I hurt myself again recently. I didn’t want to reveal this to my therapist because it’s one
of the few times she gets to break confidentiality. What does that even mean? Will she
send me to a place where I’m forced to get better?
I’ve been there once, voluntarily. A mistake. I don’t want to tell her that, either, because
I’m usually faced with congratulatory praise instead of a gentle silence.
I told her anyway. The part about my self-admission, not about the self-chastising.
She noted, “You were fighting for your life, kicking and scratching for a chance to stay
alive. Against your body’s will, you chose life over death.” She did not glorify my trauma as an act of courage. Instead, she understood that I am exhausted. Tired of trying to reignite the drive all life is supposed to carry inside. I don’t know if mine ever grew past the size of a waxy birthday candle, the kind that melts quickly and ruins the cake. She reassured me, “I specialize in complex trauma.”
One session together, and she’s already taught me valuable wisdom: Boundaries
protect from the inside, too. A perspective shift that has the power to light up an
electric heat lamp, one that can defrost my demeanor.
No, it’s not the same as reigniting the furnace of my soul—the one that nurtures tealight dreams into forest fires—but it’s better than sitting here, trembling. So I take in her words and sit in the possibilities. I reflect on my journey thus far.
I’ve grown comfortable letting my own arrows, aimed at my own mirror, bury into my
neck, fingers, ribs. I’m less empty this way. With these wounds, I declare to nobody but myself, “My life has meaning and that is to heal.” Without mature boundaries, someone
else’s flames can reach me easier. I already know this. It’s just…I’d rather burn than
remain trapped in solitary resinous fears.
The pain is not beautiful; it is simply painful. Still, it’s been easier pretending I enjoy
martyr-hood than rejecting a life etched in unfinished wood. Wood that leaves my
fingers splintered from all the hours of work I have to put in. Because truthfully, as
much as I hate picking broken pieces of myself out of the unbroken parts of me, it has
kept me entertained for this long. Busy. Warm. Alive, somehow.
Using tweezers, I extract the foreign objects. I command them to leave.
The next time I return to my carving, the splinters return, too. Business, as usual. Still,
we have an agreement. I keep carving. They keep hurting me. I keep picking because
at the end of it, I grow a bigger pile of firewood. Painstaking as it is to collect them, it’s better I put the tiny pieces to potential use than to discard them and regret it later. To
any other person, I’m sure it seems unnecessarily laborious… Not now, not any time
soon, but I’m sure it will be worth it. How else will I survive a blizzard?
It was only our intake session. Meaning, I was instructed to fit my life’s struggles into a
forty minute session—ideally told in concise bullet points rather than detailed tangents.
“Let me know if you need a break.” She interrupted my thought process. As a
professional, she saw my blank stare and knew something was up. “I understand some
of this might be triggering.”
I nodded my head and pressed on. I explained to her, “I’ve spent my whole life
anticipating rock bottom to get deeper. And it has. Every time. So deep I could never
fathom handing my faith over to a god who punishes mistakes—a god who would send
me into a corrupted snowstorm without a flicker of shame. So deep I have crafted a
home using weak splinters of my childish hope.”
My true response, however, I kept to myself. Which is, triggering complex trauma is the
least of my worries. In fact, it feels good to stick my feet into a freshly smothered fire,
where hot coals still glow slightly. Where recycled tinder waits hoping for its chance to
be rekindled. I wanted to tell her, “My memory triggers the rekindling daily. My pain is
the rekindling. But don’t worry—my heart is a natural snuffer, and I enjoy sitting in the
ashy death that was once my lively blaze. At least I’m less glacial this way. Less of a
liability.”
