Becoming Unboxed

People have often asked me how it is that I’m able to remember so many details.

The truth is, I don’t remember quite as well as I once did. A lifetime of incredibly difficult and unusual circumstances, wrapped up in the word trauma, changed the way my mind holds onto things.

Trauma has a way of affecting even someone who once could catalog everything in their mind down to the smallest detail.

That does not make me extraordinarily brilliant.

Quite the contrary.

I learned that much of my ability to remember came from my life circumstances. Somewhere along the way, remembering became one of the most important parts of me.

Maybe it came from what life threw at me.

Maybe it came from something much simpler.

I never wanted to be forgotten.

Maybe that is part of why I learned to remember so much. I remembered the details of people—their words, their faces, the things that mattered to them—because remembering felt important.

If I remembered you, you mattered. And somewhere inside me,  I wanted to know that I mattered enough to be remembered too.

Remembering was also a defense mechanism because I never wanted to allow myself to become trapped, questioned, or ridiculed in a harmful situation again.

It is hard to explain what it feels like to have a mind shaped by trauma while trying to work through it, heal from it, and explain to others how deeply life’s experiences can become ingrained—so deeply that they are physically felt too.

I can often remember the sounds from an event—the flashes of light, the temperature—before I remember the words in the conversation.

I can remember the feeling in my chest before I remember the words someone spoke to me.

I can remember how the light shined.

I can remember their faces as they walked out of the room.

And sometimes I can still almost see the silence—the cold shoulder, the lack of empathy or care, the way someone can throw silence at you.

Maybe this is simply one of the skills a trauma survivor develops.

I can remember the weight of each moment as though my nervous system were keeping its own journal, a record of both positive and negative memories.

Other people may be able to remember joy simply as happiness. I often feel as though I remember all of it—the joy, the fear, the atmosphere, the weight of the moment—as though my nervous system is always keeping score because it never completely rests.

Maybe that is because I don’t simply remember what happened.

I experience it over and over again.

There is another part that has always been difficult to explain, and sometimes it can make you feel incredibly alone.

What can feel like a trauma survivor’s superpower is the nervous system’s ability to brace and sense, with every fiber of your being, the potential danger that may be around you.

Is that why, when I see memories, it feels as though I’m watching a movie from the outside?

Watching every scene of that memory, whether it is positive or negative?

Is that why I need to remember the whole thing?

But remembering everything is painful—the bad and the good.

Maybe that is part of why surviving trauma can feel so lonely. Life itself can become a painful, constantly on-guard experience.

It is hard to explain how you can see yourself standing somewhere and know what is about to happen. As you watch every moment unfolding in the past, you wish you could reach through the screen of your mind and change the ending.

I can’t.

No one who has survived incredibly difficult and complicated circumstances, all wrapped up in the word trauma, and made it to the other side can reach backward and change what happened.

Even though every fiber of your being can make it feel as though it is happening again, the movie always plays the same way.

For many years, I wondered if something was wrong with me because my memories felt different.
My descriptions felt deeper.

My words seemed to touch people as I told them the complicated stories of life with a passion that made them want to hear more.

I suppose it is only now that I understand that this is simply the way my mind learned to survive something overwhelmingly painful.

It is through this realization that I have changed the way I look at myself.

I no longer judge myself because a sound makes my heart race or because a memory arrives carrying the same physical sensations it carried the first time around.

I understand now that my body was paying attention even when my mind was desperately trying to survive.

Maybe that is why I remember so much.
My memories were never stored only as stories.
They were stored as sounds.

As sensations.

As images.

As fear.

As silence.

And remembering is painful whether the memory is bad or good.

Maybe this is what defines trauma healing and why it is so painful, because the pain is what stops or stalls the healing process.

So for now, I write these stories not because I could change anything when those things happened, but because I am no longer trapped as the woman inside those scenes.

Now I am also the woman watching—and healing in the process.

My hope is that, as you read these stories, you see yourself not in my incredibly difficult circumstances or trauma, but as the individual trying to change your own scene, grow, and heal outside of the trauma that has defined so much of your life.

Maybe healing is learning that trauma can be part of your story without being the only thing that defines you.