Five Minutes: Forgetting

Ok, the rule is to type for five minutes and post whatever vomits out of my fingertips. May God be with you all.

Go.

I remember the oddest things. I remember that when I cracked my chin open in kindergarten that Nathan Mestrey tripped me with the television cord and I was wearing my favorite purple shirt with a bow on the front and that I ruined it because I pulled it off while rushing down the hallway with Mrs. Nye with blood gushing out of my face.
I remember all sorts of details that are useless and unimportant.

Lately in therapy I've been asked to write completely sensory details of instances of abuse or trauma that I've pushed down all these years. She asked me to write about the colors, textures, the smells and everything down to the smallest detail like the wallpaper or the color of the carpet.
I tried really hard to do it but I kept cracking jokes.
After I read it aloud to her she noted that I use the sarcasm as a buffer between me and the trauma.

Um...duh lady.

So I wrote about another occasion. The trigger situation that sent me spiraling back down and drove me to therapy. The straw that broke the camels back as it were.

But this time I just wrote. I wrote like I write here. With the tears pouring from my fingertips without worrying about the sensory part of it. Ten handwritten pages later I found how hurt I still was and how much that wound is still raw even as I'm working through it still. How much easier it is to be mad or hurt about this then about the wounds that were created before I had any say in what my life looked like.

As I read it aloud in the office I heard that even though it still hurts I'm seeing the pattern and ties that connect the trauma I've been sarcastically keeping at bay to the last year of my life.

Because even though I have a great memory I'd forgotten how deeply the cuts run and how pervasive they are because I'd buried them under stories told in just such a way covered with decades of sarcasm.

Done.