Fox and Wolf: It’s been a /Year/
I’m sitting here on a Saturday afternoon, leaning against my glass door and looking out on my terrace as I wait for my second dose of medication to kick in so I can stop feeling like utter hell.
I’m waiting for this, and I notice myself start to dissociate; which is perhaps one of the worst experiences ever. “Not today” I think, as I forcibly push myself off of the door and walk over to my kitchen. “Not today.”
As I’m preparing my ready to eat salad, I wonder why I’m experiencing this now. Yeah, I have not kept to my schedule this weekend and yes, I had a hard week but I got to take a pretty big break from that yesterday…
Why am I so off?
And then it hits me:
It’s been a little over one year.
It’s been a little over one year and while there’s a lot in my life that has stayed the same; everything has changed.
As I sit down to eat my salad, it kind of comes crashing down. No wonder I’m facing my trust issues in 2021. I broke up with a partner of years in 2020. For poly folks, it seems everyone’s polycules are breaking up. And that reflects the preliminary knowledge when it comes to non poly situations
I moved out from the only family I had for years and discovered entirely new ones in plain sight. Somehow, my other relationships and my friendships remained intact and I ended up with two new loved ones and a life partner. I switched jobs and said goodbye to a 20K salary increase and goodbye the perks of paying adjusted rent in a household of two other techies. Hello living on my own and welcome back into my life to my beloved family.
How the fuck did all of this happen in a year?!
I’m no stranger to trauma, I’m a trauma survivor, I’ve written extensively about it on this blog. But as a coworker recently pointed out to me, people are going to have 2021 breakdowns. And then I realized: The entire nation of America is going to have a 2021 breakdown. And while other countries have managed the pandemic much better than in the USA, the impacts have still been devastating. The entire world is going to have a 2021 breakdown.
I honestly don’t know if anyone is ready for that or even can be.
But, I know a lot about having breakdowns. As a doctor once explained to me, you breakdown when you feel safe because you’re processing. That’s why people are able to survive traumatic situations with incredible skill and poise and then fall apart afterwards (in this day and age, often publicly and leading to a lot of WTF!?! moments). You can’t go through something traumatic like a global pandemic and not process it, you can’t return to some new semblance of normal without processing it. Everyone has to process it eventually.
And that involves breaking down, in private or in public. That involves a lot of really hard grappling with how things have changed and they will never be the same. But there’s a lot of beauty there, too. The metaphor of a phoenix is one of my favorites, from the ashes comes regrowth and healing. The opportunity for new things. This is a pattern echoed in nature by trees whose seed pods require a forest fire to open and release new spores.
But, trauma and healing from it has side effects. It affects those around us. It affects our jobs and our friendships and how we think about our own futures. And while the good news is that like the phoenix, we can heal and rise from the ashes, the bad news is that constructive forces are also often destructive forces as well.
But as any transgender person can tell you, dealing with trauma is a hard and complicated process. It is the process of reconciling with loss, the loss of a person that you could have been and will never be and accepting who you are now. If I had been born cis, what would my life be like? If I had known sooner, what would the daily impacts be? Who would I love, where would I work, how much less would I spend on therapy? People come to different conclusions. For me, the conclusion I came to is that I am who I am now, and so I move forward and try to be kind to myself, try to ask myself “what would that young girl who you were before GamerGate and before your DID got symptomatic and before you ended up on a stranger’s couch: What would she want? How would she view the world?” It’s a process, for me, not an end goal. Because I will never be who I was before what happened to be. I will never be that mystical me.
But I can still carry on her dreams.
It’s March 13th and it feels like this pandemic is coming to some kind of an end, the winds of spring are in the air and hope is on the horizon, floating amidst the dreams.
