The two hardest things I’ve had to learn, accept, then change about myself.
The first was that the abuse and trauma I went through was real, and it changed me. It happened so young that I was changed. In the metaphysical ways we think about, like memory and our souls. But also in a physical way. My nervous system and brain grew differently, in ways I’ve only learned to articulate in recent years.
The second was that the physical changes were a gift, and embedded in the gift was the realities of human physiology. That among those realities was the truth of something called neuroplasticity, which is part of our ability to learn, grow, adapt and change. I could teach myself to adapt my nervous system to help me be myself. And in those moments, I learned what self-acceptance meant for me, and the idea of being at war with myself or conflicted became a hug, as if those parts I disliked just became a child I could parent, and then accept, and then feel whole.
I’ve described my PTSD before. The flood of horrible images, memories and sounds that get triggered by things like a breeze blowing. But there’s something else that happens to me, too. I don’t know if other people experience this, but I sometimes get flooded with joyful images, memories and sounds, too. It’s like a PTSD flashback, except it’s happy. Maybe that’s what normal memories are like for people. I don’t know.
So it’s either I get to feel what normal feels like, which is a gift, or I get ti feel this flipside to my PTSD, where my brain learned this mechanism for flooding my conscious mind with memories, and then decided to give me happy ones from time to time. There’s been moments where I was in deep despair, including in childhood, where that happened and took me from the brink into a place where I could smile again.
I don’t even need the floods. Sometimes, a blue sky or the moon being a certain color or a leaf is enough, and it’s just one sliver of time, a dew drop on a spider web sliding down in the sunlight, and I can hold it and feel fine.