Trauma Cop
People who aren't massively traumatised often have unhelpful advice for people who are. They want to fix what they don't understand. It's hard to know what to do about one's own trauma and it's even harder when you are being pummelled about the head with very hot tips for how to get on with your day. I feel it has taken me way too long to truly marvel at just how damaged I am and that this over seemingly endless time has caused even more rips and tears in my life. When people suggest I should have a great attitude and just get on with it, I tend to sympathise with terrorists. Normal people are a curse.
Normal people tend to overrate their own uniqueness and downplay the suffering of others. I mean, that's what it looks like to me, but maybe setting myself apart from "normal" people doesn't help my case. Maybe I should simply focus on the trauma and get as far away as I can from any mythologizing or romanticising about how special it makes me.
Any attempt to describe one's own suffering will be met with unhelpful bullshit. A while back I mentioned to a much younger person that when I was a child it was still very legal for parents and teachers to hit kids. I don't know what the person I was speaking with heard, because their reaction was to challenge me about whether I thought it was okay to hit kids. That's a fairly extreme example of the intense lack of empathy I can experience as I use words to make sense of the world and our lives in it.
I am increasingly of the view that I must talk about my trauma on a fairly regular basis or simply slip beneath the waves of mental illness. This is not because there is anything wrong with me, even though I've just said that I'm damaged, but that the wounds never heal. And when you are hurting for no reason you can really get caught up in it. And you can find that life is passing you by.
It's not possible to simply get over this shit because we all come equipped with a memory and a need to understand. Your mind will never stop trying to make sense of things that happened to you, that's what it's supposed to do.
There has to be a way to talk about trauma that doesn't start a fresh round of one-upmanship and I think it's in trying to stick to the facts of what trauma practically does to you as you try to live. (Right now I am running out steam, which is one of the things that happens).
Trauma doesn't go away over time, memory is not a voluntary process. The only way out is in focusing on the facts of what happened, denial is not an option.
Normal people tend to overrate their own uniqueness and downplay the suffering of others. I mean, that's what it looks like to me, but maybe setting myself apart from "normal" people doesn't help my case. Maybe I should simply focus on the trauma and get as far away as I can from any mythologizing or romanticising about how special it makes me.
Any attempt to describe one's own suffering will be met with unhelpful bullshit. A while back I mentioned to a much younger person that when I was a child it was still very legal for parents and teachers to hit kids. I don't know what the person I was speaking with heard, because their reaction was to challenge me about whether I thought it was okay to hit kids. That's a fairly extreme example of the intense lack of empathy I can experience as I use words to make sense of the world and our lives in it.
I am increasingly of the view that I must talk about my trauma on a fairly regular basis or simply slip beneath the waves of mental illness. This is not because there is anything wrong with me, even though I've just said that I'm damaged, but that the wounds never heal. And when you are hurting for no reason you can really get caught up in it. And you can find that life is passing you by.
It's not possible to simply get over this shit because we all come equipped with a memory and a need to understand. Your mind will never stop trying to make sense of things that happened to you, that's what it's supposed to do.
There has to be a way to talk about trauma that doesn't start a fresh round of one-upmanship and I think it's in trying to stick to the facts of what trauma practically does to you as you try to live. (Right now I am running out steam, which is one of the things that happens).
Trauma doesn't go away over time, memory is not a voluntary process. The only way out is in focusing on the facts of what happened, denial is not an option.
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