The I'm Sorry Of It All

Trauma responses often cause us to apologize endlessly for the wide variety of things that may cause us to feel ashamed or guilty as a consequence of our actions. I’m not exempt from this, I was however exempt from acknowledging that the trauma that my life had stumbled through created less than desirable reactions to life, and I didn’t have to let these responses dictate what kind of person I had become. Trauma responses are not character flaws, not even character traits. I often find myself having to repeat that last sentence, sometimes in my head, sometimes out loud, but always loudly.

I have lost to death in the most gut-wrenching of scenarios, I have loved with every beat of my heart, and I have hurt from the words and actions of others to the deep corners of my soul. At times in my life, I’ve done all of these things simultaneously, my body has felt like a shell, my heartfelt like each second alive weakened, and inside my head, I was screaming, crying, and pleading for an outcome that would deafen it all. I have desperately wanted to suppress coping with the raw realities of life to avoid the required vulnerability. Vulnerability just gives the world one more opportunity to take a jab into the core that makes me just who I am.

These actions created some of my most shameful feeling trauma responses. If I anticipate that a scenario may leave my audience less than in emotion as a result of my actions, I immediately meet them with “I’m sorry.” If it is asked, it is a yes. I likely have more fear from saying “no” than telling someone “I love you” and I’m not exaggerating. I may suffer, my passions may suffer, I may endanger my health with exhaustion, I’m not going to let the circle around me down with two little letters.

If trauma responses have never deeply rooted themselves into your behaviors, I’m sure you’ve found yourself struggling deeply with the why of these actions or even bothered with the frustrations of an overly apologetic individual. Trust me, those of us suffering from the hell we’ve endured to create these responses, are also beating ourselves up for not just simply being able to embrace vulnerability and expose our true selves to the world.

But, here’s the thing. I know the depth that sadness, anguish, longing, mourning, penetrate into your soul. I know the agony of feeling your heart crack like broken glass and shatter into millions of pieces inside your body, unable to glue or tape the shards back into the perfect shape without pouring forth blood from cut fingers. While these things have conditioned me to run in the opposite direction of vulnerability, they have also distinguished inside me the need to passionately love and care for the individuals that remain on this Earth woven into my life. I shall struggle with the demons, I shall battle to acknowledge and overcome the behaviors these events have developed, and I shall do everything within my human abilities to prevent those individuals from ever looking in the mirror to whisper between tears, “I get it now.”

I was convinced for a long time that I deserved the lack of patience that accompanied what I thought were personality traits as a result of being damaged goods. Deep down, I assumed that since this was who I was now, I deserved the judgment and annoyance that came from the lack of understanding in the outside world. In reality, it’s not who I was destined to become, these weren’t my traits, these were just signs trying to smack me in the face and get my attention of the path I was traveling, the mistakes I was making in pushing aside all of these things happening to me, running with my knapsack to the treehouse in the backyard to escape vulnerability.

What I truly needed was to run from those who could never fathom outside their box, could never see I was protecting their hearts at the expense of what mine had survived. There was patience, guidance, warmth, and comfort waiting amongst the people meant to show me safety, security, and the place I would face all I had suppressed, instead of drowning in trauma and its responses. While my head hung down from exhaustion, stained in tears, and fearful of the judgment that came from coping with all that has happened, there would be a circle just as protective of the broken toy needing repairs, as it was of preventing them from ever needing super glue and duct tape.

It will never be easy to travel down the dark rabbit hole that is my past, that is the love I’ve lost, the laughter that’s faded, the hands that were raised too many times in abuse, to visit the faces I pray to bring back with life. But it has gotten easier to understand the necessity in making up for the years I ignored the emotions that come from never coping, from never creating closure, from never embracing who I’d be destined to become. It has gotten easier to fall into the darkness of a rabbit hole, knowing no matter how deep I go, how lost my mind becomes, there is someone diving into my hell to bring me back home. No matter how ashamed we feel, no matter how many times we respond in ways we hope don’t make us less than, all broken toys deserve to be repaired.

Call it the trauma response, but I’ll apologize, as I will fall very short from ever telling my story in the order that the events transpired. There is more success in the road less traveled than the high road I should have taken, and for that, I’ll share it as the mess it was, and the beauty it became.