I’m going to be leaving this blog dormant for a few months. During a previous session with my therapist I’ve realized I’m not just in a depressive episode that will get better with time. An event occurred that re-traumatized me and I didn’t see the signs until I started identifying triggers and realized the dark cloud of Bad-Thoughts-And-Feelings wasn’t a sad greyscale filter over my life, but was something that actually only cropped up during specific circumstances. It sounds very dramatic and life threatening when I say I’ve been re-traumatized, so I want to clarify, there was no physical danger or threat. The thing that separates an event from being a normal stressor versus being traumatizing has almost nothing to do with the event itself. It’s all about how your brain reacts to it. If your brain reacts to something bad happening by believing it’ll happen again, it begins to look for patterns and builds up walls to protect itself. If your brain identifies an event as a threat to a stable existence, this can happen, fully independent of the severity of the traumatic event itself.

My cousin is terrified of eating red velvet cake. When we were kids, he ate too much of it at a birthday party and when he threw up and saw red vomit, it terrified him. For most of our lives he claimed to be allergic to the red food coloring or the specific combination of Betty Crocker cake mix and Pillsbury frosting. To this day, he still refuses to eat it, even as a fully grown adult who knows it won’t hurt him. This is a form of trauma, and I hope it better explains what I’m saying about myself and my own personal experiences. Me and my brain are separate entities and we often disagree. I don’t think the inciting incident should have had this result and I don’t blame anyone or anything for creating the situation itself. But my brain disagrees and now I’m unable to do things I used to be able to do before. I feel the desire to be much more private than I used to be. I want to be extremely selective with the people I talk about my life with. I really want this to be temporary as one of my favorite things about myself used to be my vulnerability and expressiveness. But charging through the defenses my brain has built up doesn’t help in the long term. I have to work with it to dismantle these walls brick by brick.

Thanks to everyone who’s kept with the blog. I’ll be back to writing my life updates as soon as it’s healthy.