During the year 2020, I exhausted the topic of trauma and the role it plays in our lives. Each Tuesday, I would spend my entire day writing. It was covid, we were all homebodies whether we liked it or not. Finding myself free of work and social obligations, I had the luxury of an entire day to devote to writing. Each blog post took me around 8-10 hours to write. After the first draft would come around six re-writes. I became familiar with the process. I would find myself wholly frustrated, tasked with converting feelings into words. Around the 4th draft, I would see it start to take shape. The last two re-writes were the yes, yes, YES of triumph. I would post it, link to it on my social media then hide for 12 hours, feeling vulnerable and exposed. The following day I would wake up with the next topic already forming in my mind. Of all the things 2020 brought me, I miss this the most. The luxury of an entire day with nothing to do but write.

During this time, I learned so much about trauma. I continued to meet with my therapist online. I was one of the few clients she had that did well during those months of uncertainty. I thrived in it. I’d had some really rough years leading up to 2020. I took it as the universe telling me I could sit this one out. Cut off from everything and everyone that had been draining my energy, it was suddenly all flowing to me. I leaned into the pain, bathed in it, sobbed with it. If pain ever can be a thing of luxury, 2020 was this to me. I became more authentic than I’ve ever been in my life. Everything in my life became better because of it.

I digress. I wasn’t even planning on writing about my current life tonight or my very sporadic posting this year. The world opened up again. I have two jobs I love. I’m doing fun things – making TikToks and raising my monarchs. I’ve been reading again. People are coming down to visit and we are traveling after a year off.

My writing has always come from a place of pain. It’s an integral part of who I am. I would not trade my pain for it because it’s made me a person of empathy and depth. I am actually a very funny person. I am fun to be around. Wonderful things happen in my life. It’s just that none of those things give me the urge to write. After I am gone, if anyone happens upon my journals they will find gaps that are years long. One journal took me 10 years to fill. What was missing, the good times I was living. My lack of writing is a sign I’m doing well. But, over the course of a life, it leaves a bleak snapshot, a rather one-sided story of my pain and the growth that comes from it.

I’ve always been drawn to the work of Van Gogh. I’ve felt we were alike in some way, both people who see great beauty and darkness in the world. In his madness, he used the most vibrant of yellows and blues. He could see the night sky in motion. There’s a great sadness in his art. I feel it as my own. There’s a great sadness in my writing. It’s an expression of pain but, if you notice, it’s pain that is always defeated in the end. In this way, it does have a happy ending. Recently I was wondering if everyone sees life from this perspective. That they triumphed. They got where they were going. They shed the trauma that held them to the darkness. They ended up being ok, I’m drawn to books and movies along this theme. While I enjoy funny movies – I want to feel human, I want to not feel alone. I want to know there are others like me. I want to believe in a world that is beautifully painful and in people who become beautiful through their pain.

My therapy has continued during this time. I’m back in my therapists’ office again. She sees a lot of children so her office doubles as a play space. It’s decorated with strings of star lights, emoji pillows, and plastic figurines. There are no windows in the room, which I know has to be difficult for her day after day, but it is a cozy refuge for me, in the hour I spend with her.

A few weeks ago she asked me (in a very therapist way) if I really want to lay my trauma down. I was surprised by what came out after that. Because part of me truly doesn’t want to. Fears not being “me” anymore without it. Fears losing my ability to write and to connect to others. I like people with problems more than I like people without them. (And what’s worse, a person who ignores their problems and pretends they don’t have them.) Even that I didn’t want to lose her. She is the person who knows everything I know about myself. It’s a safe place with her. No matter how awful I’ve felt about some of the things that have come out of my mouth, she’s never acted shocked or that she thinks less of me. And I mean, we can’t be friends if we ever call this off. So.

Laying my trauma down – what does that mean? When I talk about the physical hardships I’ve faced, it makes it even more amazing that I’m a fitness instructor at age 51. When I talk about the men who only pretended to love me, it makes what I found with my husband more of a miracle. When I talk about my depressive episodes it makes me all the more grateful I didn’t give up. I would have missed now. Trauma does give us depth. It does connect us to other people. And everyone loves an underdog story. It’s even better to live it.

So no, I don’t want to ever reach a point of not telling the story of my life. I hope to get to the point where the heartbreak is absent from the telling of it. I hope to reach the point I can talk about certain things without feeling the heartbreak of them, but I will not stop telling it. I’ve only just begun. This was my year to write my memoir. I wrote one a few years ago, but I have a very different story to tell now. I think then my eyes were only open about 30% of the way. My life story was in battling the depressive episodes I’ve faced in my life. You know what, every single one of them was brought on by some asshole. I’d rather talk about that.

(I’m going to do something daring and post this without the requisite re-writes. This might be a new thing for me.)

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