#so ofc nearly every trauma got tossed onto the pile of memories and sensations I was already getting rid of

[fredthedemonpartner]

Having dissociation be your main coping mechanism for your entire childhood and knowing that you’ve had many traumatic experiences feels like your memory is a bookshelf that should be full. Each memory is supposed to be a book and your shelves should be full, but at some point you took out every book with the letter Q in the title. But all the books still stand straight despite the gaps and on a good day you can convince yourself that enough are there for it to be fine, everyone has books that get lost or damaged or never make it on the shelf to begin with, until you talk to someone and they say something that reminds of a book you know you had but when you go to pick it off the shelf there’s a gap where it should go. But you know the title didn’t have a Q so why isn’t it there, then you realize that as a kid you couldn’t really tell the difference between Q and O. And looking at the shelf suddenly it’s a lot more bare than you realized, too much to be explained away by your general untidiness and leaving books stacked to the side out of order, at least you can still find those ones if you remember they’re there. You can see the shape and size of the missing books and sometimes you can even guess what they contained based on the bits of titles or authors you vaguely remember, but the poor copies you try to make stand out worse than the original gaps. They’re like folders with what little information you can remember that are far too wide and thin to fit well on the shelf, leaning and sticking out past the spines around them. And your fingers catch on them as you run them along the spines of the books, interrupting and frustrating your browsing occasionally even giving you paper cuts. And now you find yourself shelving new books on the most recent shelf, holding a book with Q in the title, stuck between the urge to get rid of it asap and the fear of losing it forever that makes you want to sit down and read it over and over, annotating the pages and writing a whole separate copy just in case because you’d rather have a thousand paper cuts than look at another shelf with more empty spaces than occupied ones.