celeste_noelani | Ouch, my head

I am having a really tough time right now. I'm in a painful place. I'll be okay, but I'm here now and I'm not even trying to pretend I'm not. It's okay to be hurt. It's not negative; it's human.

Here is something I wrote in response to a tumblr thing that said "Only a fool trips on what is behind him."

I'm tired of being called a fool. And to all my survivor friends, I sure fucking hope that you are too.

***

I don't even know what this means, but I do know that we shouldn't be calling each other fools. We shouldn't be calling each other foolish for tripping, for tripping up, for falling down while others are saying hey, there is nothing there holding you down. Because we don't know what people have behind them. We don't know what people are carrying. We don't know what hard and heavy and weighty traumas people are still actively surviving, not because they want to still be traumatized, but because they have been traumatized and have been taught very early on that the only way past it is to get past it. It hasn't killed you. Move along, move along.

Nothing to see here.

But there is something to see. Something to look at and say, darling, why are you hurting? Why are you tripping over your past? Why is it following you around and tying you to all of the pain and regret and blame and shame and humiliation of not being over it already.

Well I'm not over my traumas. I don't know when I will be. And they come up again and again and a-fucking-gain and hold me down. I trip on them. I trip on my dead father and my dead mother and my dead boyfriend and my dead baby and my dead, dead, dead, dead, dead everybody.

I trip. I fall. I cry, I free fall from a height of being okay and being strong and being able to cook the kids breakfast and pay my bills on time and brush my hair after washing it. I live there, most of the time, in the forward stepping march of humanity and recovery and trying to make something of my life before I, myself, become one of the dead. I live there, but sometimes I step outside of it, not on purpose, but maybe because of an anniversary or a song or something called triggers that non-survivors don't really understand. I remember something, or I remember everything, and then my heart hurts so much that I can't stand to have my daughter touch me. And I kind of want to die.

But I'm not a fool. Yes, I've tripped, and it was over the past, but it's over my past and how dare anyone tell me that my past is behind me so I should get over it already. Get over it, get over it, get over it, yet not one actually knows how.

No one actually knows how.

Not my therapist, not my doctor, not my husband, and certainly not the positive thinking, self help, chin up, bumper sticker gurus who want us all to be better because they're the ones afraid of pain.

Well I'm not afraid of pain. I'm not afraid of remembering or being hurt so much that my whole body aches with the memory of burying someone else who loved you just for being you.

I get to be broken. It's okay to be hurting. It's normal. It's human to have these human reactions to this whole sordid business that we call life. I don't have to feel foolish or guilty or angry at myself for tripping over death and loss and grief and abuse and assault and the world's insatiable fucking need to turn us all into survivors.

I'm broken and I'm heartbroken and I'm triggered to the motherfucking rafters right now but I'm no fool. I'm just a girl, dragging behind me everything that I've already been through, collecting it all to help me through all of the shit that I've still got left to survive. Because I'm going to live for a goddamn long time, my friend, I'm going to survive. And if that means that I've got to have my survivor's toolkit at the ready, then okay.

Okay.