There are so many threads

I’ve been in therapy now for a few months trying to unravel all the different parts of my life that have led me to here and now. I am a genuine mess. I have been for a while, a lot longer than I thought. Every time I think I’ve made it through, I’ve finally reached the bottom, there’s more. Someone says something, something happens, someone pulls away, and I’m spiraling again. All of this started when I was laid off in 2023. It took over a year for me to find new work and that year destroyed my confidence. All the cards I propped up with sticks and tape and glue came tumbling down, even while I tried so hard to keep them standing. Now, everything is laid bare and I’m trying to rebuild something stronger, but I have to understand how it all fell apart.

I’ve been peeling away the mask I’ve worn my entire life and started looking at the woman who’s underneath, who she is, what she's been through, the stories she tells and the things she believes about herself. I’ve added some new diagnoses and started to understand me and my youth in a much different, more complete way. It's been incredibly healing in some ways, but so unbelievably painful in others. Part of what’s taken me so long to seek help in healing the different traumas I've carried with me into adulthood is how they look compared to the usual discourse. I didn’t register any of it as traumatic because none of my experiences fit neatly into any one category. Nothing that happened to me was that bad. I'm a late diagnosed AuDHD woman in her late 30s, and I'm beginning to process a lifetime of emotion I denied myself because I took things literally.

A lot of childhood trauma is discussed with the assumption your parents were bad or abusive. Mine weren't. The one thing I've always known is that they love me. That knowledge is one of the main reasons I made it to adulthood. My parents just worked all the time, especially when I was a teenager. When they weren't working, they were busy dealing with trying to keep a home running. I internalized the need to make myself smaller learned at school and made myself smaller at home. No one needed to ask.

I often read about emotional neglect, but I never identified myself as emotionally neglected because my parents loved me. If I had talked to them, they would’ve listened. I just didn’t. I lived in a state of silent rejection at school and brought it home with me. I denied my needs for fear of being a burden. For fear of silence. Even though my parents loved me, the deep emotional connection I needed wasn't available to me because of capitalism. Perhaps I isolated myself, but we need to talk about that too.

Because it left me so vulnerable.

There are so many things in my life going back that were traumatic, but because what I experienced isn't how I see other people talking about the same thing, I didn't acknowledge my own pain. It delayed me from processing anything until I completely collapsed in on myself. I've been writing about my experiences a lot, talking about them, making art, because I don't think they're unique. I think there are a lot of people like me, walking around with a structural flaw waiting to take them down when the conditions are right. I need to be loud now. I need to give a voice to the pain I suffered in silence because that silence almost killed me. Hopefully it can help someone else.