Trauma Remembers

I have a pimple in the crease of my ear. Annoying. Gross. It's a lot of things, but mostly, it's a reminder. It's situated perfectly near an old scar, just north of the tragus of my outer ear.

*brief pause whilst we google "tragus".*

It wouldn't stop staring at me from the mirror - the scar that is - but hard as it was after a day like today, I finally put the thought to rest.

I put the kids the bed, then I put myself to bed. I was full of self pity for not digging within myself to put words to paper before waving my white flag for desperately needed rest. I didn't pick up the house, didn't strip the day's clothes off my weathered body, I precisely turned off the lights and burrowed into all the down fluff on my bed.

Just as I laid my heavy head onto my soft pillow, there it was: that damn, peeving ear pimple. It left that part of my ear a little tender to the touch. But the idea of it pestering my rest was only fleeting. It was the reminder it brought with it that held its grip on me. The heat of anger, the dark blood dripping between my fingers as I held my hand to my head in shock, the pain that woke me night after night as it healed when I'd simply roll onto that side of my body in my sleep and the careful hair manipulation daily to cover any trace of it's bruised existence. After living in just an instant of the memory, I found I needed to ground myself: I was in the here and now, my ear was healed, the old wound is now just a scar.

Scars can sometimes do that. Suddenly you're held hostage in a time-warp of a past moment or emotion. Old wounds can leave marks that last a lifetime. Just as grief becomes a core memory and builds a new "Island of Personality" within who we are (big fan of Inside Out over here 👋), trauma will do the same. But you cannot talk yourself out of these new traits or run from them. You cannot shame them out of you or bury them to be forgotten. We learn to heal, we learn to respect sharing space with this new island within us, and we teach it to play nice with the other islands. It's a learned skill, never perfected, and always in practice. There will always be some unexpected prompt that will send us back to practice again.

A quick little side note though worth remembering (because seriously - Inside Out - it's amazing):

Sometimes, we need sadness to find and feel joy.

What is something good that has come from your heartbreak?