A Challenging Post: Emotional Healing During 2020
**trigger warning**
Here I mention childhood abuse, sexual trauma-
but no specific details of abuse described.
This post has been sitting in my drafts for months, but only now am I taking the breath in and allowing myself to hit publish.
I have been delicate about the topics I share on here, even though I have shared a lot. I want to share something difficult, not with the intention of triggering anyone, or looking for attention, but to simply get this off my chest.
I have shared before the story of my sexual assault in Boston by my co-worker, I did not keep that post when I updated my site. It was a big thing that had happened. My job dismissing it, my police report being scoffed at. My sophomore year. Somehow, I let that story be told but I hid a story from a year before that. May, freshman year had ended and at the start of my summer I was raped and needed doctor’s care. At the time I paid out of pocket, because I did not want my family seeing the insurance statement. As much as I believed it was my fault for a while, I let my “work story” be my only story because for it to happen again in such short of time it had to have been my fault for sure, right? (emphasis on that being my trauma brain speaking)
I’m one person and I’m small but I can carry a lot with grace, I’ve proven it many times before. I can say that emotional pain is different than physical pain but it is still painful. Those assaults are a lot to juggle. I have to say that with PTSD involved, my brain is spinning with memories going back to high school, and early childhood. I couldn’t see it for a while but some things started to stick. And I bottled it up. On June 2nd, somehow I spoke of it in the backseat of my car during FaceTime therapy. I was told my mind was not playing tricks on me, and I sobbed in my car for an hour after. What am I trying to say? I was sexually abused as a child.
Though I suffer from flashbacks and my body reminds me often what did happen, I still sometimes have trouble trusting myself, and believing my gut.
I am not broken, but I have not felt like “me” since. My identity is no longer familiar to me. I’m trying to be her, the old her that got away with pretending things were OK. Who is she now? I’m still figuring that out.
While doing trauma work in therapy, I am processing my triggers, my nightmares, memories, and dissociative episodes. It has been a difficult process, and sometimes I nap for several hours after a therapy session. It makes sense why I am tired all the time. Sometimes I don’t know if it is my body, heart or soul that is tired. Emotionally, I am exhausted.
I have felt anger that things were not discovered sooner. That I didn’t get help sooner. I feel sadness, like I am connecting with the hurt child deep inside me. And trusting others, seems far more difficult to do. I’m afraid of getting hurt, I’m afraid of what I know, and what I might not know! I just graduated with my social work degree, and I’m now living in Hawaii working towards my Masters. Good things are coming my way, but there is all of this- all of this stuff I am carrying, and some days it weighs me down more than other days.
I think people assume I just graduated from undergrad, now I’m thriving in my dream place, Hawaii. So many of you do not know what has transpired since graduation. Leaving for Hawaii, was not only a comfort for me, but for my family. I was difficult to live with when I was dealing with all of this. I was causing other people pain.
I used to feel such fire in my belly, a passionate energy, dreaming about the future and all of these possibilities for what I can achieve. Everything that has happened these past 5 years, including now dealing with the changes brought from this covid-19 pandemic, I only feel stuck. My job is take it day by day. Therapy twice a week, 5 graduate courses, and soon starting an internship as a crisis counselor- I am working every day to take better care of myself and trust that though things are hard, and that things have been hard for a while, I will get the break I deserve and have been craving. This darkness can not be my full story, there has to be much more out there; more good for me to discover. I owe it to myself to learn how to love the parts of myself that hurt terribly, and which make me doubt myself and find it difficult to be living in this skin.
I’m very Haley because I bring light and acceptance to other people. Because I still sleep with stuffed animals. Because I like to journal. Because I’m clumsy, yet caring. And because I find my sense of humor to be a savior.
None of this trauma makes me who I am, but I can’t neglect this to be a part of my story.
Would I be in this very place today without any of this?
