#trauma-memory

There was a stretch of months where I was seeing him every week. I didn’t know at the time that I was dissociating almost constantly — that my body was there but my mind wasn’t really registering anything beyond the rituals I clung to. I’d been taking too many antihistamines without realizing the fog they’d dropped me into, and he became the anchor I latched onto without ever calling it that.

He never really asked about me, and I didn’t offer much. That dynamic made it easy. Comfortable, even. The intimacy was always tilted in his direction — everything personal had to do with him. But somehow that felt safe when I was working so hard not to be seen anyway. When I think back to that time now, I don’t remember much. Just a few cold mornings. A black sweatshirt. His hands. The sound of my own voice, faint and strange. Mostly I just remember him.

It’s weird to realize that someone who barely looked at you might be the only real imprint left from an entire season of your life.

Dear Dad, I don’t know how to start this because I still don’t know how to talk to you. You’ve been gone for over a decade now, and I’m still afraid of saying the wrong thing. Afraid it might sound like blame. Afraid it might sound like begging.

I want to ask you why. I want to ask you if you thought about me. If you thought about what it would do to a 14-year-old girl to find out her dad chose to disappear.

I wish I could tell you I’m okay now. That I’ve grown up into someone who’s fully healed. That I don’t still carry this ache into every other loss, every fight, every time someone pulls away without explanation.

But that wouldn’t be true.

I still flinch at abandonment. I still get scared when people go quiet. I still don’t always know how to trust that someone will stay.

I think about the way you used to smile. I try to remember your voice but it’s fading. I hate that. I hate that I’m forgetting the pieces of you that didn’t hurt.

There’s a part of me that always wonders if I wasn’t enough. Even though I know better, I know better, that voice still lives in me.

You missed so much. I went to rehab. I got sober. I started writing. You’d be surprised by how much of you I see in myself—sometimes in ways I’m proud of. Sometimes in ways I’m afraid of.

I’m trying, Dad. I’m trying to let go of the shame. I’m trying to keep going, even when I feel like disappearing too.

I hope wherever you are, you see me. I hope you’d be proud. And I hope you’re finally okay.

Love,

He called me the next day. My coworker. The one who found me drunk outside the office, walked me to my car, and touched me when I was too far gone to speak clearly.

He asked if I remembered. I didn’t remember all of it. But I said I was okay with it.

And I’ve been carrying that ever since.

Because part of me still wonders if that response made it my fault. Like saying “I was okay with it” somehow meant I had no right to be hurt later. But I think about that version of me—hungover, ashamed, probably still half-spinning—and I know what I was trying to do.

I was trying to make it easier. For him. I was trying to smooth it over, like I always did. I didn’t want to make it a thing. I didn’t want to deal with the fallout of telling the truth. I didn’t want him to be mad, or defensive, or worse—say I came on to him.

I was too scared to say, “No. I didn’t want that. Not really. Not like that.” So I said what felt safest. I told him it was fine.

And that’s the thing about trauma. Sometimes the most confusing part isn’t what happened. It’s how good you get at minimizing it. At rewriting the story for someone else’s comfort.

That call wasn’t about checking in on me. It was about checking himself out of guilt.

I keep asking myself: When do I get closure? How do I stop thinking about it? How do I stop trying to process it?

I want the answer to be linear. I want there to be a moment—a clean turning point—where I can say, “That’s when it stopped hurting.” But I’ve started to realize: closure isn’t a chapter that ends. It’s a story you learn how to carry differently.

No one talks about how exhausting it is to keep revisiting the same wound from a dozen angles. To keep wondering if you’re healing or just rehearsing. To keep reliving the parts no one else even acknowledges.

Some days I just want to forget. Other days, I want someone to finally say: “That mattered. What they did to you mattered.”

But closure? It’s not forgetting. It’s reclaiming.

Sometimes I wonder if it was karma. Not just the jail. Not just the DUIs or the totaled car. But the assaults. Both of them. On the same day.

I was sitting in the lobby of my office building, visibly drunk—cutwater in hand, slurring, barely holding myself upright. I don't know what I was doing. Maybe I was trying to get caught. Maybe I just didn’t care anymore. One of my coworkers saw me, said he needed to get me out of there before anyone else noticed. He walked me to my car, called another coworker to help, even accepted a drink. And then he kissed me. Then touched me. I told him we shouldn’t. Then I told him he needed to stop. But he didn’t, not right away. And I didn’t fight him. I felt so confused and drunk and ashamed. At some point I nodded off.

After that I drove home. I crashed the car. Someone found me in the wreck—another man. I was disoriented, stuck in the driver’s seat. He pulled me into the back, told me I seemed “fun,” started kissing my neck. His hands went under my shirt. When the cops arrived, he told them he was just checking on me.

Nobody ever talks about those parts. Just the DUI. Just the jail. Just the car.

It’s like because I messed up—because I drove drunk, because I spiraled—what happened to me in between doesn’t count. Like it was just part of the fallout. Like maybe I had it coming.

And that’s the part that still haunts me. That quiet voice in my head that wonders if it was karma. That wonders if being hurt was just the universe settling a score.

But I know now—that’s not how it works.

The pain I caused doesn’t justify the pain I received. I didn’t “deserve” to be touched without consent. I didn’t “earn” two men ignoring my boundaries while I was vulnerable, scared, and intoxicated. And what happened to me wasn’t fate. It was their choice.

I’ve taken accountability for my choices. I’ve faced the consequences. But I won’t confuse assault with moral balance. I won’t call it karma just because it happened during a messy chapter of my life.

My dad killed himself when I was 14. It feels strange to type it like that—so bluntly. But softening the words doesn’t make them any easier to live with. He’s gone. And he chose to be gone.

That’s the part that stays with me. Not just the absence, but the choice. He didn’t die suddenly. He didn’t get sick. He decided to leave. And I was still a kid.

Sometimes I think I stopped being a kid that day. Not because I wanted to—but because grief aged me like milk. Fast. Sour. Quiet.

I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out what kind of daughter that made me. The kind who wasn’t enough to stay for? The kind who had to grow up too quickly? The kind who doesn’t cry about it anymore and wonders if that makes her cold?

I don’t even remember what our last conversation was. I don’t know if he knew how much I still needed him. I don’t know if he felt like he was doing me a favor by going. I don’t know if he thought I’d be better off. I wish I could tell him he was wrong.

And the truth is—some days I feel so much anger I can’t breathe. And others, I just miss him so quietly it hurts in my teeth. That’s what grief is, I think. A shape-shifter. A thing that never really ends, just changes its form over time.

I don’t know how to grieve someone who left by choice. But I’m trying.

Content Note: This post includes references to alcohol misuse, blurred consent, sexual trauma, and self-blame. It may be difficult to read for those with experiences of assault or substance-related harm. Please take care in choosing whether to continue.

Sometimes I think about how he found me. Sitting in the office lobby, middle of the day, drinking a cutwater out in the open like I wanted to be caught. And maybe I did. Maybe I was trying to self-destruct loud enough that someone would finally intervene. Or maybe I was just… exhausted. From hiding. From holding it together. From pretending I wasn’t drowning.

He said he had to get me away from the office before anyone saw me like that. He walked me to my car. He called a coworker to bring my things. And I thought, maybe this is someone looking out for me.

But then he kissed me. And I kissed him back. And then I told him we shouldn’t do this. And then he said he was married. Had kids. And then I said we really had to stop. And he didn’t.

I remember him sucking on my nipples, and I remember holding his head closer. And I hate that memory. Because I don’t know if that means I said yes. I don’t know if my body meant yes. I know I was drunk—slurring, swaying, sitting in my own mess. I know I’d just told him I was an alcoholic. I know I was not in a place to choose.

And still—I blame myself more than I blame him. That’s the part I can’t shake. The part that keeps me from naming it clearly. Because what if I did say yes? What if I wanted it for a second? What if being wanted felt better than being pitied?

What I do know is this: after it happened, I didn’t go home. I didn’t rest. I drove drunk. I totaled my car. I got assaulted again. I got arrested. I went to jail.

So if it was consent, it was the kind that leads to collapse. If it was choice, it was the kind born from shame and self-destruction. And if it was sex—it didn’t feel like mine.

I wish I hadn’t been drinking. I wish I’d told her to wait it out, to sit still until it passed. But I didn’t. And it didn’t.

And now I’m left wondering—not if it happened, but if it counts. If I count. If my story is still mine even when I’m not sure what to call it.

After writing about kink and self-harm, I kept thinking about something I didn’t fully explain: why pain can sometimes feel… good. Or calming. Or even like a kind of relief.

And I don’t mean in a “I’m broken” way. I mean in a there’s actual brain chemistry involved way. I’ve always felt this instinctively — that pain (in the right setting) helped quiet something inside me. But now I’ve started learning why.

When your body experiences pain — especially the kind you chose and agreed to — it kicks into gear by releasing endorphins. These are your body’s natural feel-good chemicals, sort of like morphine but homemade. They dull the pain, lift your mood, and sometimes even give you a little high. That’s part of why a good scene can leave you feeling buzzy or floaty after — your body just gave you a chemical hug.

There’s also dopamine, which is tied to reward and stimulation. A lot of people with trauma, ADHD, or high emotional sensitivity (hi, same) tend to seek out intensity — not because we want to suffer, but because our brains are trying to balance out all the chaos inside. A controlled kind of pain can sometimes reset that system. It gives your brain something loud enough to focus on that it drowns out the static for a minute.

And here’s the weirdest part I’ve learned: When pain happens in a safe, trusting environment, it can actually help calm your nervous system. Like, physically. Your body goes into “rest mode” after a scene — kind of like the feeling after crying really hard and then lying still. You’re not imagining it. That’s your brain and body working together to say, “We survived that. You’re safe now.”

But that part only works if the pain comes with consent, trust, and care. If you’re doing it to punish yourself, or with someone who doesn’t treat you gently afterward, your brain doesn’t register it as safety — it registers it as danger. And that creates a totally different response, one that’s more about survival than healing.

I’m not a scientist. But I am someone who’s lived in both of those realities — self-harm in secret, and scenes with partners who knew how to hold me through the comedown. And the difference is everything.

So yeah, pain can help. Sometimes. In the right hands. And it doesn’t make you weird or wrong if that’s true for you, too. It just means your body found a way to cope when nothing else worked — and now maybe, it’s learning how to ask for care instead of chaos.

If this resonated, here are a few things that helped me understand it better:

“Why Some People Use Pain to Cope” – Psychology Today A breakdown of why pain can bring emotional relief, especially for folks who struggle to regulate overwhelming feelings.

“The Neuroscience of BDSM” – WIRED Talks about how the brain reacts to intense experiences like impact play and why it can lead to calm or euphoria afterward.

“Endorphins and Emotional Release” – The Journal of Pain (2009 study summary) Research that showed people engaging in BDSM reported lower stress and better mood after play. Yes, science backs it.

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk If you want to understand how trauma lives in the body and why some of us crave intensity to feel safe or “real” again.