Trauma Doesn't Make You Stronger

 I don't think I ever realized just how much I was hurting when it was happening to me. That might be due to dissociation or the very high likelihood that I am somewhere on the autistic spectrum, but as a kid I was very unaware of my own pain. Reading through diaries and journals I'd written back then is very difficult, because you can clearly see it in the text; how I was almost confused by the constant feeling of something being terribly wrong.  I remember crying myself to sleep a lot as a kid. I was sitting on my tiny bed, listening to music, and suddenly I was hit by a strong wave of sadness and emotional pain. I tried to muffle my sobs in my pillow so that my mom wouldn't wake up. And I just could not understand why any of it was happening. It wasn't like I was being abused. My journals were full of phrases like "I am kind of being bullied a little, but it's nothing serious". Part of it was very likely me downplaying the severity of the situation beca...

 Whenever I tell someone that I suffer from dissociation due to my childhood trauma, they usually ask me if it really is some kind of an out-of-body experience, like you're looking at yourself from the outside. And usually, I tend to reply to this question with 'no'.  The way people typically conceptualize out-of-body experiences are nothing like what dissociation feels like. I would even go as far as to claim that the way an average person understands the idea of "seeing yourself from the outside" is not all that close to any out-of-body experience. Near-death experiences on the hospital bed might be something akin to that, but dissociation, at the very least, is a whole 'nother story. I don't have a driver's license. I'm an adult, but I still haven't got my license, partly because living in Finland, I don't really need it and partly because it is so stupidly expensive. So I don't know what it's like to drive a car from personal ex...

I've already written about that one very frustrating appointment I had with my psychologist a bit before Christmas. There were a lot of things that bothered me in that conversation, but one of them was noticeably bigger than the rest. I could not stop thinking about the way my psychologist approached the entire issue: making me feel responsible for my own reckless behavior and thus harming the people around me more than myself. I think at the very core of this discussion was the idea that I was doing this to myself because I was making that conscious decision to harm myself instead of doing something productive. That it was my responsibility, my fault even if you will, that I was cutting my arms into shreds. It baffles me that a health care professional would say something like that about a symptom that clearly has its roots in some very serious mental agony. You typically hear doctors and nurses say that you should never just treat the symptom, because the symptom is always a sign...

 Wanting to be in pain is against human nature, and so is wanting to die. As a living organism, you are programmed to always strive to survive, keep living as long as possible because life is precious and should be protected. It is not rational to want to end your own life, because that would mean that you'd seize to exist, which is what all living things want to avoid.  Pain is sometimes the first step toward death. It is a warning sign, a signal of something that's wrong in your body, something that you need to fix before it's too late. The human nervous system is designed to inform us when we need to act in order to save our lives. And being in pain is what your nerves cause you to feel, to get your attention.  The concept of being in pain is never desirable for obvious reasons. It ignites your nerves in flames, makes it unbearable to move, to eat, to exist. Pain disables you, makes everything meaningful in life impossible for you to reach. It is miserable, intolerable...

 New year, new me. The mother of all New Years cliches. People have been making New Years resolutions, promising to themselves that they'll change their ways and become better people. This year will be my year. This year I will start taking care of myself. This year I will not let myself down. And two weeks later, they have already forgotten about all of those promises. New Years is one of those holidays that doesn't really make sense to me. Or more like I don't feel any sort of way about it, I don't have a personal connection to it. After falling ill, I had to stop drinking, and being a Finn, New Years was always about getting drunk, so the little meaning the holiday used to have disappeared too. There's no specific way I "celebrate" the year ending and the new one beginning, the moment just comes and goes while I'm lazing around with my best friend, and that's it. This year was no different either.  Exactly one year ago, I was feeling confident t...