yuzu

I didn’t ask for this.

Who could ever want this?

This is a tightened chest, a hardened heart. This is a skittering gaze and a fighting stance. This is 24/7 fight or flight. This is trauma at first.

This does not go away.

Because it’s been almost a year since I‘ve thought of it with any sincerity. It’s been several months since the incident that had me pulled from my bed at two in the morning. I think I shouldn’t be affected at this point.

That’s the thing with trauma. It doesn’t go away.

Images stick. Sounds echo. Memories repeat.

I see red sports cars and feel my heart clench in anxiety. I hear footsteps in the hall, a knock at my door, and I’m filled with dread. I am afraid to let people know who I am.

My trauma—I’ve only recently learned to call it such—isn’t life ending. In the grand scheme of the world and all the problems that exist in it, my trauma is insignificant.

But in the world which is my life, my trauma has impact. And I know I will not die from my trauma and I know that I have to believe I can beat it in order to beat it, but I will not diminish the impact it has had on my life.

I am scarred.

I think all of us are scarred in our own way.

I think that’s okay.

(I have always had scars, physical and emotional. I have been prone to scars since birth. Take it from someone who knows: it’s okay to have scars, no matter the shape they take)

Scars are old wounds healed over. Scars are struggles and traumas that have impacted us, but have faded with time.

Scars are permanent; scars can fade.

There will always be a mark, I will always know it’s there, but it will fade until I cannot see it.

It will take years for my trauma to fade into the lightness of the scar you only see when you look for it. It will take years for me to stop turning at every red sports car, stop panicking at every knock on my door. But it will fade.

I have to believe it will fade, I have to hope.

I don’t know how everyone else is living amongst social distancing and quarantining ourselves from others, but I don’t leave my house that much. 

The notion of me leaving scares my family, I was debating going and grabbing a pint of ice cream and I got just about a million “please don’t” and “I’d rather you didn’t” texts from my friends and family and so I didn’t get the ice cream and was just a little sad instead. 

But I understand that my parents are scared and my sibling is scared and my friends are scared and everything needs to be taken seriously. So I understand and I’ll do what will make my family and friends feel a little bit better. I can’t do much, but the least I can do is do what I can to make the people I love feel better. 

I only ever leave to go to the grocery store and I don’t even go in, I sit in the car and wear a mask and don’t leave and let the Fred Meyer people load the trunk of the car and I don’t move. I get home and use a Clorox wipe to wipe down everything and once it’s wiped, I take it upstairs and organize the fridge because I am the designated master organizer of the fridge because I like playing Tetris in real life. I wash all the produce ten times over. 

And then I don’t leave the house unless I’m walking around the neighborhood (except I live in the country so it’s not much of a neighborhood, just fields and fences and dogs that bark and scare the shit out of me) for the next week. 

It’s hard to ask for help. 

I’ve been - we as a generation have been - conditioned to think that asking for help is a sign of weakness. I - we - are supposed to power through and “stay on top of it” because “we’ve got it,” “it’s not as bad as it seems” and what could ever knock us down? 

And I - we - are proud of how strong we become. Of how much emotional and mental trauma we are capable of pushing aside in order to get something done. Of how we can destroy ourselves to never let the people in our lives down. Of our apparent independence. But when I - we - break, when we fall apart because the world is just too much, the first thing they say is that we should have asked for help.  

“It’s not that easy,” I - we - want to tell them. 

It’s not that easy to abandon a notion we’ve always known: that I - we - don’t need to be helped. How do you get rid of a decade or two of conditioning?  

I dream of impossible things. 

They hurt. They always do. 

I have dreams that stretch past the sky and into the milky way between us. 

I wish I could stop dreaming of impossible things. I pray that my mind is someday grounded in the reality that I anchor others to. 

I’ve been praying for years. 

It’s never come.