Nuanced Coexistential Thoughts, Because of September

Recently I learned that September is CPTSD Awareness Month. I genuinely had no idea, which feels like strange timing because September has become such a weird month for me.

A year ago around this time, I was in Helsinki.

I had planned Helsinki and Paris as a self care trip with saunas, spa experiences, exploring, and I even signed up for a class on brain health. It was very much supposed to be a trip centered around taking care of myself.

Just days before I left, my previous relationship escalated into a fight where a lot of my things were destroyed.

It took me a long time to admit to myself that what I experienced was domestic violence, and even now it's a strange thing to read, type, absorb, or say out loud. It feels unusual to put one blanket term over something that, when you're actually living inside of it, feels so much more complicated and intertwined with a person you loved.

For a long time I really did think love meant being with someone no matter what, and I mean pretty explicitly no matter what. Looking back now, I know that idea didn't come from nowhere. I've only had three relationships in my life, including that one, but dysfunction was familiar to me long before any of them. There was chaos earlier in my childhood and different versions of it later in relationships, and I think somewhere along the way I just became very good at existing around it.

Familiar doesn't mean something is good or even that you want it. Sometimes it just means you already know how to function inside of it. Understanding that about myself has helped me understand why certain things were harder to recognize while I was actually living them.

Understanding the trauma bond came later, and understanding how much all of this actually affected me came even later than that.

So Helsinki and Paris ended up becoming a very different trip from the one I thought I was planning.

It's weird looking at the photos now because they're beautiful. I was in beautiful places doing beautiful things, but when I look at them I can also see someone who was still trying to understand what had literally just happened to her. There's something strange about having beautiful photographs attached to a period of your life that didn't necessarily feel beautiful while you were inside of it.

I think that's partly what September holds for me now. Things that don't neatly cancel each other out. Something can have been beautiful and painful. You can love someone and still be hurt by them. You can understand something and still decide it isn't something you want to carry.

A year later, one of the biggest things I've learned since understanding my CPTSD is that it isn't only about processing what happened. A lot of it, for me at least, has been figuring out what I actually want to carry forward with me.

I've been rebuilding and decluttering and generally paying more attention to what belongs in my life and what doesn't anymore, whether that's people, things, habits, expectations, or even certain versions of myself.

I've also been painting a lot lately, and if you're reading this and I've met you somewhere along the way, or I've randomly invited you to one of the cool little painting events I keep finding, thank you lol. Thank you also to the artists who have opened their spaces and spent their time teaching these classes. Those little afternoons and evenings have filled my heart with so much love and care, probably more than anyone there realizes.

It took me a while to understand why painting has felt so important to me lately.

From one of my journal entries:

The first and only painting we ever made together was one of the things destroyed that day.

The destroyed paintings gave me so much anxiety at the time and I don't think I really had the words for why. There was something especially painful about seeing something that had been made by hand and created with care become part of someone's anger.

Then recently my dad casually told me that my grandfather used to paint and that he was the creative one in the family. I had no idea.

I don't know, I just really loved learning that. I've been finding my way into painting without knowing there was someone before me who did the same thing, and something about discovering that now felt a little magical. I like thinking that maybe I inherited some tiny creative superpower without ever knowing where it came from, and that maybe this part of me was always there waiting for me to find it.

I especially like that thought because it means painting doesn't have to belong to something painful that happened to me. Something that was connected to destruction somehow brought me back to creating, but creating itself was already mine.

Maybe that's why making things again has felt so good. I'm not trying to recreate what was lost or pretend it didn't happen. I'm just making new things with my own hands and seeing what comes from it.

I've also been thinking a lot about detachment lately, especially the idea that detachment doesn't have to mean indifference.

I think the way I care about people has always depended a lot on proximity. With someone I don't know especially well, I can listen to what they're telling me and recognize that they may already know what they need without necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with their interpretation, approach, or decisions. Sometimes I can simply say, this is what you've told me, and from the conviction I'm hearing from you, it sounds like you already know what you need to do to feel better.

It gets more complicated when I deeply care about someone or feel invested in the outcome.

There have been times when someone close to me was carrying the weight of difficult experiences elsewhere, and I could see some of that weight making its way home to me. My instinct was actually to detach from it. I could recognize that someone I loved was having a hard time while also knowing somewhere inside of me that what they were carrying wasn't necessarily mine to hold.

I used to question whether that instinct meant I wasn't being empathetic enough.

Sometimes, because I cared about the person and wanted them to feel better, I carried some of it anyway, especially when doing so seemed like it might keep the peace. But overriding that instinct rarely made anything better. Usually it made things more complicated because I was trying to hold something my own mind and heart were already telling me didn't belong to me.

I think that's one of the distinctions I'm understanding better now. Empathy doesn't require absorption. I can recognize someone's pain without adopting it as my own. I can understand why someone feels or behaves a certain way without necessarily agreeing with their interpretation or accepting what they do. And I can give someone grace while still paying attention to what they're showing me.

Detachment doesn't have to mean I don't care.

Sometimes it means I care, and I know this isn't mine.

I found another old journal entry where I had written, Why are you kind?

My answer was basically that I've seen too much and I don't want other people to experience what I've experienced.

I still feel that way. I don't want that part of myself to change, but I do think my understanding of kindness has changed quite a bit.

I used to stretch myself really thin in the name of being understanding. Now I'm realizing kindness doesn't have to mean giving someone endless access to me or continuing to give someone opportunities to prove something when a pattern of actions is already giving me information I need to take seriously.

Sometimes kindness can still be patience and grace, and sometimes it can look like distance. I'm also realizing that I should probably be included among the people I'm trying so hard to be kind to.

Something I'm actually proud of now is that I don't seriously need external validation around what happened. Obviously being understood feels good because I'm human, but I don't need everyone to agree with me or understand every part of it exactly the way I do in order for me to trust my own experience.

At some point I realized that the only thing I really had to do was tell the truth about what happened. I don't need to convince someone into seeing it through my eyes or keep explaining myself until they do. I need to understand it clearly for myself, internalize what I've learned from it, and move accordingly.

And selfishly, in the healthiest meaning of that word, I think I have to do that as an act of self care because at the end of the day I'm the person who has to live my life.

What's interesting to me now is realizing that I don't think my problem was necessarily that I never had boundaries.

When I really think about it, I've had more or less the same boundaries for the last ten or fifteen years. They aren't things I suddenly discovered because of what happened, and for the most part I've been pretty clear about what I am and am not comfortable with.

I think the harder part has been trusting those boundaries when they're tested, especially when I love the person on the other side of them.

Sometimes I let them become negotiable because I thought but this is love, or because what was happening around me was treated like normal relationship conflict when I knew it had gone beyond that. Having the right boundaries doesn't necessarily protect you if you keep making exceptions for the wrong people.

I understand now that people can enable things out of fear too. Sometimes people stay quiet because they don't know what to say, don't want to get involved, or maybe don't know what acknowledging something would require of them.

I can understand that without pretending the silence didn't affect me. Silence isn't always harmless when someone is already trying to make sense of something difficult. Sometimes it just makes you feel more alone inside of it.

I think this connects to another pattern I've been noticing in myself, which is how much I can stretch myself when I don't want something to fail.

I have a pretty big fear of failure and I don't like giving up on people or things I care about, so there's a part of me that always thinks maybe if I understand a little more, try a little harder, explain myself one more time, or give something a little more room, I can somehow keep it from falling apart.

But sometimes trying so hard not to let something fail is exactly what ends up hurting me more.

My dad told me something on my birthday this year that has stayed with me. He told me that I have to be wiser now.

I've thought about that a lot because I don't interpret being wiser as needing to become colder, less kind, or fundamentally different from who I am.

I think for me it means believing myself a little sooner. Knowing when I've explained enough. Recognizing that a boundary doesn't suddenly become unreasonable because someone else doesn't like it. Trusting the information people and situations give me instead of stretching myself trying to turn that information into something else.

And understanding that having compassion for someone doesn't require me to abandon myself in the process.

Maybe a lot of these things were never opposites in the first place.

Understanding doesn't require agreement. Empathy doesn't require absorption. Detachment doesn't require indifference. Kindness doesn't require endless access. And loving someone doesn't mean everything they carry has to become mine too.

September is still a weird month for me and maybe it always will be, but I'm looking at it from a very different place this year.

A year ago I was leaving for Helsinki trying to understand what had just happened.

This year I'm making things again.

Perreo triste. 🫡💃🏻