Dear Little Me

One thing I don’t think we talk about enough is how isolating it can be to survive trauma and then have to figure out how to move forward again. In my experience, and I’m sure so many others, it feels as though the world was turned upside down after living through trauma. When something so life-altering happens, it’s as if nothing that made sense before does anymore. I lost so much trust in the world, in the system, and even in healing spaces. There were weeks I spent feeling like “Nobody knows what I went through. Nobody knows how much I had to survive. I feel so alone.”

For months, I tried blocking out the traumatic memories in my brain. At the time, I thought the best way to move forward and back into everyday society was to just forget about it. Because what happened there, in what feels like an entirely different world, felt too heavy to bring back. To this one. My body was physically here, in the present, surrounded by familiar family and friends. I started working again, pursuing a relationship, trying to keep up with all the everyday things that come with being in your 20’s.

But by avoiding what happened to me, it only created even more isolation, from myself. Eventually, I started to learn how to create space within myself to feel, process, and overtime, start to release that trauma from my body. Instead of pushing it down and denying it, I was facing it head on. But with that came so many more challenges. I was met with this ugly word called stigma, where a lack of understanding by professionals led me to feeling even more isolated. Thankfully, I was able to connect with some really amazing support networks, and not surprisingly, they knew exactly what it felt like to learn how to navigate a world after survival.

Eventually, I opened up to my therapist about how isolating navigating this world has been ever since, and she paused. She said, “Kelly, it’s sort of like you went to the moon. And now you’re trying to share what that life-changing experience was like with so many who haven’t personally been to the moon.” Yes. That is exactly what it feels like. “Here, in this space, however, everyone who comes here has traveled to the moon and back too. You are not alone.”

I sat silently for a few minutes, imagining all the other clients who come into not just her office, but to the other clinicians in that building too. And I realized then, that she was right. We may have all traveled to different parts of the moon, and maybe the moon at the time was in a different phase for the person sitting on the couch before me. But still, we all traveled to that moon and came back. And then I thought of everyone else who is also on a healing journey right now. And I realized that while yes, sometimes I do feel like healing can be a bit isolating at times, I am not alone.

I am an astronaut.