For as long as I can remember, I was proud of who I was.
I was the reliable one. The organised one. The helper. The woman whose life was a full calendar and an endless to-do list. It felt good to make everyone else’s life easier. It made me feel valued.
I thought all those traits were just me. My personality. My core.
It took me until now to realise that maybe this wasn’t my personality at all. Maybe I was looking at my armour.
I never thought I had trauma.
Not really. I knew what trauma looked like, and it didn’t look like me.
Sure, I had come from a broken family, alcohol abuse had featured, and then my father had died in a car accident. But I’d come through just fine. And I became very good at telling myself I was fine. Even when things bubbled under the surface.
Perhaps that was part of the problem. I had misunderstood what trauma actually was.
All my life my body had been trying to tell me there was something I needed to heal. For decades, I simply wasn’t able to hear it. Until the day I did. In that moment, recovering memories became my primary focus. I believed that if I could just remember all of what had happened, everything…
I first tried to attend a yoga class in high school. Usually I was not interested in any PE activities, but I was strangely excited to try yoga. I was pulled out of the class before I ever got to try. My mother came to school and removed me from the class. She believed yoga…
*Self-portrait by KS, reworked digitally I don’t know exactly what I believe about the spiritual world. I lean towards fairly practical explanations for most things. I believe we share energy with each other while we’re alive, but when it comes to what happens after death, my views probably sit closer to atheism. And yet, I…
I spent most of my life unable to access my emotions. I remember a friend looking at me quizzically when I shared that my dog had died. I told her I was heartbroken, but I had no urge to cry.
Feelings. Although I only recently became aware of this… I was never really in touch with mine. For decades, I moved though life believing certain struggles were simply character flaws I needed to fix.
I always knew “things” were not quite right for me. I couldn’t put my finger on it. To the outside world, I had it together. I think most people would describe me as competent. But my internal world was quietly in turmoil.
I am in the middle of rediscovering myself after experiencing an episode of depression. It took a year for this diagnosis. Before that I called it a traumatic break. I didn’t know how to name it any other way.
