Let’s Talk About Trauma and Destigmatizes it

As a growing child I experienced and felt things, and many times I wished I had names to be able to address whatever emotional feelings I felt at the moment. And like all many people in my generation when we turned to our parents, they either brushed it off or attributed it to superstitious reasons.

As a grown-up woman, I sometimes believe that things would have been different if I knew from the youngest of age that it’s okay to feel what I felt. To have the assurance to let my emotions run their course. As someone who turned to books for answers and when I was old enough to own a phone, LOL. I would download every psychological book I could find in hopes to understand.

I discovered a couple days ago that a close friend of mine suffered from PTSD, she grew up with an alcoholic-abusive father, she always had a problem with any excessive sound, from banging of a door to a scream to a speaker with volume that hits to fifty, such sounds seem to trigger traumatic memories that hadn’t been voiced in years and she would go into hyperventilating state in seconds. I know that many of the reasons why her mental state worsened was that she never knew that such events can mark an individual more than they can believe or are aware of.

The mentality we all grew up with, is that certain feelings are for the privileged. And that is one of things that drives me to advocate for mental health, we all hurt and we all should be given that space to express and heal it. I have been reading a book called “The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Ven der Kolk” and it depicts how the brain expresses trauma and how our emotions and habits keeps the unseen scars, until our identity embraces It as part of its own.

One thing of what the author mentioned that hit me and stayed with me is: “After trauma, the world becomes sharply divided between those who know and those who don’t.” that simple statement explained my whole life in a single phrase, how I was naturally pushed to people with whom I had the same traumatic experiences or even simply failures.

The cycles that surround our lives unseen and yet they weave events that become our lives, healing isn’t just about forgiving, crying about something or receiving therapy, it’s about forging a new identity, it’s a chance for us to decide who we want to become and have say in it.

Model: @kezafiona

A System That Can Adapt to You Can Only Be Created By You

I was eighteen years old when I graduated from high school, I had grand dreams and aspirations. I finally had the chance to be who I wanted to be; I was naïve but despite it all I was a dreamer. I volunteered for a couple of months at the Cell Office in my community and soon after i started university, I wanted to be writer, from a very young age I knew that. books were my world; they spoke language I understood and together we built a world. in my head I may say. But that world grew and took roots in my principles and values, and in the person i became.

And like everyone else, I kept it to myself and tried to embrace a system that just could never accept me and for the last five years, I bent and broke to become grow within that system. I found work, part-time jobs when I could and well small services here and there to earn a living. Every time I lost a job, I would blame myself, how could I point a finger to a system that seemed to work for everybody but me, so it had to be me the problem.

But today one thought crossed my mind, these systems we work and live by have to have been started by someone, right? Someone ack in time just realized it wasn’t working for them anymore. They decided to start something, to create a path. So, I am going to start my own.

I asked myself: What do you want to do? When we are asked that question, we tend to respond in consideration of our financial status, our environment, and what can develop itself quickly. So, when I asked myself that question, I answered it with everything put aside.

With that decision made, there is just one thing remaining, A system.

A system that adapts itself to encourage and develop that decision, that is why I am doing this, to finally create a system and a path of my own. Instead of working so hard to walk and adapt to someone else’s. I have got to prove to myself that every decision I have ever mad and every single time I chose to be me was worthy it and not a waste. So, I hope whoever you are out there, know that you hold that key, that world you want to create has been with you all long. A friend of mine told me a few days back “You have got to get that inner world out there and give it to the rest of the world.”