On Tuesday a received a comment on my blog from a fellow survivor: ‘I was up all night working through some stuff and I felt like I hit a wall… I needed a good example and then I remember about your blog.”

I was also up the night before- hitting my own wall. I realized reading this comment that part of what I wanted my blog to be was writing about the real moments of finding myself and my home after trauma- which includes the times I don’t handle it so well. I have been going to therapy for 10 years, and I naturally brought my frustrations with myself and the wall I was hitting to therapy:

“It was frustrating, I was fallling back into old thought patterns; adult me recognized what was happening but the younger versions of myself were not hearing it. I cried for hours. Nothing helped: I tried coping skills, medicine, and stratagies and nothing ‘fixed it’. The following day I got my period, had an in-person interview, MG&E came to work on our meter, our dryer was delivered and then had to be returned and on top of that I still had all of my normal parenting and household stuff to do. It was awful”

Me to my therapist, paraphrased.

After thirty minutes of therapy and more explanation into the events of the day and my reactions to them; why I was frustrated that different parts weren’t listening to my higher self and expressing wanting to develop more skills to processing situations like these… my therapist turns to me and goes: Tay, you’re human.

One of the themes that comes up regularly for me in therapy is this theme of me reconciling with the fact that no matter how much I work on my stuff, go to therapy and develop coping skills to react differently to situations I will, inevitably, not react the way I want to sometimes. I identify as a recovering perfectionist because sometimes my drive to get an ‘A’ in therapy, utilize coping skills in difficult moments, and prove that I am worthy of love because I work on my trauma get in the way of my healing and self-love. These myths are so dangerous, because when I fail to meet my own unrealistic expectations… I feel unworthy, and I fall into old patterns.

Therapy, coping skills, strategies, and safety plans are essential for MY healing and they guide me in becoming who I want to be, but the culmination of everything I work on in therapy- is not who I am. I continuously work on giving myself grace and allowing myself to make mistakes, but it isn’t easy. My first thought seeing that readers comment was: ‘Good for them, they were in a tough place, and we’re able to identify what they needed and tried to meet that need by turning to a resource in their toolbox- that takes so much bravery’. I thought about how that is what I wanted my blog to be: a resource, and a reminder that folks are not alone. I am proud of that survivor- so why doesn’t that translate when I look at my own attempts to cope when I had hit my own wall? The answer: I don’t like being human.

It’s not just about wanting to be perfect all of the time, the trauma I was experiencing taught me that one mistake could mean my death, if I said or did the wrong thing at the wrong time, it could be fatal. BUT, I don’t live in the abuse anymore. I am safe, but my body and my mind didn’t feel that safety. Helping myself learn that being human is okay means that I am helping a younger version of myself unlearn the belief that if I make a mistake then I will die.

I want the younger me to rest unburned without unrealistic expectations. So I guess we’re human, but we’re not happy about it.