When it finally comes

I thought I’d start at the end. The end of 50 years of feeling something was off, not quite right. A journey that consumed me, my energy and my lifeblood for all of my life.

When it lands, it does so with the grace and power of something that can only be felt, not necessarily understood cognitively. The body took over. Looking back, I think it took control in 2020, 2 weeks into a job as a teacher. I was driving into work. There was no self. Only a realisation that I was heading towards something that was self-harm. Pure and simple. I had left a successful career in IT and had retrained to teach to keep me sane during Covid. Literally.

What has followed for 6 years is dissolution at its most profound. A constant and involuntary disintegration of the self. The ego fighting every step of the way to keep me trapped in the patterns I’d built to survive in a turbulent environment from birth. Patterns that showed themselves slowly, deliberately and pulled me apart, a bit at a time until all there was do was to see clearly for the first time in my life.

I write this from the middle of grieving what I believe is the final sight. The sense of hollowing out and depth of feeling is interlaced with a peace and gratitude for my life and those around me who have kept me on this path. I was lucky that my adaptions on the whole were what society would deem as valuable. I’d had a successful career, a family and friends. But it always felt like I was living life at arm’s length, through a proxy of self. Through learned rather than lived behaviours. Always the finger pointing to the moon. Never the moon.

Seeing. Physical and mental pain. Anger. Realisation. Acceptance. Peace. That seems to be the process. What it doesn’t tell you is what each of those stages feels like. There is no 7-step plan. There is no self-help. Only what is. Each of those stages carries real human emotion and activities designed to keep you in the model you’ve built to remain safe. The internal battle, the build of emotion with nowhere to go other than out, the receipts you leave based on your behaviours. The certainty. The uncertainty. The panic. The pain.

The deeper and more sophisticated the patterns, the harder to unmesh them from who you are. You are it. You are the patterns. The matrix lives in each and every one of us. Seeing it is to become so overwhelmed with your life that you can no longer cognitively manage the interlocking nature of thoughts, what you must manage to appear OK. When your capability to contain is removed, the slide into dissolution can begin. Step by step. Downwards. To the bottom.

This blog. The whole point of this work is to show you. Give an insight into the reality of trauma healing. What it takes to come back from what was you. To die and to be reborn. And to do so while holding down what looks like a life from the outside. The pain of those around you. The embers of history that float and burn all around you until they turn inward. I will write as I feel. I am more than happy for comments. In fact I welcome them.

I wish you well on your journey. It is a brutal, shocking, at times deeply painful and it is rare. It is human-being at it’s most effective and protective self. It is grace and at times I can’t believe it. Know you are not alone. Know I have walked the path, and I am here to walk along side you.