Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
—The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. ELIOT
I have been conducting an in-depth study on human behavior. Or rather, spent the better part of 45 years stumbling around making mistakes.
Oh god. Some of them were so public, so excruciating in how I exposed myself that I could crawl into a cave for the rest of my life just thinking about them. (Part of me would find some comfort in that.) Or I could drink myself to death. (I failed at that, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. See: “excruciating” and “public” above for reference.) Some I brought on myself. Others, notsomuch.
I could die over them or I could chalk it all up to experience. I could look at it through a lens of research: I was figuring out what does not work for me. And for those who want to point and judge me, let them benefit from the wisdom of my challenges and missteps. Let them use my pain to learn what NOT to do.
In the name if research, I discovered some excellent traits along the way. While trauma makes a comfortable home in your nervous system and isn’t easily expunged, survival can give us useful tools. For instance, when my safety is threatened, I will leave a home, a job, or a relationship. Not easily. Not without leaving shreds of skin attached to the Band-Aid I have to ripped from my flesh, but I will do it. But we can’t live there in survival mode. For one thing, it gets awfully tiring. At some point we have to graduate from surviving to actually living.
That’s where it gets hard.
Survival to me can look very quiet. It means making myself small and unnoticeable. It means not calling attention to myself or making a joke of me. “Oh, it’s only me! It doesn’t matter. YOU matter.”
Example: I spent the aftermath of sexual assault apologizing, excusing, blaming and chastising myself over being dramatic about it. “Am I overreacting or under reacting?” I asked a friend at the time. But only I had the answer.
I knew the truth. But that truth required me to take action I didn’t know if I was strong enough to take. So I tried to deny it and ignore it. I tried to excuse it and make it smaller. I examined this piece of truth like a detached specimen and tried to regard it objectively: Was it real? Was it my fault? Was it even a big deal?
Other people can gaslight you, but never as badly as you can gaslight yourself. I decided to keep it very quiet. I tried to fast-forward through to the forgiveness part and to try to keep everything as normal as possible. My whole world was fabricated on a careful construct of relationships that formed an almost physical foundation for how I lived my life. I did not want to disturb that. Who would?