Time Travel Exists – Just Ask A Trauma Survivor
Time doesn’t heal all wounds. What might?
What if I told you that today alone I have been 31, 19, 16, 5, and 26 years old?
In the West, time is framed as linear — an entity that people experience universally. It is a ribbon that stretches from the past (what happened) through the present (what is happening) and into the future (what will happen). This ribbon is divided into segments (years, weeks, days, hours) that unfurl stably and predictably.
In the same way that one plus one may not equal two, though, time is tricky. And when it comes to how time is stored in the body— as memory — “reality” is much more nuanced.
I am a trauma survivor. Specifically, I am a complex trauma survivor, which means that I’ve experienced multiple, intersecting traumas that lack decisive beginnings, middles, and ends. These events started in childhood, and they got cumulatively worse with age. While I have endured distinct, horrific instances of abuse, I have also lived for months and years in homeless shelters, in psychiatric wards, and in predatory addiction treatment centres where maltreatment was normalized or encouraged.
No Mad, disabled drug user escapes unscathed. For much of my life, fear has been my baseline. As a result, my sense of time is…
