Healing from complex ptsd is a strange thing to experience. One minute you’re fine, and the next you’re staring out a window with tears rolling down your face unsure of why your eyes are even welling up in the first place. Something feels heavy inside your mind, yet identifying what feels heavy would be like trying to pick up thousands of tiny glass shards all at once.
You have no idea where to start and no idea where it ends, you don’t feel like the same person you used to be, simply because you’re not. The trauma changed you, and while this version of you is still you, you don’t recognize yourself anymore. The way you see the world is different now, it seems like things turned sideways, a bit darker…
But everyone else still sees you as you, they don’t know what to say or what to do that would help you make this new version of you more whole or complete, and so you isolate and think that maybe if you go away for a long enough time you’ll be able to emerge again existing with the other humans in the real world, without the nightmarish thoughts and lackadaisical unfamiliar presence that is now…you.
So you recluse and do the things you think will help you get back to yourself. But then you realize that the idea of getting back to yourself is partly you just living in the past, denying who you are in this very moment. You realize that in itself is a tragedy and adds to the pain that realizes the present moment is being torn from your hands and you didn’t even realize it.
So you start to feel your way through the mud and the grief. You allow the heartache to live and breathe instead of trying to fix it. And even though you feel weird and discombobulated, you find reasons to smile again and take deep breaths that help you let go of wanting to make sense of those thousands of pieces of tiny glass shards. You learn to let the pain coexist beside you and you stop fighting it, and one day at a time, you start to embrace this new version of yourself because you realized that no matter what you do that you’ll never be able to “get back” to who you used to be, and that that’s okay.
Because this version of you has armor now and that’s pretty cool…and as you continue to remind yourself through the pain that life is growth and life is change, and that even though you can’t always see where it’s going, something sits in the back of your mind telling you that this season will one day come to an end and that there will be a day that comes about when you realize you haven’t even thought about it, a day when your lungs feel a little less heavy, and smiling doesn’t feel so foreign, and you feel peace knowing that change is the only thing that is constant.
