Trauma is tough because it separates a painful experience/memory/period into a recurring feedback loop, resulting in behavior and responses that can harm oneself and/or others.
I am thinking heavily about what it requires to heal from complex histories and pains. Through my own journey, I’ve learned it comes down to witnessing all the parts that have been separated and piecing them together. Wholeness.
Navigating mental illness and addiction in my history showed me a lot about the process of integration and how difficult it can be. Words can be elusive to illustrate what it means to repair a damaged past, but I’m grateful to have written the below as a reminder that it’s possible.
What split me up in the beginning was a system, a family unit, that brainwashed me to think that what was sensitive about me, what was emotional and deep, was wrong. I broke myself apart. Broken into pieces that were either in denial about the depth of feelings within, or so emotional, so eruptive I hurt everything around me, including myself.
I think about these fragments, they are synonymous with my youth. An Evan that did not have the words to describe his abandonment, berated friends, hooked up with men almost every day. An Evan that had no racial consciousness. He was afraid of the folks who looked like him, because they were the ones who made fun of him. Who punched his stomach and called him faggot for walking with a limp. This child had ideas of a person he could become, but the cracks between the bridges of faith to see them through, were too wide with trauma to even contemplate crossing.
When the pain of neglect and loneliness is so dense it seems like it will be impossible to heal, to assemble into a whole being, but this narrative has hope. It is not the narrative of some happy ending, but about the honesty of human experience, and the awareness that life can be ok, even when it’s hard. Here’s what changed. Perspective.
Intensity became passion. Sensitivity, turned into empathy. Grief transformed into depth. And pieces became a spectrum. I took myself out of a classification system on all levels and began to identify as a whole unit. One soul, part of a larger collective. Filled with nuance of experience, strength and hope. I do believe unity of the soul is the answer to this larger spiritual question. But it’s not easy.
For in order to see yourself as one beautiful vessel, it’s required to brave the task of holding space for all the parts. The good parts, the funny ones, the sad ones, the unsure ones. I am here at this moment, feeling all types of ways. I’m to the brim with gratitude that I’ve made it four years without substances. That what I feel is entirely mine and even if it’s hard, it’s a conscious experience I choose to stay present for.
See, I am slowly piecing these parts of Evan that shunned themselves from each other. I’m having tea with the resentful me, who is afraid of connecting closely to others. I’m laughing with the one that honestly just wants to fuck all the time and see’s no issue here in doing so.
I’m dancing from one color of living to another as gracefully as I can. And even if it’s not gracefully, that in itself is another beautiful part of this rolodex of a soul God designed me with.
Truthfully, there are still bits of my essence far from reach. They’re hurting in the dark and doing their best to call my name. And what I hope for, what I believe in is that with time, faith and help. I’ll hold their hands too. I’ll be there and I will love all of me that could ever possibly be.