Sorry for the scary CW but it might be kind of necessary…

For a while now, some of us have been trying to convince the headmate holding back our earliest traumatic memories that whatever they are, we can handle it and process them in the safe place we’ve made of our life now.

After getting a glimpse, I’m now certain that while that is largely true, the reality is way more messy (as always, I guess).

So like, yes. We’re capable of reasoning with what happened, we can process it and understand we were never at fault, that we deserved better, etc.

But also, that shit is not just data on a hard drive. That is the environment that formed the hard drive itself. Our entire mind is built on scar tissue and you can’t pick at that without opening the wound.

As best as I can tell, I grew up with a father that I expected to kill me and my mum and sister. The memories of that time, I don’t know how intact they are, but I’m sure I could face them.

But I don’t have just a recording, I have those experiences. We are inseparable. It doesn’t matter how much I tell myself we’re safe and he’s dead and gone, that fear and shock is what our psyche was built out of. You can’t step in and out of that.

I guess somehow we jailbroke the fucked up, super damaged kid mind and figured a way to add some home brew psychic identity(/identities) on top of that, and that’s how we function.

“We can face whatever trauma there is” seems so naive now, that trauma is the scarred and scared mind of a tiny child that dissociated so hard they never existed. That’s not something that can be healed. That existence is pure trauma, it makes sense to leave it.

Anyway after… figuring all this out, I’m not sure where that leaves us. It’s partly a relief, that things there are as good as they can be, no more work necessary. Plus there’s validation in recognising the source of the pain was real.

But also, we’d bought into this idea of “healing” so much, but it’s like, you can’t heal when all your vital organs ARE the disease.

I dunno, it’s anti-climactic, not cathartic at all, but I guess that’s because it’s real.

Oh well, any time I need comfort I can remember how much he suffered as his cancer ate him away until there was nothing left. That’s as close to “closure” as we can hope for.