The Failures of My Life Are Many
And still I persist.
I went to college hoping to become a psychiatrist and study the brain. Turns out I wasn’t smart enough for general chemistry. I was pre-med for two years and they were torture, in part because of the inadequate exposure I had to science in high school. Fearing organic chemistry, I dropped pre-med after my sophomore year and settled into my safety: English lit.
Which, let’s be real, is all about psychiatry anyway. I wanted to understand human behavior. I wanted to study it through science but instead I studied it through literature and real life. In addition to English lit classes, I also took Spanish and women’s lit classes, worked in the dining hall, and volunteered at the campus Rape Crisis Center.
I drank in drama. While creating plenty of my own.
If I couldn’t study how the brain works from the inside, I could observe from the outside in as many ways as possible. And conduct experiential field work. This is really how I learn and encode best anyway. Semantic memory is nothing compared to experiential memory.
This is how I came to be fixated on trauma. Which is really why I wanted to study the brain in the first place. How does trauma impact the brain and what can we do about it?
My dad’s brain was damaged by trauma, and so was my mom’s. Mine too. I wanted to heal us all.
I failed to become a psychiatrist but I never lost my fascination with neuroscience or my desire to help heal trauma. I’m still trying.
Today that looked like writing in partnership first thing this morning and dancing close enough to some unprocessed trauma from my own childhood that I needed to nap. Which turned into staying in bed all day half conscious listening to a book on attention deficit disorder. The brain. The brain on trauma. How to heal the traumatized brain.
Even when I can barely function, I am trying to learn how to heal the traumatized brain. Especially when I can barely function, I am trying to learn how to heal the traumatized brain.
My own.
Because I could stop my own judgmental criticism for staying in bed most of the day, I was able to get up and go out and walk just as the sun was setting. Convene with nature, nod at passersby, remember I am one among many. Days that include this are always better days, even if I barely get it in before nightfall. Better late than not at all.
Hydrate and move. When I get to places where it feels harder to function, I can get myself out of them by remembering to hydrate and move. And when I hydrate and move, things inevitably shift and rarely in a negative direction.
I wrote the above on Wednesday, the day this newsletter was scheduled to go out. But then I crashed again.
The less time I spend shaming myself for missing my deadline, the sooner I can finish the post and send it out.
Likewise, the less time I spend shaming myself for feeling exhausted, the more I can actually rest, recover, and be ready to go again.
I struggle a lot with fatigue. I don’t love this, especially because I know it is often my pronounced freeze response. I’m amazed looking back at all the ways I found to propel myself through profound exhaustion triggered by fear so much of my life.
I’m not as good at ignoring what my body feels as I used to be, so the fatigue really slows me down. Sleep is restorative, and I have been letting my body make all the calls for the past few years. When I get triggered into needing to sleep during the day it is often because I have confronted trauma from my past and I’m having a fear response. Which I need to do because I wasn’t able to have it in the past when it happened. It’s part of why I face my trauma—to let my body experience its natural reaction and, ideally, to have my mind stay in my body as it happens. This is how I heal my trauma and reintegrate my various parts. I remember it and allow my body to have the reaction it was prevented from having when it happened.
Except when I sleep I’m repeating the way I survived as a child. Freezing and fawning kept me safe when I was a small child, and my brain is still wired to do both before fleeing or fighting, options not available to me when my brain was formed. It takes lots of work to rewire my instinctual reactions. To recognize I am no longer a trapped child, but an adult with agency and autonomy. I can fight or flee now, too. I did both to exit my marriage.
Range is good, and I’m glad to have access to flee and fight in ways I didn’t as a small child. Even if it takes me a few tries to override the instincts imbedded in childhood.
Still, I would much prefer to NOT feel like my life is under threat and be reduced to survival instincts. Fortunately, I know countless ways to restore order to my dysregulated nervous system, even in the midst of ongoing trauma. This lets me access my logic and reason in addition to feeling my feelings.
One of the ways I restore order to my dysregulated nervous system is through writing. Thank you, readers, for receiving my words, for your patience, and for your acceptance of my wandering mind.
And much love to anyone else triggered into a desperate need to sleep when faced with trauma past or present. While there are worse trauma responses, frequent paralyzing fatigue can get old quickly. I don’t want to ignore my body’s needs, but I don’t want my body caught in a loop of ceaseless fatigue either.
One way I overcome fatigue is by placing myself in a new environment. It heightens my senses and wakes me up. I’m in DC this morning, grateful to find it doing to my brain and body exactly what I hoped it would. It’s making me feel safe and it’s waking me up. My fatigue is a trauma response. Coming home restores me to homeostasis. It is the easiest, fastest way I know to come back to balance. And it’s just a short drive down the highway.