Memoir-ella
How To Escape A Mental Prison
| Mississippi | 1990s | Gender Conversion Therapy | DID |
CW: transphobia, disordered eating, SA, hospitalization
Starvation is a powerful tool. It’s almost supernatural.
It can be used to force all kinds of things to happen to yourself, to others, to the world around you. But that power is a trap.
For me, starvation was a hammer and my body was the nail. With each hit, I shattered into smaller pieces. The further I shrank, the less there was of me to save. And with each diminished part, so went the rest.
Brené Brown, famed expert and social science researcher on shame and vulnerability, noted that if you numb one emotion, you numb all of them. There’s simply no way to kill our connection to sadness without also destroying our connection to joy.
She said, “When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive ones.”
In the same way, the memories I needed to forget took with them the memories I would have liked to have held on to. I felt empty because emptiness was better than being filled with the memory of what my family had done.
I’ve lived in terror for years. Decades. Terrified what remembering would bring.
