Annee
and Jini
and Lynnette
and Jane
each of you raised me
in your own way
and i still ache for you
every
single
day
Annee
and Jini
and Lynnette
and Jane
each of you raised me
in your own way
and i still ache for you
every
single
day
as fall approaches
but isn’t quite here
not yet
not yet
the memories of late summers past
invades my mind
sans consent
[do flashbacks ever ask?]
and no matter how stable
and lovely
and mine
my life is today
i keep seeing
loss
upon loss
upon lost trust
upon that feeling of any control in life
fleeting though it may have been
stolen in an instant
and this current administration
certainly doesn’t help this
weird ptsd i’ve found myself in
everything seems to be
culminating in something
and i continue to avoid all emotions and memories
until absolutely
necessary
everything in my life
seems to be
on delayed reaction time —
processing traumatic events/
pain responses to any injury/
excitement and anxiety responses/
processing temperature changes in my body/
even my damn tarot cards seem
a little too far away from the reading
to the event they foretold
to be anything less than
delayed
[but, i suppose, that’s just how my body/soul
plays this little life game]
it became so much easier
to talk about my drive
to take care of others
when i thought of it as
a trauma response
from childhood.
when approached as something
stemming from the
‘goodness of my own heart’
something akin to being
‘just a good person’
or the source being
‘simply my selfless, altruistic self’
then the ache i felt when i wanted others
to drop everything
and care for me
(the way i did them)
stopped being so disturbingly
selfish/bad person/greedy-hearted
and instead became a warning sign
that i still needed to heal my inner child,
and the care i gave others
wasn’t, in fact, a choice or a personality trait
but was a compulsion driven from a place
of needing what i gave.
the trauma was not good;
no amount of “things happen for a reason” will change that,
it was unfair, unfathomable, wildly wrong.
but how i choose to deal with the trauma,
how i have survived thus far,
and how i choose to keep on going,
that is where the beauty lies.
and i can adjust my own coping mechanisms;
make them healthier, make them stronger,
for nothing is truly “good” or “bad”
“positive” or “negative”
but there are healthier and not so healthy,
things that help me access my emotions
and perform acting in a real, vulnerable, and honest way,
and that is how i choose to keep going
(start going? this is technically all new to me…)
and, similarly,
there is no “recovered” vs. “not recovered”
there is in recovery and the levels therein.
but one level does not disappear once you move on to the next
they are uneven steps existing in a labyrinth
that sometimes require backtracking to continue on.
and if i can look at my own mental health
in a way
that is
Non-Binary
(just like me!)
then maybe,
just maybe,
i can make friends with my trauma
(and how i felt it initially/since)
and understand a little bit more about me
in the aftermath…