Of the waves
To anyone swimming with trauma
Are you of the waves? You know if you are. The pain crests and falls, a dizzying crush and pull, contraction chased by sudden squall.
Waves come with small warning—breath stolen from your lungs, panicked pain in your abdomen, precipitous ascent on a teetering wall of emotion, disorientation in your body and brain.
The twisted water turns up bottled glass and rocks, shakes them in a tumbler, tenderizes your heart, wakes you in the middle of the night.
Perhaps you’ll wake to a placid sea that rages into typhoons before noon. Or you’ll wake up drowning, begging the day for a single breath of air.
Each day you find your sea legs again. Maybe you’ll ride the surf from bed, your legs tangled in seaweed.
You can’t deny the torque and toss, the lack of oxygen, the failure of all your devices to move your body onto land.
You learn to swim without breathing.
You learn to navigate by less than nothing.
You accept that the day is a sacrifice to the trauma swelling within.
You are of the waves.
I found these words on Canva slides I created sometime in the past, and I thought perhaps they might help someone today.
One reason I went on hiatus from writing this newsletter last year was because I was enduring with a time of active trauma response and entering a season of intensive burnout.
The process of healing continues to confuse and befuddle me, as does how I should communicate this to others.
Writing a book would seem to be a great jumping-off point for this kind of discussion. Yet it continues to feel upsetting sometimes to discuss my book, which I literally carved out of linoleum as I coaxed my injured brain to painstakingly create new pathways among neurological carnage.
Healing the brain is vertiginous. No amount of progress can shield me from the embodied torsion of the self encountering a new pocket of trauma unlocked. To meet the sudden undertow, do I release and let go, or will I benefit from swimming?
Daily as I apply the many techniques and modalities of healing that I have learned, I navigate realities that contradict one another. On the one hand, I know my brain is capable of healing. On the other, my brain is still injured and I must act accordingly.
I must attune myself to subtle shifts in energy and be mindful of when it’s time to rest. I also must find a way to continue to uphold a truth I have experienced: if I act with specific intent, I can positively influence my brain to feel better by following a defined protocol of movement, sleep, exercise, food, and activity.
Neuroplasticity—the idea that the brain changes and adapts based on its experience, which can be used to therapeutic advantage—is not a cure; it is a helpful principle that must also be balanced by my everyday realities. I live simultaneously in the hope that I will continue to get better as my brain learns new ways and in the daily experience that I am not yet better.
In spite of all my attempts at self-compassion and my intention to give myself the time I need to rest and recover, all my efforts add up to what feels like failure. That recurring realization devastates me again and again.
As I scrape together more energy here, more functionality there, I see with painful clarity just how much energy and function I lost when my injury happened and just how much I still have yet to regain. The grieving process for a simultaneously living- dead self is quite unbearable and my mind gets swept up in whorls of emotion that I thought I processed long ago.
I must advocate for myself to my self. I struggle to believe my own experience and to acknowledge that when my body goes wonky in spite of my best efforts, I am dealing with a physical problem of an incredibly complex nature. I must feel my feelings, be in my unsafe-feeling body and try to let the waves of trapped traumatic emotion sensations wash over me once again.
At this point, though, I’m thoroughly exhausted with feeling and reasoning. I want to live with my body on autopilot, without large expenditures of energy to do the basic care it takes to live in a body like this. I want to think positively and celebrate every ounce of progress, and I want to vent my feelings about how slow and grindingly awful this all is. It goes beyond anger or sadness but to a very specific and multilayered physiological-neurological-psychological experience that I am so done with teasing apart.
And yet I must tease. I can’t go around it. I can only go through it.
It is not always easy for me to know what layer I am living in or what level of trauma I am descending to. I perseverate and I bottle, and I become overly enchanted by progress, which means I forget the problem at hand for a moment before being flung back down into the twisty sand trying to figure out what the hell happened. No matter where I am in my progress, trauma sneaks up and it becomes time to process it again in a more deliberate way.
I am tired of working the same themes over and over in my mind, tired of learning the same truths over and over, tired of excavating for new information that might help, tired of my continuous failures of applying what I’ve learned, tired of processing and reprocessing trauma. For a while I thought I shouldn’t share all of this, worried that I wouldn’t be perceived as competent by a future employer or that I would be hampering my own progress by focusing too much on the discouraging aspects of my experience instead of coaxing my brain to believe even more zealously in its healing.
But this is my life. This exhausting and contradictory lap pool is where I live. I’m not where I want to be and it’s painful. I strive to be mindful of all the advantages I have, to be grateful for all the resources I have been given. And no amount of these can shield me from the fact that living with a brain injury is excruciating on so many levels.
I want to be writing other things, but I think the important thing for now is to be writing. To get all this stuff out. If I don’t, I’ll never be able to make it to the next thing. And perhaps the next thing will exist in spite of or because of my injured brain, not because I was able to fully heal it. Why not just journal these thoughts? I don’t know. I think it’s important to share from this corner of human experience and to believe that I have something worthwhile to say in the world even as I’m holed up behind my computer.
Thank you for sharing this moment of vulnerability with me. I feel like I have a hard time describing exactly what I mean and exactly what I am feeling and experiencing, thus adding to the anxiety of putting this all out there. My energy is limited. I could say more, delve more, if I hadn’t had four and a half hours of sleep last night and a headache that will keep chewing on my brain if I don’t stop working right now and go take a nap. I’ll be continuing to try to write my way in, around, and through this labyrinth, to learn what it is I have to say.
Finally, if you are of the waves, I’m sorry if they are sending you spinning today. You deserve a warm beach with your favorite book and a cool drink. You deserve to not be paddling for your life today. You deserve a raft, a float, a boat, whatever it would take to make things better. You are not less because you go centimeters when you swim with incredible force. Being of the waves is a perfectly acceptable way to be.
