If you prefer to listen, you can hear me read this piece nice and unedited into my iPhone by clicking the audio above. :)
Months. It’s been months since my body has screamed in agony.
That all went out the window last night after a day filled with anxiety. As I listened to my audiobook, I strapped my Apple watch on to make sure I wasn’t having a heart attack. I attempted to remind myself that there was no point in worrying about dying, because if I was actually dying the worry would be a moot point.
As 8:00 rolled around, the anxiety had diminished but was replaced by excruciating tension. Last year, I wrote about what my trauma feels like when it shows up in my body, and guess what, it appeared exactly the same way. Admittedly, there was part of me that thought I was over it physically hurting this badly. I’ve been grieving and honoring my feelings, so what the actual fuck.
After following the prescription I know works–meditation, breathing, and writing, I gained enough space from the pain to take a stab at what triggered me.
There’s been days–WHOLE days recently where I felt light and whole. Familiar twinges of ease and confidence from the before times when I was living confidently in my cozy rental, discovering my spirituality, beginning to integrate who I was and what I wanted into my choices. A feeling of possibility. A feeling of my baseline self. Maggie before the trauma.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. I always knew the pain would become less sharp, less persistent. I could have easily made the decision to freeze my life in that moment of time, to let the loss become my identity. If I did, no one would fault me, but I didn’t. I decided to assume the role of the creator, not the victim. To live.
The problem is that I am still in search of a way to recognize, honor and integrate the hell I went through.
It was all so ugly, and yet I find myself wishing there was a video tape I could watch. Wishing someone was with me, alongside me to bear witness. Perhaps it's exacerbated by having a handful of new people in my life. I want them to know that the fun-loving Maggie they know has also been through hell. That I walk around with wisdom and scars I don’t want to go to waste. There are stories, horrible, painful stories from those 8 months that I don’t want to tuck neatly inside a book, place on a shelf and never open again, but there’s part of me that feels like that’s what I’m doing. I closed the book and carried on.
And so my body screams, but a little less loudly now that I wrote this.
To all the caretakers out there—I see you.
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Thank you for sharing. I’m so glad you were able to manage the pain. 🙏🏽 it sounds like you’ve integrated a lot ❤️🩹 maybe it’s just not linear.
Maggie, This is a very powerful piece. I do not think you have to worry about putting your experience in a book on a shelf. You are already internalizing it. I believe it will lead to an increase in compassion. D