Category: Trauma

The Grain Beneath


So as I was working on an old door today—a vintage door, I’m not sure how old it is, but it looks like it was probably an exterior door with a single pane of glass in the middle—it hit me.

It’s one of those things I bought because I knew I would do something with it someday.
And then everything happened.

Now it has become one more project that sat too long—whether from procrastination, exhaustion, trauma, or simply life getting in the way.
And maybe that’s me too.

I don’t feel very yellow brick road right now.

And the sad part is, I had so many good words in me today.

Most people look at things as disposable. At least in today’s world, that’s what it feels like anyway.

There are a lot of people who would ask themselves, what’s the point in fighting for something that has three layers of paint on it when it would be easier to simply replace it?

Maybe that’s part of why I see the world with rose-colored glasses.

But I guess the thing people misunderstand about rose-colored glasses is that it doesn’t mean you think everything is always beautiful.

Sometimes it simply means you can still see beauty in something after it has been neglected.

Because that door has a story.
Just like any of us do.

Whether it’s a person or a thing, from the moment we are born—or built—everything begins to shape us into what we become.

As I worked on this door, I used two containers of paint remover. The battery kept dying on my electric sander. The sandpaper was too fine and couldn’t get down into the deeper grooves.

And the weathered side of that door—the side that had taken the beating—held onto that paint like it had fused into its DNA.

No matter how much stripper I put on it, that paint was ingrained.

At least the top layer was easily removable, and didn’t put up a fight. That of course was just the visible superficial layer, that layer that the world sees without having to dig too deep or as too many questions.

And somewhere in the middle of removing the visual easy superficial paint, I started to see myself.

There were layers and layers of difficult, complicated things that had attached themselves to me over time.

Things that harmed me.

Things that changed the way I move through the world.

Things my own mind still struggles to fully comprehend sometimes.

And over time, it made me feel weathered too.

Worn.

Like life had sat on me a little too long.

And I guess I began to realize that the final layer—that deep-seated, rooted, hard-to-remove layer of paint—was the part of me that feels like the trauma of the last couple of years.

Because the more I worked on that door, the more I could see the beauty underneath it.

The grain.

The movement.

The oak waving through in places where the paint finally gave up.

And what struck me was that those lines weren’t man-made.

They were created by nature.

They were the backbone of that door.

Its original structure.

Its truth.

At one point, it was a living thing until it was cut down and turned into something meant to become useful—maybe even beautiful—to someone else.

And that made me think about how healing from complex post-traumatic stress disorder—complex PTSD—is not simple.

Complex PTSD can develop through repeated or prolonged trauma, where painful experiences layer themselves into the mind and body over time.

It is not one event.

It is not one wound.

It is not one memory.

Every layer you remove exposes another layer underneath it.

And just like I fought to get the paint off that door, I fight to understand what caused all of it underneath me.

Why I react the way I do.

Why certain things still live in my body.

Why some pain is surface-level and some pain feels like it has soaked so far in that you don’t know if it can ever fully be stripped away.

Now the average human—and I don’t say that with disrespect—would say enough is enough.
They would have thrown the door away.

I fought with that door for five days, and I’m still not done.
And it still needs repair.

But then again…
I’d say that about me too.
And maybe that’s the point.

Maybe the point isn’t that it should have been easy.

Maybe the point isn’t whether it would be cheaper, faster, or more practical to replace it.

Maybe the point is that some things still deserve to be saved.

Not because they are perfect.

Not because they are convenient.

Not because they haven’t been damaged.

But because underneath all the layers, there is still something solid there.

Still something real.

Still something worth bringing back to life.

As I continued to sand the door, I noticed something else.

The layers of damage were deepest in the most delicate parts of it—the places with the most detail, the places that had the most exposure to the harshness of the world.

And I realized I had come to a crossroads:

Do I repair it until it looks like new?

Or do I sand it and allow the finished product to still carry evidence of what time and neglect had done?

That question hit me harder than I expected.

Because I realized that in me, too, every layer exposed through this journey has left jagged places and missing pieces—things a Band-Aid could never simply cover.

As I looked at that door, I saw the pitted sections.

The softened places.

The rotten wounds.

And I realized that with grace, time, and just the right amount of pressure, even damaged things can still become something.

I think my complex PTSD was shaped, in part, by all the years I never allowed myself the time to heal.

I always rushed.

I, like that door, spent so much of my life shielding others from the harsh elements that I never stopped long enough to deal with what all of it was doing to me.

I tried too fast and too hard to get over things.

To be fine.
To function.
To keep going.

They are there as proof.

To pretend the weather had not reached all the way in.


But this time, just like that door—the one that had been discarded as useless, too far gone, too much of a burden to repair—I finally see something different.

The scars are not proof that it is ruined.

They are evidence that it made it through the storm.

I also realized, while working on that door, that some of the wood had been too weathered to survive.

As I sanded, parts of the rotted edges came away.

And that made me think about something I had not fully put into words before:

Was the goal to make it look new again?

To repair it so completely that someone else would never know the original damage had ever occurred?

At first, that feels like the right answer.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that doing that would also remove the real story.

The real truth.

Because nothing once damaged is ever truly new again.

And maybe that is not failure.
Maybe that is simply reality.

Maybe beauty was never supposed to come from pretending the storm never happened.

Maybe beauty comes from surviving it.

Not by announcing every scar.

Not by turning every wound into an identity.

Not by using pain as a shield of protection the way I once did.
But by understanding that the scars are not there to make me harder.

Proof that I still exist in spite of the harsh elements that once tried to wear me down.
And maybe the most sacred realization of all is this:

That on the inside, the softer parts of me—

the healthy parts,

the loving parts,

the hopeful parts,

the parts that still wanted beauty, connection, gentleness, and peace—
those were the parts worth protecting all along.

Not the armor.

Not the survival mode.

Not the shell.

The softness.

The softness was never a weakness.

It was the part of me that survived.

And maybe healing is not about pretending the weather never touched you.

Maybe it’s about stripping away what was never supposed to stay on you in the first place.

Maybe it’s about realizing that the deepest parts of who you are were never the damage.

They were always the grain.

They were always the oak.

They were always the part that remained after everything else started coming off.

And maybe that’s why I keep fighting with old doors.

Maybe that’s why I keep fighting with myself.

Because somewhere underneath the exhaustion, the fear, the anger, the grief, the years of surviving, the shutting down, the hypervigilance, the overthinking, the numbness, and the scars…

I know there is still something beautiful under there.

Not untouched.

Not unbroken.

But beautiful all the same.
And maybe the world would call it too much work.

But I don’t.

Because I know what it means to look at something weathered and still see its worth.

And maybe that’s why I keep going.

Because I am not disposable either.

The Way My Mind Remembers :  Trauma, Memory, and the Pain of Healing


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.