Fighting the traumas that I live with

“We all of us suffer from fear. I am suffering from it at the present moment, but I should be a coward if I sat down and did not say what I feel.” — RAdm Tufton Beamish CB DL

I confess, I am more susceptible than most to (non-physical) trauma, especially interpersonal trauma. Especially when I’m facing difficulty in life that I didn’t ask for, and people don’t like the way I deal with it. The more raw the trauma, the more it drives me to either fight against it harder, or flee from it faster. I’ve tried to flee from trauma in the past, and it generally doesn’t serve me well.

I came across this recently: https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/i-knew-the-minute-i-saw-her-19-years-on-we-re-still-firefly-friends-20201001-p56149.html.

I related very strongly to this as I read it. I think I had someone who was not quite a firefly friend, but I thought was a good semi-firefly friend nevertheless, then went through some very difficult times, and after having found out she ghosted me, I didn’t really know how to react at first. This was the first in a series of trauma response paralysis that amplified this trauma.

I then came across a complicated firefly friend, and due to the complications, it made the ghosting hurt even more over time, then when the fire disappeared from the (flawed but good) fly, that’s when the ghosting started to really hit home and things started to go really downhill for me. I really wanted a firefly friendship/relationship again, or so I thought.

I then came across this: https://www.sbs.com.au/topics/voices/relationships/article/2016/01/05/im-having-friendship-affair. Where do I even start? Most of the time, it was a very heavy read, cutting to the bone even. My highlights:

“I understood that adult female friendships are no longer socially supported or sanctioned in the way they might have been a generation ago, or the way they are for girls and younger women today. While the kind of relationship I had with my new friend might be perfectly typical for a girl of 16, it was far outside the realm of normalcy for a married mother in her 30s, at least far outside our notions of what is normal today. And yet, why should this be the case? Why shouldn’t we get certain types of intimacy from husbands or romantic partners and certain types from friends, the way women of my mother’s generation seemed to? The idea that a husband should not just be a husband but a best friend, an everything, a partner’s entire emotional world, is a recent one. But is this new emotional transaction, this replacing of female intimates with a husband, really an even trade?…

When I mentioned this to another friend, she assured me that I’m not the first person to ask these questions about intimacy: “I’ve read so many pieces lately about our longing for intimacy in our lives. I think the internet has flung us so far away from each other, even as we’re there, in each other’s worlds, all the time.” This seems as reasonable an explanation as any. My fate is not tied up in any meaningful way with my casual friends and neighbors. Would I be happier back in the proverbial village, back on the shelf? Would I do well with a few sister wives, or my own sister next door? Or would I be exactly the same?”

These days, I feel like a 22 year old, even though I’m 32. Social media has ruined my life, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

I’ve learnt my lesson about discerning people, and laying everything out on the table at a low resolution to filter out people before they ghost me. I don’t know if and when the firefly will come next, but what I do know is that the long-term on-and-off trauma response paralysis has not served me well, and that I now have no choice but to fight the traumas that I live with harder than ever as the way forward for healing.

This includes continuing to keep the political bastards honest, starting my Catholic bioethics studies at the University of Notre Dame Sydney, part-time in 2021, and working towards zero on the cowardice scale.

“Love is acceptance. When you love someone… you take them into your heart, and that is surely why it hurts so much when we lose someone we love, because we lose a part of ourselves.” — St Andrew the Apostle