alternates
Physicists traffic in some pretty wild theories about the nature of our existence. I’ve expressed frustration about the idea of multiple universes as an easy out of inconvenient three-dimensional constraints. (After all, other planes of existence can explain away a lot of inconsistencies.) The reason I bring this up, however, is not to uphold or debunk such theories. Full disclosure, I have experienced occasional moments in my life where the way I remembered something was completely different from how someone else remembered it, and I’ve decided that, for lack of a better explanation thereof, I’m comfortable with the possibility of slip-streaming from one version of reality to another.
I bring it up because I was discussing with my therapist how angry I was having to lug around my past of being bullied, ostracized, assaulted, lied to, or taken advantage of, something that happened so often and for so long that my soul feels broken and damaged beyond repair. I live in a barely managed state of despair. I have no idea how to move past something that took up such a significant chunk of and made such a significant mark on my life. I am now middle-aged, and still struggle with loving myself or seeing myself as worthy of being treated with kindness and dignity.
But last night I was thinking that perhaps I needed to expand upon my limited thinking about the situation, my potentially unfounded assumption of a two-dimensional, linear timeline that only moves in one direction. It is at least possible, if not plausible, that there is a plane, or are multiple planes, of existence wherein I never experienced one or more of the handful of traumas that have since defined my reaction to triggers as a reopening of old wounds that bleed afresh as though brand new each time.
There might be a version, or maybe several versions, of me that had different experiences. That would be more mentally and emotionally resilient because she never went through the things that hold me under my pain like cement feet. (I’m not interested in hearing arguments about resilience being measured by the number of awful things that you’ve had to get through–I’m not convinced that’s how it works.) I don’t need to slide over onto (into?) one of those planes to access the possibility that I could be mentally healthier and happier than I am now.
It may be that the scars trauma leaves cannot be escaped by surfing different paths; they may imprint such indelible marks that there is no way to keep from dragging them along whichever turns you take. I may not be able to erase the emotional, if not spiritual wounds I carry by any amount of metaphysical drift. But the fact that it is at least possible (if rather unlikely) offers a new way of thinking about it.
The hardest thing about moving past trauma and, more important, those deeply ingrained trauma responses, is that I don’t know what I would move forward to. I don’t know who I would be without them. It’s so far removed from who I am, from how I feel when I allow myself to access that seemingly bottomless well of darkness, that I don’t even know where to start.
However, the idea that that well-adjusted person already exists somewhere (if where is the appropriate term) presents an opportunity to imagine what she might be like. Of course, I can’t ever completely erase the effects of trauma; the best outcome I can hope for is a disentangling of that trauma from my current way of feeling and thinking so that I can react more like a person who did not experience those events. But even that feels out of reach at the moment. And the idea that there is a version of me that does react that way gives me hope.
If I can envision a non-traumatized (or less traumatized) version of myself, I have a goal I can work toward. I can imagine her responses to different things, and how they are different from mine, especially what might be distorted about mine and how to un-distort them.
In my last job, it took months for me to convert my knowledge about how toxic the workplace was and how awful I was being treated into the action of quitting. But the non-traumatized me might have acted on that knowledge far sooner, under the realization that she did not deserve that sort of treatment, especially considering what she has to offer in terms of experience and knowledge about the work. She might have left after a few weeks in search of a better opportunity, and might have found one more quickly.
I want to be that woman. I want to be the woman who trusts her feelings about how she is being treated and acts upon them. Who trusts that other people should treat her with respect and to not accept those who don’t. Autistic people are discouraged from entrusting their instincts by a lifetime of negative feedback. Negative feedback is one thing, but I went through some truly horrible shit, so horrible that to this day I have never told anyone the whole story, although a couple of people know one thing or another. (And by a couple I mean literally two, and one is my therapist.)
But if I can act as if I were just a person that got that negative feedback, minus the horrible shit, and that now recognizes, as I do, that nearly all of it was due to misunderstanding my intentions, maybe I can get there after all.
No alternate existences required.
