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Nicole W. Lee, from "Even the Dust"

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Something traumatic happened to me

The title I’ve chosen for this blog post gives me a knee-jerk feeling of being self-indugent and dramatizing what happened. There’s a discomfort that arises for me in acknowledging that past experiences have hurt and affected me. I guess it’s admitting that I have vulnerable, soft places where jabs will hurt, and my armour is not complete.

Simultaneously, there’s something powerful I find in using the past tense; ‘happened’. In that implication that the event has passed, and I have come through it, however scathed. I think I’ve yet to dive into how much damage has been done, as I’m reluctant to touch upon those painful, bruised places, stirring up memories and flashbacks to the incident I’ve worked hard to put behind me.

Initially I did feel that I was ‘dealing’ well with what had happened. I was most touched by the shock and hurt of it, but I managed as much vulnerability as I could muster and let friends and family take care of me and allowed myself to let them in – for a time. For as long as I felt it socially acceptable to be grieving and hurt. But as soon as I could, I was hurtling towards new experiences, towards bigger and wilder things that would surely lead to success, no matter how little thought had been put into the plans, and of course such new endeavours quickly fizzled out and left me feeling disappointed and hungry for my next feat.

Never time to rest. Never time to sit with what had happened and reflect upon it, heal from it. And now I find myself washed up on the shores of a life that is safe, comfortable, and surrounded by good people who care for me and love me, barely understanding how I’ve got here. Grateful that fate saw fit to put me on this rollercoaster of a year that somehow didn’t go horribly wrong. And yet at the bottom of my haversack, crumpled up and forgotten, I’m still carrying around this trauma of what happened, and it’s as big as ever, no matter how I try to ignore it.

I can’t fathom the ways in which it might be touching my life, damaging the work I’ve put into having this love, my successes, my resilience. But I feel that I owe it to myself for my strength and resourcefulness in how I picked up the pieces of my broken life and forged something sustainable and beautiful, to address this. To chip away at that trauma and to stop allowing it to tinge my blessed life with anxiety, distrust, cynicism, despair, self-doubt. I want to strive for more for myself and to believe that I deserve that.

The first thing that has come to mind, a tactic I’ve seen applied to infinite situations and which I have a gut-feeling may suit mine very well, is to write a letter to the person who traumatised me, and tell them what they’ve done, how it’s affected me and continues to, what that means to me, ask my questions: and then never send it.

To my ex-boyfriend, I’m certain we both know without a doubt the inciting event for what transpired between us. A shocking day, on my part at least. Sometimes I wonder whether you were really so careless as to let that information fall into my hands through simple error (and if so, how long would you have let the facade of commitment persist?), or if it was a calculated move on your part; a cowardly gesture to let me discover the truth for myself so that you wouldn’t have to go through the effort of having a sincere conversation with me. On one hand, I doubt your intelligence too much to believe that you could formulate such a plan. On the other hand, I know you were a cowardly person and that you would do most anything to avoid conflict or difficult conversations; those are so ugly, it makes you look like a villain when you acknowledge your own mistakes and fess up to what you could have done better, right? It’s something I knew about you from the early days, but I ignored it as I’m sure I ignored many of your worse traits, because I was in love with you and dedicated to you. I still hold a lot of anger towards you (if you haven’t picked up on that yet, I’d be rather surprised). I think what you did to me was outrageous and I hope that is the worst thing you will ever do in your life, because if you’re capable of worse, that idea of a good, loving person that I once had of you really is just an idea. The double-edged sword: your reaction to being found out…embarrassing, huh? Why were you the one crying? In a way, I’m glad you prostrated yourself and made yourself so undeniably unattractive and pitiful to me, because it meant there was no way I could ever retrace my steps back into your lying arms. But really, why did you let the situation go so far as to necessitate that whole scene? That’s the thing; if you hadn’t been such a coward and given me the respect of having a serious conversation with me where you treated me like an equal, I truly doubt I would be in the state I was and am today. This was avoidable. And that hurts me even more deeply than the situation itself. I don’t credit you with an iota of the fulfilling, beautiful life I’ve built for myself today, but I thank God that I am not continuing in that shallow existence at your side. I thank God I’m where I’m supposed to be right now. I feel sad for you, that somebody like you can exist; someone who can go to Christmas dinner with their girlfriend’s family, look everybody in the face, accept hospitality and gifts from her family members, all while being unfaithful. And the same goes for the way you took advantage of my friends. You took advantage of me and everyone in my life who showed you kindness, and that is dispicable and one of the worst aspects of it all to me. Thank God you leant into this villainy almost to stageplay levels of misbehaviour, because it meant that I would never take you back, want you back, or look back on our time together with an envy to have it once more. I go back and forth; why did it have to be so terrible; it’s a good thing that it was this bad and painful. But at the end of the day, it was wrong of you to do that to me, and I live with the effects of what you did to me everyday.