Member-only story
In “Mental Healthcare” — The Personal is Political
Let’s use our lived experience to drive change
I am sitting beside her, with my head leaning on her shoulder. My eyes are closed, and I am just being, in this moment of rest, close to another person.
She lets me sit like that for maybe a minute. Then she pulls away. Not saying anything, just distancing herself from me. Which forces me to lift my head and sit up straight again, to not fall over.
I had put my head on her shoulder, because I was super weary, tired, exhausted after a trauma confrontation we had just worked through. I had faced a traumatic memory that has haunted me for decades. Those kind of memories are hard to get out into the air, to talk about in a way that makes sense to anyone else. The story itself had never before been told to anyone; none of it had been named, put in a sequence, spoken out loud, as part of my story. I had kept it that way, to make it easier to pretend none of it had really happened. And now the memory had been shared with another human being.
The whole of me had not been present during that trauma confrontation. That would have been too much, too much to cope with at once. The part of me that was present during this traumatic event was the part facing it in this confrontation, as that part of me is the one holding…
