[Picture of a three-part drawing.
First, a stick figure. Text reads ‘We are ourselves. Whole, wholehearted. Full of potential and power and with unique and lovely voices.’
Second, a stick figure with harsh red and yellow bursts obscuring them, and a small disassembled stick figure beside them. Text reads ‘Trauma obscures and fractures us. Pushes some parts away, introduces new shapes and gaps and struggles. Now we have a trauma body.’
Third, a stick figure reassembling a little stick figure. Text reads ‘Trauma recovery can mean collecting the fragments and reassembling. But we still have ourselves, and access to our hearts and power and voices. We can help ourselves – help our trauma bodies – because we are amazing.’]
I was thinking about how trauma distances us from ourselves. How it can close us off from our memories and our self-awareness and even cut us off from making the choices we want to make with our lives. And I was also thinking about how trauma recovery is so slow and painful and iterative. How it takes so long and is such a fucking slog. And yet how we do it. How so many of us have experienced trauma and still work towards healing. How the heart inside us is so strong and we are never too old or too weak to do some healing.
I was thinking about intergenerational trauma. And maybe even intergenerational healing.
This isn’t great art, and I would do a lot more to frame this in ways that don’t slip into harmful individualism, before I made it a blog post or whatever.
But today this is my love letter, and this is what I am thinking about.
How so many of us have been blown apart by trauma, and have walked through our lives with obscured and fragmented selves because of it, and how many of us have done such beautiful and meaningful and magical work to heal.
I love us, all of of us trauma bbs with our trauma bodies and our trauma minds. I love those of us who parent with trauma and those of us who are parented with trauma. We are so amazing. We are *so* amazing.
