Thinking Out Loud (6)
Sometimes I think about human behaviour and wonder if we’ve forgotten something as humans.
We’ve all heard the phrase:
“Be kind because you never know what someone is going through.”
It’s a beautiful perspective.
But as I get older, I wonder more often than not how many of us actually live by it.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the road I’ve had to walk down.
I asked for a simple accommodation, and instead of simply being able to ask for what I needed, I found myself once again in the position of having to explain, justify, and prove that my need is legitimate.
And I catch myself asking…
Why?
Why do I have to prove that my struggles are real before someone believes I need help?
The strange thing is, I don’t expect people to understand my experience.
How could they?
If you’ve never lived through childhood trauma, being the family scapegoat, you don’t know what that feels like.
If you’ve never lived with anxiety, you don’t know what that feels like.
If you’ve never spent years living in survival mode…
You don’t know.
You can care.
You may listen.
You can have compassion.
But unless you’ve experienced it, you really don’t know.
And that’s okay.
I don’t expect people to understand my experience. I just wish they’d stop assuming they do.
Because there’s a difference.
One creates curiosity.
The other creates assumptions.
People see who I am today.
They don’t see the little girl who was uprooted and displaced.
They don’t see the teenager who left home.
They don’t see the years of survival before I ever had the chance to actually live.
They see me today. In the now.
And they assume today tells my whole story.
For a long time, I thought I was fine.
Until I wasn’t.
Because my body just couldn’t take it anymore.
I don’t think people realize how a traumatized nervous system works.
It adapts.
It copes.
It survives.
Until there comes a day when it simply just can’t anymore.
I find myself explaining what happened, hoping that if people understand my past, they’ll understand my present.
The truth is…
Nothing happened.
Yet everything happened.
Years of living in fight-or-flight mode eventually caught up with me.
And now, every time I find myself having to explain my simple needs or my behaviour, it feels like I’m once again being asked to defend my existence instead of simply being believed.
I’m tired of having to stand up for myself.
At work.
In systems.
In situations where I should never have had to explain myself in the first place.
It feels like every so often, I’m standing in front of someone else trying to explain why I am the way I am.
And I’m tired.
Not because I don’t know how to fight.
Because I do.
I’ve spent most of my life fighting.
I don’t want to have my fight stance on all the time.
I don’t want to walk into every important conversation preparing for battle.
I don’t want my nervous system scanning every room, trying to figure out whether I’m safe.
I don’t want to feel like I always have to prove that what I’m experiencing is real.
I want peace.
I want to hear the silence of just crickets.
I want my system to remain in a state of calm.
And maybe that’s what this stage of my life is about.
Not surviving.
Not proving.
Not fighting.
Just learning what it feels like to finally put my guard down.
And just be.