Dalloway´s Recovery Journal

[HannahOne]

It's painful to hear the ways you had to be strong, and why. I wish it had been otherwise for you and that you had had the connection, love, support, care, and understanding you needed.

Knowing you have the power to rewrite your story is also a form of strength.

[Dalloway]

One of the hardest things of doing trauma work is peeling off all these layers and finding just more and more questions and a big pile of uncertainty. I feel like the more I know about mySELF, the more I´m willing to look old ghosts in the eye, there´s exponentially more work to do. I don´t wanna ignore the skeletons in my closet anymore, so I guess I´ll have to clean up the mess somehow. Maybe even befriend the skeletons. Halloween´s right at the corner, after all.

My all time best of hit remains the same this year, too. The song is called "Who am I under all these layers of trauma" with subtitle "Is there even one thing that is not the by-product of or at least impacted by trauma?"

I´m currently reading What my bones know, a memoir of healing from CPTSD by journalist Stephanie Foo. Her experience of finding out about trauma resonates with me very much because she asks herself the question: so all these years everything I´ve done and felt and thought was the trauma or at least deeply impacted by trauma; so what is/was real? And I can relate to that A LOT.

I anxiously search for the answer to that question. What is real about me and what is not? Do I pursue the career I do just because of my traumatic childhood? Do I love and hate specific things because of the memories of trauma? Would I love Jane Austen and The office if I didn´t go through the things I did? Who am I as a person?

I know no one´s an island and guess the answer will be somewhere right there. It´s just that the feeling of being like a puppet, dragged right and left, is almost unbearable at times. Controlled and formed by trauma. Born from it the second time, after my very birth, creating this half me-half persona entity.

I want to believe that whoever I am, is in the making, a work in progress. I just have to be sufficiently patient to find out what it´s gonna look and be like.

[HannahOne]

"who am I under/outside of the trauma, is there anything of me NOT determined by my past?" I ask myself that too.  It's an important question, and I'm with you in the unknowing.

I sometimes think that the need to know "who I am" and feeling like I don't know who I am is also a result of trauma, LOL! Because I didn't get mirroring, attunement, and validation that I needed to form a coherent sense of self. And even so, who I am is yet to be determined, I'm still becoming it. Your last line resonates, too. We are in the process of becoming, so who I am isn't a one-word answer or simple solution, it's more a felt sense that I can be in touch with or lose touch with, the more I can validate and attune to what I really feel, whether that is "because of trauma" or not, the more I feel into who I am.