happened in the past. This week, I learned that just because it isn't my present doesn't mean that I didn't experience it or that my system still doesn't hold onto the pain of the past.
I no longer identify with my trauma in the ways that I used to, and in some ways, that has made it even harder to honor its existence.
I lost my mother suddenly in March; the fact that I have moved through the last six months without her in a relatively positive manner doesn't mean that I am not still grieving. Or that some parts inside me aren't constantly wondering how a world exists without my parents in it.
Yet, as with all of the other painful experiences that I have endured, they are quickly forgotten at the first moment of self-judgment and shame.
I still compare myself to others and judge my output based on what others can do instead of what feels possible for me at the moment.
So, what would my life look like if I honored all I have been through?
Well, for one, I plan to stop playing contact sports in the next few months. I always expected there would be an age where my body told me that I needed to stop. Still, I expected it to be due to my body no longer being able to do what it used to athletically. Instead, it will be a choice made out of the risk no longer being worth it. There are other places to let my competitive parts come out without forcing other parts within me to re-experience the pain from the past.
And this is just the beginning of the changes I plan to make.
I used to think of my trauma as something that took my choices from me. Now, I want to make choices because I have been traumatized. And I know that each choice does not require me to explain its reasoning to anyone other than myself.
Too often, we get ourselves stuck in patterns built from the pain of our past. We grow up in unsettled households and are attracted to chaotic work environments. We suffer mistreatment in personal relationships and then subconsciously seek to recreate that dynamic in future romantic ones.
Our pasts determine the patterns of our present. We cannot simply look toward the future and make different choices because, on some level, we will never be able to outrun what we have endured. Our patterns can only break by acknowledging our past and not running from it.
People with an addiction traditionally do not just quit their addictions cold turkey because they want a better future. Instead, it is the product of all that they have experienced combined with that vision that provides them the strength to break their addiction.
So here is my proposal for an updated version of Pinterest's most famous quote:
"Decide what kind of life you want, and then say no to everything that isn't that. Acknowledge what kind of past you have endured, and only say yes to things that honor it."
This is my wish for myself and everyone I love.
With Love,
Clayton