There are some points in life which feel so utterly out of our control that it’s difficult to find a positive spin or an adequate meaning for their representative chaos. In some instances these juncture points may have been self-inflicted. Even so, it still seems impossible to find a silver lining or even justify what the hell just happened. If I look back on the last 2.5 years of my life, I see a person that I barely recognise. Someone who retreated into themselves for a whole number of reasons. There was a lot of trauma, a lot of things were not properly dealt with as the response was just to simply continue on. But what I didn’t realise is that these events had somehow altered my DNA, in a way that changed me without me even consciously knowing.
When I look back I can see how those compounding traumas which kept piling on forced me to become a more muted version of myself. I just kept slowly making myself smaller and smaller, in order to hide or dodge anything else negative that would come my way. I found myself guarding my heart, no longer wearing it on my sleeve. I found myself to be a quieter version of who I was; unrecognisable in my willingness to placate others by dismissing my own desires. I was completely fear driven because my body and my entire psyche was consistently in flight or fight mode. My nervous system found itself on overdrive as its natural state; I still feel this sensation to this day in which my chest feels tight most of the time.
I also found myself being able to compartmentalise in a way that in the past has been completely foreign to me. It has meant that I find it hard to be outwardly emotional at times. As if there is a barrier that’s been put up and I’ve just locked my emotions away somewhere that even I can’t access. If I reflect on this ability, the only thing that presents is that this isn’t who I am. In actuality I am the person that leads with their heart. I am deeply affected by the simplest of things. But my traumas have somehow resulted in an emotional blockage as a protection mechanism which is now doing the opposite of protecting me; it’s harming me.
Emotional suppression, in and of itself, is usually an automatic and habitual process of pushing feelings out of conscious awareness before you fully experience them. Suppressing how you feel out of trauma and fear is an active but temporary nervous system response; a learnt safety if you will. It enables a sense of emotional numbness or mutedness which in actuality affects decision making, especially for someone like me who has always been ruled by their emotions. My ability to feel has been my moral compass and without it I have made some questionable and impulsive choices that have unwittingly hurt the people I love the most. That emotional numbness activated as a coping strategy that was most definitely made subconsciously. It became an active defence mechanism, but one that led me down the wrong path.
Looking back now, I admit that I have made many mistakes recently. I don’t pretend to justify these. All I can do now is reflect on what got me to this place, delve deeper into healing myself and hope I can turn up tomorrow as a better version of myself. One who doesn’t hurt others in order to preserve and protect themselves. I can reflect on how trying to suppress my emotions and who I truly am has inevitably caused chain reactions that have harmed people deeply. For that all I can say is that I am sorry; more than they will ever understand. All I can say is that I promise to try to do better and attempt to get back to being that person that led with her heart, felt every emotion and still lived life vicariously and consciously through her compassion and empathy. I believe I will be that person again; maybe not today, but potentially tomorrow.
I blog for Change. 