Trauma Doesn't Make You Stronger

 Things have been pretty rough lately. It seems like my mind is all over the place, I can't keep it fixated on one thought for longer than a few hours, and then it drifts off somewhere I don't know. For the most part, I think a lot of this has to do with the time of the year we are heading to: the beginning of summer. There's a lot of things that happened either at the very beginning of summer or during the breaks when I was a kid. That is definitely one of the reasons summer has always been my least favorite season. That and hot weather; it makes me miserable.  The end of May and the beginning of June are marked by one very special occasion in Finland: school graduation ceremonies. When I was a kid, it used be a common practice to always have the graduation on the last day of May, no matter what weekday it landed on. This has since changed due to certain adjustments done to the Finnish school year legislation. But back then, the graduation ceremony was always held on the l...

 I can feel my legs twitching, my muscles contracting. I can feel my feet stretching on their own accord, as if someone was pulling at them with a string. Every single muscle in my legs is tensed up and flexed, and I can do nothing but watch it happen and wail in pain.  Everything happens so suddenly, I never have the chance to go back to what I was doing before the attack washes over me. It is usually a minor thing too, something small that upset my brain somehow, triggered a trauma response within me. For the most part, those are subconscious and I have no way of controlling them or avoiding the triggers, because I am simply just not aware of them. So I am forced to watch my body twitching and convulsing all the while not having any idea why any of it is happening. The only thing I know is that it hurts like a fucking bitch.  pull 1. Sometimes my legs get twisted into positions so unnatural that I am amazed they are even able to bend like that. I have hypermobility in a...

 They say that trauma gets stored in the body. And by 'they', I mean psychiatrists and other professionals working on the field of psychiatry. There is a lot of scientific evidence of psychological trauma not only affecting the brain, but the entire body. Human beings are not the only species experiencing such post-traumatic symptoms: the same phenomenon can be detected in animals like dogs and cats. I remember reading in one article on the science of trauma that because animals' brains are not able to comprehend and deal with the psychological trauma they might have gone through, they resort to physical reactions instead. These typically consist of shaking, trembling, and convulsing. That is the main method of dealing with trauma for animals.  For humans, we do have other means of comprehending psychological trauma, but sometimes we also experience these physical reactions. We shake, tremble, twitch, convulse, ache. They might be secondary methods of coping with trauma, bu...

 As a literature major, I know that meta text is very often frowned upon, and it is commonly not considered an effective way of narrating nor making an impression on the reader. Especially text about the process of creating the text is very bad and should always be avoided. It very rarely offers any important insight or serves a significant role in the context of the text, so all writers are told to stay away from it. But, like in many other ways, I am just a little too different, and I have to stray away from the norms and conventions that even my own field of study has posed on me.  ⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⊰⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅∙∘☽༓☾∘∙•⋅⋅⋅•⋅⋅⊰⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅ I have been struggling with trying to find a way to end this chapter. I have had all illustrations finished for quite some time now, but I have just not been able to write a conclusion to this extremely heavy and taxing topic. No matter how much I write, how many art pieces I make, I feel like nothing will ever be enough to describe the true emotion...

 My girlfriend from the US stayed with me in Finland for almost the entire month of April. I dropped them at the airport yesterday at the time of writing this entry. Four weeks is a long time to spend with another person, and especially when that person is so very dear to you, after such a long period letting them go becomes that much more difficult. In other words, I have been feeling sad since she left, but I guess that is to be expected. Goodbyes at the airport never get any easier. As is very evident in my lack of posting of any kind, I wanted to spend all the time with my girlfriend when they were here with me, and I put all work aside for those three weeks. I was working on some little things here and there, but I did not have a set work schedule like I normally do. I can draw and write whenever I want to, but I only get to hold my girlfriend's hand a couple of times a year.  With me living in my new apartment, we got a lot of time just for ourselves. We did the laundry ...