Trauma Doesn't Make You Stronger

There comes a point in your life when you start to wonder why bad things keep happening to you year after year. Why people keep mistreating you, hurting you, abusing you. You are desperate to find any kind of explanation for it, no matter how irrational it may be. And when literally everything about the circumstances change – the place, the time, the people – everything but you, you wonder why that may be.  It's not as much that I believe I am deserving of what has happened to me. It's not that I think my abusers were right in what they said and did, that I am not deserving of anything else than shit being thrown at me. I've come to the conclusion that it is more about how I view myself in relation to the rest of the world. That because everything around me can change, the milieu and the people, and I will still be victimized, it must be because this is my place in this world.  That this is my role in social settings and the society as a whole.   all i'll ever get. Punc...

 On the first day of fourth grade, I got greeted with about a dozen of girls from my class. They noticed me right away when I stepped into the doorframe. Their faces turned into looks of disgust and horror, and they all approached me as a group.  There are a lot of instances, a lot of moments in my childhood that I remember like they happened yesterday. A lot of my trauma did get buried under the constant state of dissociation I was in, but some things were just so memorable and hurtful that not even my brain was able to protect me from them.  It would be an understatement to say that I wasn't welcome in that class. I had left that school, those people, two years prior and moved to a new town on the other side of the country, and then just as suddenly as I had left, I came back as if nothing had happened. I only wanted to be in the same group with my best friend, but that was a wish I shouldn't have had. It would have saved me from a lot of the abuse I had to go through. ...

 "Things will get better eventually." I wish I knew how many times this sentence has been uttered to me. Sometimes it has been in the form of a promise, sometimes as a consolation. The motive doesn't really change the message in any meaningful way: at the end of the day, the person who repeats this sentence to me over and over again always wants me to keep holding on. Not give up. Just hang in there, a bit longer. Soon, everything will be okay, I promise.  I wish I remembered when was the first time I heard someone say that to me. It must have been in my childhood sometime, most likely in elementary. Maybe a teacher that I had confided in and gone to talk about the things the other kids were doing to me. Maybe the school nurse whom I'd told about how miserable I was feeling at school every day. No matter who and when it was, I know that I was very young. A child. Ever since I was a child, I have been promised this one thing, that everything will be okay eventually. Th...

 This week has been very eventful, and even though I am exhausted and my body is hurting a lot, I am so relieved and excited. On Thursday, I finally moved into my new apartment. What a struggle it was, everything with my former landlord and all the money issues; a lot of things didn't go as I'd initially planned, but we managed to figure it all out and make it work eventually. This weekend, I've been working on getting everything ready in my place, unpacking and organizing, making the apartment feel like a home and look like me. I also placed an order of Sanrio-themed decor items as well as everyday household tools, like oven mittens! Why should you have boring, regular oven mittens when you can have cute pink ones that have Hello Kitty's face on them? Exactly. As much as this change is for me in this current day and age, I can't help but feel like a huge chunk of it is for the Kid too. She's a very prominent figure in my life, she's always been here for me ...