i’ve been recovering and healing from trauma for a long time. going through intentionally dehumanizing trauma makes for a long and complicated journey afterwards. what do you do with that?
for the longest time, i felt like a zombie. i sort of… was a zombie, in the most literal sense and metaphorically. in the innerworld, i was a reanimated corpse as a result of what i endured. i struggled with my identity for a long while. where my personhood should have been… there was a hole. a gap between myself and the threshold of humanity. how do you make something out of nothing?
after some time, i began to define myself by what i wasn’t. that seemed to be the easiest way to make heads or tails of who i was. i wasn’t exactly alive, so i was dead. i wasn’t straight, but i wasn’t “lesbian enough,” so i was bi. i didn’t experience attraction the way other people did, so i was ace. i wasn’t a christian, so i was an atheist.
you get the picture.
time spent with myself has changed not just me, but also my relationship with myself. i’ve started to take up positive space instead of negative space. before, it was like i was guessing how a cookie looked by seeing the hole the cookie cutter left behind. i didn’t see the icing or sprinkles or any nuance at all, just a shape around an empty space. now… my act of being is what defines my parameters.
i am a nonbinary femme lesbian. i am demisexual. i am a witch, a spiritual practitioner, a pagan. i am a poet, an artist.
i am alive.
when in recovery, you get to make a lot of choices. for a lot of us, that may be the first time you get to make a choice at all. you can do your best with the cards you’re dealt, accepting what happened and making changes to move forward. you can take a wrecking ball to it all and rebuild from the ground up. you can squint and see what’s left of you to salvage before gradually molding yourself into something new. something, something, the ship of theseus…
i think what i did was raise myself, starting over as if i was never their daughter at all. i didn’t tear down the ways that they molded me. i released that version of me entirely.
if you’ve ever seen corpse bride, then you know the final scene we see of emily where her soul is so fulfilled that she turns into hundreds of butterflies and disappears into the moonlight. i think that’s what happened to that version of me they broke down and buried somewhere. that person has been dissolved into a swarm of wings.
what i learned
you cannot kill me in a way that matters.