It’s always other people who see me before I see myself. Such was today in one-on-one. Apparently I’m more articulated and animated, today, despite feeling sluggish. I keep forgetting my “tired” is most folks’ baseline. Or, it’s mental before it’s physical. As is today, I am mentally drained, but physically animated.
Anyway, I do feel like I’ve moved on from my relapse — because it is a relapse, not a meltdown, and we have to keep it framed as such since we’ve already proven it can be almost completely mitigated with routines and good sleep hygiene. With this, I’m starting to notice that there are a lot of energy drains in my life, which aside from routine management and good sleep hygiene, remove necessary energy to mentally process therapy and skills that I am learning in class…meaning if I had the energy that I use toward those drains, I’d have even more leverage when the retraumatizations happen. One thing we have not done — and most likely cannot do — is mitigate sources of triggers for said retruaumatizations.
As I grow and develop a more stable sense of self, I will notice the world clap back. Because of how I am essentially trained to be hypervigilant, I will also often see nuances within the world that might indicate this without actually meaning it. For example — distances of time where people are absent don’t always mean they are ignoring me. Since abandonment trauma and narcissism are a thread in my life, this could be (could be my ass, it 100% is) a trigger. I start looking for where I went wrong, what I said, if I wasn’t appropriate, or if I was rude or negative. Or if i was the big hairy monster with green and purple polka dots taking up too much space in the room or at the table.
In one-on-one, today, we talked about that big hairy monster actually being a version of me that really wants to come out…and is not a monster at all. I see that projected version of myself and want to hide it away because I don’t want people to see it and react negatively. That monster is the part of me that doesn’t want to be quiet when injustices happen. It doesn’t want to be small when the room gets too quiet. It doesn’t want to take a back seat when it knows it can help. But it wants to disappear when it feels like it made a mistake. It wants to run back into the cave that I’ve been working so hard to coax it out of for the past year and a half. It wants to give itself a new name and new life somewhere where it feels like it might be safer. It wants everyone around it to forget it was even there.
So we make new fences and safe checkpoints within ourself to let it know that it’s okay to feel this way or act this way, and it’s not something to run away from. It’s okay to have courage when nobody else is willing to step up. It’s okay to be angry as hell at people who formed you into the person you have to be to protect that monster. It’s okay to be confident and faithful to your foundational beliefs without the need to relate them to the opinions and understanding of others. It’s okay to live loud and proud. It’s okay to be selfish. Routines establish baseline. Daring to step forward, to step out, to step with confidence — that’s what comes next.
Here’s to well-managed routines and good sleep hygiene, and here’s to stepping forward and stepping out without shame.
