The Tales We Tell Part 1
This is an extra vulnerable post for me, because it’s not yet a story that makes sense in my head. It’s the Now, and the Now is hard, messy, and uncertain. It’s also a post that deals with some mental health issues. If grief, depression, or trauma may be trigger for you, you may want to skip this one.
As humans, we seek meaning in our experiences. We are inherently story-making animals. That is how we make sense of the world. How we learn, how we build our own identities. Something happens, and we (mostly subconsciously) decide how that event will fit into the story of our lives so far. We decide what it means or doesn’t mean.
For the other posts I’ve written, I’ve had time to figure out how those events fit into the story of the life I’m writing. I’m still living the events in this post. The past few months have left me wounded and questioning why anything happens. It hasn’t been just one thing to struggle with, but half a dozen. I’ve spent the past few months trying to let myself feel all the feelings, process, talk with my therapist and closest friends, and heal. I’ve been here before, and once I’ve gotten distance, I’ve found (created?) meaning around why things have a place in my life. But I’m currently fighting a battle in my head over what the meaning of the most recent series of events is. So this is a collection of mini-stories and photos from my trip to the mountains a couple weeks ago. Time will tell how I will piece them together in the future.
I got a yearning for the mountains back in June. Even though I’d just been backpacking in April, I longed to go back. I booked a tiny house on a whim, telling myself I could cancel if I needed, but that I had to grab a spot in case I wanted to keep it. I started a new job just weeks before the trip. I thought about canceling. But the need to see the mountains was greater than ever, and after two weeks of working two full-time jobs on top of being a single mom, I made myself keep it.
This was a huge win for me. You see, in the past I would have canceled, just in case. I’m a chronic self-sacrificer—it was trained into me. Rather than ask if I could take off, in the past I would have assumed it would be too much of an inconvenience, that it would put my new position in jeopardy. But after months of sadness and stress and struggling to look forward to anything, I found myself actually looking forward to the trip. For years, I’ve been walking the hard journey of learning to know my needs and protect them. I needed a couple days off. So I asked at my new work, and it turned out they were fine with it. I thought about the money I’d lose by not working two and a half days, and decided I was fine with it, too.
I set off west on a Monday morning.
The car ride was for thinking, songs, hard feelings, and when that all got to be too much, listening to Emotional Agility by Dr. Susan David. She talks a lot about how you should allow yourself to feel your feelings, but not let them control you. I’ve always been afraid if I let my strong feelings take over, I’d be out of control. I’ve always been told I feel to much, I’m too sensitive. I’ve spent a lot of my life trying not to feel at all. But she explains techniques for taking half a step back from your feelings. One of those techniques begins with noticing what stories you associate with the facts you observe. For example, you might observe factually that a colleague finished a project before you. The story you bring to that fact, though, might be about how you’re slower than them, less adept at your job, and probably going to get fired. Noticing when you get “hooked” into those stories helps you avoid treating them as fact and immediately reacting to them. She drives home how we are not our emotions, we are not those stories. We have a choice about what we do with them.
I’ve done a lot of investigation of those types of stories over the years through therapy, especially trauma therapy. We are not those stories. But we are made up of stories. How could I be a writer and not believe that?
Finally, the mountains came into view. There’s something about that first glimpse of the mountains or the ocean that still holds magic, the kind of magic we used to find all the time when we were children and the world was new. Some things are like that. I have been in cars full of adults who can’t help but cry “Cow!” every time they pass cows in a field. We stop what we’re doing and exclaim over the moon at evening workouts. One of my favorite memories of all time was at the Eiffel Tower. We’d just arrived in Paris, and practically ran straight there from the train, four college students on our last weekend studying abroad. The sun was setting, and as we walked under the monstrous metal structure, we passed groups of people speaking a dozen different languages. It grew darker. Suddenly, the tower lit up, sparkling with lights glittering on and off. Every person from every country stopped and said “Ohhhh” in wonder at the same time, at the same pitch.
When you’re lost in depression or grief, it’s hard to find joy. It’s like your joy tries to get up, realizes there’s too much effort involved, and collapses back to the floor. Sometimes, it’s like you’re trying to climb a joy ladder. Maybe something that would normally send you to the top of the ladder, only gets you a couple rungs up instead. There’s a song I’ve been listening to recently by AJR: “Way Less Sad.”
Don’t you love it, don’t you love it,
No I ain’t happy yet,
But I’m way less sad.
I honestly wasn’t sure right then if I was on the grief or the depression side of things, but seeing the mountains the first time got me a rung up that ladder.
I arrived early, hours before check-in, with the intention of hiking. On one of my pit stops along the way, I’d looked up hiking near my Airbnb and set the GPS for Bearwallow Trail.
I found myself smiling as the drive took me winding up a mountain. I lived on the side of a mountain in Roanoke, VA for two years when I was a kid, and when we moved out of the mountains to the Raleigh area, I felt lost every time I looked around. It seemed so flat without constant tree-covered peaks around me, so exposed. The mountains just make sense to me. Or maybe “sense” isn’t the right word. All the winding switchback roads, dappled in tree shade and sun, are just better than blank highways and straight lines. They’re full of possibility around each curve.
A mile or so before my destination, the directions took me onto a steep, narrow gravel road that climbed past adorable houses. In a flash, I could see myself as an old woman, living up an impossible gravel lane on the side of a mountain, tending my wildflowers in the sun and writing.
Eventually, I pulled onto a paved area with parking. With unpracticed hands, I pulled out my actual, honest-to-God camera. I’ve barely taken any pictures with it since I started training for CG three and a half years ago, despite having been a professional photographer before that. I’d forgotten how many lenses and accessories I had. It took a while for my fingers to remember how to adjust the f-stop and shutter speed. I fumbled as I searched for the right settings to capture a butterfly on a flower next to my car.
But slowly, as I headed into the cool, quiet shade of the trees, the muscle memories came back to me. ISO, manual focus for a tricky flower, adjusting the exposure. The information trickled back in from wherever it had been tucked away. I started to forget why I had given up photography. Cell phones are nice, but this. This is something else. To try to capture the world the way we see it, whether in photos or in words, is illusive at best, and sometimes impossible. Have you ever tried to photograph the moon with your phone? This unbelievable, mystical orb that takes over the night sky ends up looking like a little white dot. That’s partly because you need the right tools, partly because of optical illusions with the horizon, and partly because our brains skew sight slightly, to allow us to focus on certain things.
My body sighed with relief to move after sitting still for four hours. The air chased away stale thoughts that had been circling in my head too long. The sadness hummed along in the background, but there were new things to pay attention to in addition to the hard thoughts. I paused to listen to the mountainside, full of the sound of the trees blowing in the wind (my favorite sound in the world, other than my son’s laughter). There’s little better at getting me to feel here, completely in the moment. I worked a lot in the past with a therapist who did neurofeedback with me. She was a sweet older lady, who spoke with a voice that was at once small and full of wisdom. She emphasized mindfulness to me, giving me techniques and meditations and book recommendations. It took me a long time to even understand the concept or what she was saying, but that and the neurofeedback changed my life. Mindfulness is a technique I return to time and time again when I’m full of anxiety. It takes me out of my head and anchors me in the present. There, with the whispering trees, I felt a bit less sad.
It wasn’t a long or strenuous hike, but it got me thinking of the backpacking I’d done earlier this year and got me longing for more. Backpacking makes me feel like I can take on anything. I remember hiking along a ridge in January, the afternoon sun streaming through the bare trees onto us in rays. My friend Angela was ahead of me, and I felt amazing. It was the first time I truly believed I could choose to do another job, or take a different path in life, and I’d be okay. More than okay; in that moment back in January, I felt completely secure in the knowledge that I’d thrive even if everything fell apart (again). A month ago, I took the first steps down that new career path. I left behind my business with Camp Gladiator and switched back to my very first career: technical writing. The purpose was partly to give myself more time and mental space for my actual dream career: creative writing. I pull that hiking memory back up every time anxiety wells up now over having made such a drastic change, and try to recapture that feeling.
I thought about future hiking trips and felt a bit less sad.
Eventually, the top of the climb opened up onto a sun-filled meadow overlooking blue mountains. I stopped.
I’ve done a lot of therapy around trauma. Part of one of my favorite techniques, EMDR, has you choose a safe place to return to in your head because processing traumatic memories is really, really hard. One of the worst things trauma does to you is make you feel like you’re never safe. When my son was little, my safe place was a mountain meadow that I made up in my head, just like the one laid out before my feet. The sadness (depression? grief?) made it hard to truly appreciate what lay before me, but I stood and stared. Took pictures of the wildflowers. I wasn’t joyful; I didn’t feel safe from the stories running through my head. But maybe I felt a bit less sad.
I sat on a rock and watched a hawk fly past, listened to cows moo up the hill behind me, and soaked in the sun. I texted a couple friends to let them know I’d made it safely and where I was hiking. Felt the sadness lift its head again to fix me with its stare.
Requisite selfie with my cell phone.
I was wearing a shirt with an adorable unicorn holding some cupcakes on it. It says, “I baked you some shut the fucupcakes.” The old me would have found that crass and never would have worn it for fear of what other people would think. The me that is alive today thinks it’s hilarious. The shirt also makes me feel angry. And fierce. It reminds me to defend my boundaries against those who will never respect them. It reminds me of how I now am secure enough in myself to only let certain people in my life, into my heart—only people who contribute to my peace or well-being get to be close now. While I won’t wear it in front of my son (yet), it’s symbolic to me of doing what makes me happy. You see, a lot of the trauma in my past centered around emotional abuse including consistent messaging that what I needed and wanted didn’t matter. That I shouldn’t have boundaries. That love is conditional and depends on me doing the “right” things and giving myself up for another person. When you hear that enough, you start to tell it to yourself, too.
The sadness sat with me, took me over again. Over the years I’ve learned there are certain trains of thought that dip into deep wells of sorrow. Maladaptive stories that run through my head about me or the way the world works. When I get caught up in those, it’s hard to get out. The sadness was creeping out of one of those wells, the one about being alone and everyone I care about leaving me. The rational part of me relished being able to completely enjoy the view before me on my own time. The sadness reminded me I was alone, and whispered to me that I always would be. A gaping chasm of loss opened up in front of me. Without even thinking about it, I used a technique I didn’t feel worthy of or confident in employing in the past: I reached for others. It wasn’t that long ago that I wouldn’t have been able to do this; I would have been too afraid no one would reach back. But that’s been a miraculous change for me over the past few years. I texted some friends, and shared pictures of where I was on Facebook. Some friends asked to come with me next time. My dog sitter sent me pictures of my pup. I quickly planned a day for a workout with another friend. I felt a bit less sad and a lot less alone.
I was able to settle back into the moment then. I was trying to photograph a flower when a bee landed right on it, loaded up with pollen, as if asking for its portrait. I spent a happy little period trying to get the best bee shot. It proved ridiculously easy. When I was caught up in the swirling storm of those old hurts, I couldn’t see that bees were everywhere. Coming out of that storm, I didn’t notice them all until that one landed in front of my face.
I felt a bit less sad.
Finally, I got up and wandered on. A pair of hikers had come up while I was sitting, and had settled down on a path that led to the top of the last bit of hill. They lay next to each other, eyes closed, clearly secure in each other’s presence and feeling safer because the other one was there. The sight brought up memories—not traumatic ones, just ones of things I’d lost. The sadness came rushing back in, and I tripped over one of those wells.
Walking up to the meadow.
Trauma sticks with you in the form of intrusive memories that push in without your permission and take over your reality. It’s perpetuated by harmful thought patterns and coping mechanisms you’ve developed to deal with horrible things that happened in the past, when you didn’t have a better way of dealing. I think maybe it’s like those stories Dr. David was talking about, but on steroids. It goes beyond just the reactions we all feel about life. It makes it hard to see why you would keep living if living hurts this much.
And if you don’t do the work, learn about trauma, understand how it affects you, it rules your life. It guides your decisions, steering you away from things that might make you happy because you can’t see past the past. It takes over your mood so that even when you’re faced with a beautiful mountainside full of flowers, you are stuck in the old stories. You can’t just “move on” and “get over it” and “focus on the positive.” You have to work through it. I’m still learning what triggers me. Sometimes, triggers are the classic PTSD triggers we’ve heard of, like loud noises for a soldier that is home from war. I’ve lived that kind of PTSD too, like when the sound of a distant car crash literally knocked the knees out from under me, months after having witnessed a man trying to kill everyone around me with a car. But sometimes, it’s something as simple as two people safe in each other’s presence. The present moment isn’t dangerous. In this case, even the memory it brought up wasn’t dangerous, although it made me sad. But the sight of those hikers was a trigger that sent me back into a trauma-informed view of the world and myself. It reminded my brain of something else. Something emotionally unsafe.
I honestly struggle to even describe the battles that go on in my head; I feel ashamed. I feel like I need to qualify that I’m not always like this; that it’s like there are two rooms in my brain: one where it’s light and I’m safe and things make sense, and one that is pitch black and full of danger. Depending on how much I’m struggling with at any given time and how much I’m triggered, I can live most of my life in that lit-up room, or I can live mostly in darkness. I’d been stepping into that dark room a lot recently. I wasn’t sure how much of it was reactions to the hard things that had been happening in my life and how much of it was getting caught up in those older stories, triggered by the more recent events. I’m still not sure. There’s no hard line in the brain delineating Here Lies Grief or Trauma Response Here. It’s all a mixed-up, mushy mess.
I have to remind myself it’s not weakness to be like this. To live like this and turn to look straight at it, walk with it every day, is the ultimate strength.
Cow!
As for the PTSD around the car incident, loud noises and silver SUV’s and cars driving and a whole host of other triggers panicked me for a long time. Now, seeing a car drive towards me in the daylight with its headlights on still puts me on edge, but I did so much work around that incident that that’s pretty much the only trigger left, and my reactions are mild. Someday I want to get that way with the other triggers.
I battled the trigger back down into submission and went to go look at the cows. The sadness followed, but I stepped away from the well of it.
Later, I checked into my Airbnb, and being alone was a relief.
I unpacked my car, hauled open the glass garage door of my tiny house onto an incredible view, and sank onto my bed. The breeze swept through the one-room cabin, which was perched on the edge of a cliff. Everything smelled like freshly cut wood. I sighed in contentment.
The sadness was still there. It’s been a constant companion recently. I pulled my computer over and started to write. That’s one of the best ways to banish the darkness. First, I wrote for me, a gush of juicy, pain-filled words, bleeding them out onto the screen.
Then came the words for my blog. When I started typing, I wasn’t sure how to begin. I intended to write about my trip. I found a story about my dad coming out instead. My dad, who told me stories and showed me magic growing up. He’s had increased fluid in his brain since last year. In the middle of the COVID shutdown, he had surgery to put a shunt in. On Mother’s Day of this year, that shunt malfunctioned and he passed out, falling face-first onto the driveway so hard it caused his brain to bleed.
I got dinner, watched a bit of Westworld, battled an overwhelming desire to go back to a few months ago, and then the blog called to me to finish it. Where my writing for myself is a disorganized gush of words and emotions and memories, I’ve been surprised to find that writing for my blog taps into a deeper wisdom. It helps me organize and make sense of the myriad impressions swirling around in my head. When I’m done writing, I feel like a different person. It’s like the telling of the story shapes me as much as experiencing it did.