So. Many. Posts.
So hard to know what order to do some of them in, but anyway here’s one – even though I do have others that will be talking about recovery (from a year of trauma therapy from sexual assault and all of that, in case you happened to find this out of nowhere and are new here).
So, anyway.
Being “better” or “reasonably better,” at least really is a weird feeling… I feel like I hear the phrase “picking up the pieces” a lot after a tragedy of any kind, and I think I kinda get it fuller now…
Because it feels like over the last year, like if my whole life were this gorgeous house, that it had been traaaashed – just totally, stuff is EVERYwhere. Vases, dishes, anything breakable – it’s all broken – shards of glass are all over the floor.
There are rips and tears all over the furniture. Things do not look good.
Is it all sexual assault guys fault? Did he do this whole thing to me? Or is it my fault for not handling this better (or other reasons). Or is it a mix of a lot of different things?
At this point, for this specific post, I don’t think it matters too, too much what percentage of what made my life feel like this. It just matters that the couch is ready to be reupholstered.
The couch, the dishes, all this stuff – it’s all the different things that make me me. It’s my dreams, passions, desires, work, fitness, ethics, hobbies, relationships, all of it. Anything you can imagine that is a part of me/my life is in this (metaphorical) house.
And so, some things seem more easily salvageable than others… like huh, this (metaphorical) pillow just has a little stain. Let’s get a Tide pen or something.
Everything feels like it will take work, but some things seem like they’ll take less work than others, at least.
And picking up the pieces is a weird feeling. It used to feel all the time like, “how will I even get through the day?” (Kind of as though the house was being trashed around me, and I was just trying to survive.)
And now, it’s cool to be in more of a calm place, where, sure, the house is still a mess, but it’s settled a bit, I can see the mess, and be able to start to think about other things.
(But it’s also quite overwhelming to think about how much work has to go into some of those things.)
Friendships that were strained aren’t magically okay when I’m better. My muscles don’t just immediately have the same memory/strength for workouts I loved. (And on and on and on.) It’s cool to be in the “last stage” of this trauma recovery (or, at least if not the last, it has to be close to the last). But I can totally see it’s gonna come with its own unique set of problems. So, I guess let’s get to cleaning up that room.
[This is a post from the sexual assault series.]