originally published via my email newsletter in August 2024
“I feel this essay now more than ever,” I emailed to an editor today. Writing an essay about chronic illness over the past four months, I’ve often wondered about the truth of it. Like on the good days: was it still true? Still accurate?
Today, as I wrote that line, it sunk in. Deeply. It does feel true. It feels true because I’m living it. It feels true because the words aren’t just words; they are a reality I’m existing in.
It felt like whiplash, hearing the words “the story feels true” ring in my head. Perhaps it’s because I’d just logged off a therapy session, where we discussed how anxiety feels different, harder to shake, when directly tied to trauma. This past week: the anxiety sparked around sharing my words in the form of a prayer read at church, because my trauma revolves around how others reacted to me writing my story down in sixth grade.
I don’t want this story to be true, just like I didn’t want that story to be. But it was. It is.
We all have stories we’d sooner forget. We have realities we wish we weren’t living in.
Today, I found myself following the light as I processed through trauma (a modality called EMDR). I found good moments, good memories, around the story of trauma we’re navigating. I flipped on a light switch for myself. This felt good, but it’s not what I need. My therapist has learned how to steer me back to what I need to be processing, which isn’t the good things. I need to process the hard things.
“Let’s go back to the room,” she said today, a signal to shift. “Focus on the feelings in your body. And remember, you’re not alone. I’m right here with you.”
The room was dark when we began. I went back in fully knowing that. And I was able to rewrite some of the story in that room, not with my own hand, but with reimagining those in that room, re-hear different reactions than what it originally held. See the light switched flipped on by someone else. And as I sat in the feelings, even the dark ones, I could see different parts of me responding. I could see the part that doesn’t believe the re-written scene. And the part that does. The part that knows what is truer than the trauma itself.
The part that knows that when we let our stories be true—whether they hold trauma or chronic illness or shattering, whether they are dark or light, whether they are traumatic or hopeful—when we let our stories be true, we become truer, too. We become more like ourselves. We become whole.
At least, that’s my hope. That’s what the part of me that believes the truth even when it’s scratched out and rewritten, over and over again. That part of me—do you want to know what she looks like?
She’s my NICU baby self. I was born three months premature, and I was the rowdiest newborn. I threw diapers around the room and ripped out my IVs. I was also awarded the “Queen of the NICU” award. I still have my little star-tipped sceptre beside my writing (and therapy) chair in my office.
And I’m still learning to believe that my stories are true. Which is to say, I’m still learning to believe myself.
If you are, too: Remember, you are not alone. I’m right here with you.
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