Constance Persephone

Scroll to the end for a long summary

For a while I have been trying to go through life appearing happy and put together. And for the most part it was easy because people are so consumed in their own life that unless you’re rocking in the corner or bawling your eyes out in the bathroom (I’ve done both) they will assume your doing alright. Or that you are at least dealing with the normal everyday stressors that many other people including themselves go through. If you plaster on a rather obvious fake smile and keep your physical person and possessions somewhat organized, you’ll pass for a fully functioning human. The key to really locking in the fake persona is to constantly insist that you are fine when you know you are the furthest thing from it.

I could never afford to go to therapy before. Financially, it was too expensive for my single mother who worked 2-3 jobs to make ends meet and make sure we didn’t have to rely on anybody. We also didn’t talk about issues like this, I had no idea how to tell her there was a chunk of my mind missing and everything was short circuiting. I was trying as hard as I could even when it looked like I was slacking off. The thoughts I was having and the thoughts that would never go away ate away at me until I couldn’t take it anymore. So I did what I’ve always done and pushed everything to the back of my mind to forget about it, but that’s how I ended up this way in the first place.

All this time, a good decade, give or take a couple of years, I thought there was something wrong with my head because things always felt confusing and wrong. It’s hard to explain exactly what I was feeling because the complexity of emotion goes beyond human understanding sometimes. You can describe it all you want but to full understand you need to feel it for yourself. We simplify our emotion to make them easier to manage and relate to. Whatever I was feeling felt wrong, something was wrong. It feels so empty and cold.

All this time I never knew what I was feeling or why I acted the way I did, or why my thoughts were so skewed. It was because I had blocked out years of my life. I couldn’t remember what happened to me. That “chunk” that was missing, was years of memories and experiences both negative and positive that were pivotal to my development as a child.

I created this black hole in my mind although it feels more accurate to describe it as damaging part of the tape. You load the VHS and make sure it’s rewound to the beginning and then you press play thinking you have a little movie of your memories. Your anticipation builds and the opening credits play and as the movie is about to start the screen goes black and this awful screeching sound starts to come out of VHS player. You pause for a second confused and then the screeching stops and the picture comes back but instead of watching an old memory you’re looking at yourself from a few moments ago loading the tape and pressing play.

One thing about me, I won’t give up on myself emotionally, physically or spiritually. A hobby? If I get bored I will mostly definitely put it in the corner with the rest of my hobbies but never will I abandon myself. Through the years I have tried all that I could think of to keep myself going and appearing stable to the public. In private I would try to heal my wounds but nothing worked and as frustrating as it was I found strength anywhere I could to keep myself from giving up. Partly because I couldn’t afford to, I had responsibilities albeit minor but they were still things I was responsible for. But mostly, what kept me from really going off the deep end even though I was dangling from a cliff on many occasions was the hope that it was going to get better. I was going to get better on way or another. I had so much I wanted to do and experience. Maybe subconsciously I was seeking to replace the memories I was missing.

Finally after years of trying, meditation started working. This was the beginning of my restoration. I didn’t remember everything but a decent amount of things and holy fuck no wonder I am the way I am. My conscious mind didn’t remember but my nervous system did. Poor things she was trying to navigate through trauma and instead of recognizing it for what it was and offering help I blamed myself and punished myself for it.

On the bright side, now that I know the cause I can accurately treat the symptoms. Even when I was drowning in my misery, and the possibility of a brighter future seems like a cruel joke, I couldn’t give up. I knew I would get to this point eventually, I just had to go through a lot of heartache first. Now the healing can begin.

Summary:

Imagine someone you trust breaks your arm, and then they tell you not to say anything because you’ll get in trouble for breaking it. You’re confused because you know lying is wrong and you don’t want to lie to your mom but the other people you trust told you it’s better this way. But they also broke your arm which isn’t a good thing but that’s how the game is supposed to be played and if you tell on them you never get to play with them again. In your childhood naïveté you stay silent and eventually the pain subsides a bit and you pretend your arm isn’t broken until you believe it for yourself. But as you go through life you feel the sharp stabbing pain in your arm that you can never use properly. You don’t tell anyone your arm doesn’t work you just compensate and cry behind closed doors clutching your arm hating that it hurts and that you can’t do anything with it. You look at it with such disgust until one day you take a closer look at your fingers all bent and crooked, your wrist that hangs limply, and a forearm full of bruises from trying to use your arm like normal but you just end up hurting yourself more in the process. You take it all in and suddenly remember that it was broken but never reset. You never healed the broken bone you worked through the pain deluding yourself. You remember that somebody else broke it and tried to make you take the blame.