7.27.23

Sin vergüenza.

Trigger warning my boos:
Mental Health, Eating Disorders, Generational Trauma, Suicidal ideations, and many other hidden hurts that were surfaced for so many of us in the last few years. Feel free to pass on this read, stop reading, or take breaks.

March 2019
As I inched closer to my 40th birthday, I spent a lot of time reflecting on the end of a decade of life that felt so abundant. In my 30s, I finished my degree, got married, started a new career, and created a family. I looked back at all of it with gratitude, it was delicious, and also imperfect, but it was good. That decade of life was so good that I held it up as a victory over a very difficult childhood. I finally felt safe and secure in my life, for the first time ever. And then life started lifing. HARD.

In the early spring my mom had been very ill and underwent a leg amputation, I flew out to Flagstaff to help her and make sure she would be okay. In the early morning on the first day of summer, I woke up to discover my 2.5-year-old son Maxwell, who had been sleeping next to me, having a tonic-clonic seizure that lasted over 5 minutes. I thought I was watching our son die. We were rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Max remained in a post-ictal state for over an hour, his eyes were open and he was breathing but he was not speaking or responding to my voice. He went on to have two more seizures that week and underwent a barrage of tests where they ruled out things like brain tumors and cancer. I was so relieved that all his tests came back normal — there didn’t seem to be an obvious cause — but the seizures kept happening and he was diagnosed with unexplained epilepsy. Max was placed on anti-seizure meds. I was so distraught that I had to start taking anxiety medication so that I could show up as a functional caretaker for my family. I also took steps to get myself back into therapy to help cope with the post-traumatic stress and anxiety over his diagnosis. I reached out to several therapists through my insurance portal, most never responded and the few that did said they were not taking on new clients. Even with insurance, I struggled to find help.

The final trauma of 2019 had been slowly building and reached the point of total devastation in the late Fall. This one took my already compromised mental state and rendered me into a pile of dust. I am still not ready to get specific outside of therapy, but I can tell you what the fallout was. This trauma found every wound I had worked on for two decades to heal — and ripped them all wide open. It destroyed my self-concept, it caused an eating disorder relapse, it had me questioning whether my sense of reality was trustworthy, it physically changed the shape of my heart, and it revealed every way in which people I thought I could go to for help — were not equipped to show up for me, and to love me in the way needed. 

I lost faith and trust, and I no longer defer to the inherent goodness of people. It reenacted my biggest childhood traumas, and it had me telling myself things like “I am so broken that I am going to harm my family by existing, and it would be better for me to stop existing to save them.” I was suicidal. I was making plans. I wanted my life to end. I was emotionally bleeding out. I had been this deep once before as a teenager and I was able to get help. Therapy in my teens gave me the tools to see when it was time to reach out for support instead of running for the exits. I reached out to my brothers Chris and Nick, and they helped pull me out of that dark place. They saved my life. I am so grateful for that. With their love and support, I was able to get to a place of wanting to live and try to find a way to make something beautiful despite all the hurt.

Then the pandemic happened.

I have to admit that there is a certain amount of guilt over what I am going to say next, knowing how much trauma and loss COVID brought to so many. I still hurt for the communal loss, I was able to escape that trauma directly. For me, the pandemic was a period of relief. I was suddenly (and gratefully) no longer expected to show up in the world as my “self.” I did not have to climb into the skin of the self that I was before the devastation to create a protective buffer while I sorted my shit out. I didn’t have to pretend I was “okay” because NOBODY was “okay.” A week after the start of the pandemic, I turned 40. This marker of time felt especially biblical, scripturally the number 40 typically represents a period of testing, or struggle. I felt like I was stepping into Noah’s arc huddled with my family, floating amid the destruction of a wicked earth, wondering what God had planned next. 

I spent the early pandemic getting myself a good therapist. Dr.B specialized in trauma/PTSD, body image/eating disorders, pregnancy loss, and attachment wounds, and she also understood the ways that racism, sexism, and social injustice affect mental health. She had expertise in every wound I carried, but she was out of my insurance network. I was extremely fortunate to be able to afford her help, that privilege was also a byproduct of the pandemic — because I was working from home and not having to pay for childcare — I could finally afford a good therapist. The first thing Dr. B helped me address was BREATHING. Basic ass, deep breath in, deep breath out. I was stuck in fight or flight mode, so dysregulated, that I was breathing like an animal running or hiding from prey. Quick, shallow, and tight. Learning how to breathe was a baby step in the direction of healing.

In the past, healing for me has been a process that needs to happen away from the eyes of the world. In my 20s, healing looked like staying in, reading, sleeping, making art, feeding myself lovingly, and exercising lovingly. I would say nice things to myself, and I knew I was getting better when I would look in the mirror and feel like I was chillin’ with my best friend again. My healing always happened in solitude, where I was allowed to sob my fucking eyes out and let my nervous system return to its baseline. That 20-something version of me did not have the level of responsibility I have now though. While the pandemic gave me space from people outside of my family, being a mother of two small children meant I could barely go to the bathroom in solitude. 

To get some semblance of retreat, I removed myself as a face and body from all of my public-facing social media platforms, I removed any images and evidence of my personal life from the internet. It’s important to note, that a very hurtful part of the trauma of 2019 was that there were people outside of my safety bubble who fed on the chismé of my life. They were creeping on my social accounts as voyeurs to my pain, and removing myself from their view gave me some peace back.

This perception that people were rubbernecking the car wreck of my life led to me making some pretty sad decisions though. I stopped celebrating publicly what was good in my life. I stopped praising the wins. For me, praise was a way of showing myself that “You are okay now. You got out of those hard places and you are safe.” I stopped updating my portfolio, and I hit a massive personal creative rut. Just the thought of sharing anything resulted in me heaving imagined judgment onto myself, an odd coping skill that tries to stay ahead of the hurt by being prepared for it. That voice was so cruel though. It blamed me for injuries I didn’t inflict on myself. The inner critique faulted my intelligence, body, age, race, and gender for my suffering. I hated what I saw in the mirror, I couldn’t stand looking at photos of myself. I was not a good friend or caretaker of myself.

There is a James Baldwin quote, that resonates pretty well with this time:

“What the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.”

The world hurt me good. From childhood to adulthood I was not shown healthy love, I was not protected, and I was savagely bullied. So I stopped loving myself, I started hurting myself (again), and then I bullied myself.

With therapy and spirit work I started to heal enough to show up for my children, my career, and my students with joy. Little by little I backed off the self-blame, but I still struggled to show up for myself with anything other than grief.

While my self-love healing requires solitude, processing grief requires communal healing. I had lost so much, but there are some losses out there that are so heavily stigmatized by culture, and rolled up into fat balls of chisme, that choosing to grieve alone feels safer. Trying to white-knuckle my way through grief in such a closeted manner has made me feel desperately lonely, I tried to find sacred communities where people experiencing the same trauma could work through their grief and grieve together. The first community was online, membership-based, expensive, and led by/populated by primarily white women. That was not going to work for me. The second place was recommended by a friend of mine, her church (which she swore was very progressive) had grief groups for every kind of trauma you could think of. Except mine. When I contacted a church leader about why this was, he shut down the conversation. There was no community for me.

Communal healing helps us all remember that we have not been specially singled out to suffer so pitifully. As a community, you see God in others and understand that God is not part of, or party to the hurt—only to its healing. In community there is sacred witnessing. Because I did not feel safe talking about my grief, and I could not find a community, I found myself jealous of people around me who were able to publicly mourn a loss. The death of a loved one, the loss of a pregnancy. That’s how badly I wanted to feel free from hiding my grief. That envy made me feel grotesque. Eventually, I reached out to a friend, let my guard down, and discovered she had been through the exact same trauma a few years before. I was stunned that she had never talked to me about it. And then I began to recognize this trauma on women all around me. I reached out, I let them know I was checking in on them, and the confessions came pouring out. All of these women were white-knuckling through their trauma ALONE. With each one of them, I began witnessing, reflecting, and holding space, and they did the same for me. The air between us is sacred, an intimately small place of communal healing.

Three-plus years into recovery, I am still somewhere in the messy middle. With faith, therapy, family, and a couple of truly great friends, I’ve been able to imagine what I want for myself, and how to take care of myself — now. I’ve begun to think of that pile of dust of my former self, as decomposed material — like soil—and I’m planting a seed of hope in that soil. I’m learning how to put new roots down, care for myself better, and to protect myself in healthier ways. I’ve gained knowledge that I can pass on to my children, and hopefully break some of the generational trauma. The blindspots are a motherf*cker.

This level of honesty and authenticity is a level of restoration that lets me remain protective. This writing is another way of showing up for myself.

This is water. This is self-care. Sin Verguenza.

I’m going to start celebrating the wins again because they are so HARD EARNED. I’m updating my portfolio. I’m starting an MFA program at VCFA . I lead a panel in a public speaking event (which was unimaginable 3 years ago). I’m writing this from my own home, a place my husband and I recently purchased after 10 years of living with his parents to build up our savings. I want to honor these things.

Therapy has helped me see that life is a BOTH/AND. 

I’ve managed to hold a lot of my shit together, AND I barely made it. I still struggle, I have hard days AND I have really delicious moments of joy. I have a lot to be grateful for AND I am not as kind to myself as I should be. Max’s epilepsy is under control, AND I still worry a lot. There is a person starting to show up in the mirror that looks pleasantly familiar, AND I can still see the pain in her eyes, AND I am lovingly accepting her as-is.

I couldn’t do any of this until right now. This moment.

NOTE: If you feel you need help and guidance, reach out to a professional, or a trusted friend or family member who can hold space for you, call the 988 helpline. Know that not everyone will be able to support you, it’s not your fault, they aren’t capable. This includes therapists. Give these people grace, don’t blame yourself, take the Eckhart Tolle book recommendation and move on. Don’t settle for anything less than what God wants for all of us — PEACE.