The numbness

The blog posts now are starting to follow the trajectory of the book so if you have not read the two prior blog posts to this one, I would highly suggest going back and reading those first.

My mothers tragic passing changed my life forever. The world has never been the same for me since that day and I have never felt the same again either. That childlike, care-free, whimsical side of myself left my body and I don’t think I’ve ever gotten it back. My family has also never been the same since that day. My relationship with myself and my father has never been the same. I felt for many years as though my life was suspended in that day. Yes, time had passed, I had gotten older, things had changed, I had changed but I was still that lost, scared, ten year old girl sitting in that hospital room alone. Alone. I felt alone for many years after that day.

This may or may not be true but I often think of traumatic events as something that can bring people closer together or tear them apart. For my family, from my perspective, it tore us apart. It was almost like my mother was the glue that held the whole ecosystem together and without her, nobody was quite sure anymore how to interact with each-other. This was the time where I felt abandoned. Abandoned by my mother who was not part of this world anymore and abandoned by every single one of my living relatives who never treated me the same way ever again. That feeling of being in but also out grew exponentially after this event. I was watching a television show recently and one of the characters on tv was remembering a death they had experienced in their family and was recounting the outpouring of love you receive in the aftermath. You experience this tremendous loss, your community gathers around you and supports you, cooks you meals, makes sure that you don’t have to think too much or try too hard at anything. And then they leave too. And then you’re left alone. Left with nothing in your life looking or feeling the same anymore. Left with not knowing who you are or how to act or how to be. How to get out of bed, get dressed, go to school now that everything had changed. How does one go on after something like this? When your life is changed forever in a way that is literally permanent. Theres no undoing the death of a loved one. There’s no changing the loss of your mother. 

When we got back to Oregon I remember getting to our home and it had been covered in large pieces of paper with things written on them and drawings of this or that. They were from my classmates in elementary school. Gosh, before that trip I felt like my life was just beginning. I had spent the last five years of elementary school getting to make so many friends, have so many new experiences. Much of my friend group even petitioned our parents to let us apply for this special program at the middle school where we would each get our very own computer. Which, for the year 2000 was a pretty big deal. Now I was getting sympathy cards and grief posters taped to my home. I remember feeling nothing at all. I remember feeling like nobody asked me directly how I was doing or what I needed or if I was okay. I remember feeling like I was forced to go back to school long before I was ready. I remember feeling like I didn’t have a voice or a choice and like my opinion didn’t matter. I remember feeling like I not only lost my mother but everything I loved when my Dad made us move to an entirely new city six months after she died. Loss compounded on loss compounded on more loss. Let’s count that up for a second. I lost my mother, my familial relationships changed in a way that they would never fully recover from, I lost my friends and every environmental thing that was familiar to me and I lost my home. The last place we were happy, where everything was okay, where her spirit filled up the space in the way that you couldn’t ignore. That is probably why my father insisted we move. He kept a voicemail on our phone for months after and would listen to it often. I bet he couldn’t bare to spend one more minute in that house than he had to. But what about me? What about what I wanted or what would’ve been best for me? Did you ever even think about me?

Did you? If you did, you never told me. 

For those of us who endure traumatic experiences and do not have the tools to process and work through them in a healthy way (or the support), will often engage in patterns of behavior that ensure we are traumatized over and over again. It is only once we realize what we are doing to ourselves (yes, we play a part in what happens to us) and look inward that we can start the work to develop new patterns that will stop this cycle. This is exactly what happened to me. After my mother died I shut down and became a shell of who I was before. I was in survival mode. Much like I described before, I felt like that ten year old girl, sitting in that hospital room alone, confused and stuck. My body likely employing this coping skill because the idea of having to rationalize the fact that my mother was never going to walk through our front door again was much too difficult for my ten year old self to imagine. Coupled with the fact that I feel like my family, out of their own grief, let her disappear. I don’t remember anyone really talking about her again. I don’t remember people intentionally trying to tell me stories about her and who she was, asking me how I was feeling after her death. I remember people moving on but doing so in a way that made me feel like I was supposed to move on too and I couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Didn’t want to. The grief process of adults and children is different. Adults have fully formed brains that know how to interpret information and process it in a way that a ten year old never could. I think sometimes that the people in my life must not have been aware of that. I feel like if they would have, they would have done things differently. Taken better care of me. So, because of this my only option was to become numb. Being numb is a hell of a lot easier than actually dealing with the emotions inside you. Well….at least for a while. 

I remember not so much the content or context of what it was like to move to Bend but I do remember the way I felt. We drove up to our new house, a home that I had never seen before and that had been chosen without me and all I felt was this sense of discomfort. My grandmother came with us and a childhood friend from my old neighborhood did as well. I felt like everyone was putting on a show. I could tell that the people around me were trying to make me feel comfortable but they in fact didn’t actually feel comfortable themselves. They were trying to convince me that everything was going to be okay, that this was a safe space; my new home. I didn’t have much of a concept of home anymore because it was never about the home, it was about the way I felt in the home, the people who were there. The one thing that could give me a sense of home was gone and never coming back. I have an immense fondness for the home that we lived in when I was in elementary school, the one where we were a family, where we were happy. In my life where I am now, I am slowly starting to develop a sense of home again and its taken me twenty two years and a hell of a lot of intention to find that feeling again. You really can’t just pick up your life and move on to the next thing after a traumatic event. Life, our minds, our bodies, our relationships to those things do not and can not work that way. If it feels like it does, you can be certain that you are hiding something from yourself. 

Many years later, I would start to become intimately aware of just how much the numbness I employed had actually cost me. A cost I’m not sure I would ever pay again.

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The best worst year of my life

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A very vulnerable story