If you hold me without hurting me…

Hi friend ♡ Since my last post, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I share online. For a few weeks, I felt really stuck and unable to come to a conclusion (hence the lack of updates - I had to figure some things out first). The thing is: on principle, I want to be honest and share as much as I reasonably can where it’s relevant.

It’s not that I think you owe people any of your story, necessarily. It’s more that I want to do what feels right to me, and I think honesty is important. The thought that my honesty can help someone is pretty much what my entire online presence is built upon.

But it’s hard sometimes. And it comes at a cost.

Lately, I have been experiencing an intense internal struggle between staying true to my own philosophy, and risking hurting or upsetting people. As an autistic person, I am well acquainted with the whole “honesty vs considering people’s feelings” thing. But the rules on that are easier to feel out in person. Where does a blog fall on that spectrum? (lol)

A blog is anything you want it to be. It was never my intention for mine to be like a diary, but I still want to share a certain amount of personal stuff because I think it’s important. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I’m sure I already have. It’s most likely unavoidable with this kind of writing. Everything I say is the truth, but it’s the truth from my perspective, at that moment in time.

Sometimes I come back to something I posted a few weeks or months ago and strongly consider editing it or deleting it altogether. So far I haven’t because one thought keeps being louder than the ones telling me to undo it: that version of me existed. Who am I to come in and edit myself after the fact? It’s the same mindset I apply to old tattoos - that version of me had just as much of a right to her choices as my current self does.

Obviously, it isn’t healthy or necessary to follow this thinking blindly. There will be many situations where amending your original choice will be the right thing to do. You just have to figure that out as you go. But in general, and at least when it comes to creative outlets, I think there’s value in letting your growth show by allowing the past versions of yourself to remain visible. Keep your first tattoo. Don’t edit that post, don’t delete your old YouTube videos, don’t ‘private’ your selfies from two years ago. Unless you really want to. But don’t do it just because you think that version of you wasn’t good or acceptable enough. Or because you’ve changed since.

Our perspectives, feelings, opinions are always evolving. That’s normal and it’s a good thing. If you now cringe at something you said ten years ago, that’s a sign of growth, right?

The point is: I felt what I felt, and I said what I said. It was real and true at the time, and I would rather be authentic in the moment than cohesively static.

So… what caused this whole re-examining of values and my own honesty online? My previous post was written from deep in a PTSD symptom flare-up. I’m not embarrassed by any of that, although it does feel a tiny bit ridiculous to think about now how scared I actually was, and all the steps I took to keep myself safe - consciously or not. But the thing is, you never actually know. Your nervous system cares about your survival, first and foremost. If anything or anyone is deemed a threat, your body will fight to keep you safe from it.

It’s easy to say in hindsight that things turned out okay, that you didn’t need to react that strongly. I can laugh at myself for checking my entire house with a flashlight. But the reason why my body responds like that, even feels the need to do that at all… is because once, the threat was real. And I survived it. So we keep an internal record of that, and we break out all our tried and true strategies (or whatever strategy our brain deems most likely to succeed in that scenario) and we survive over and over again. And yeah, when you have PTSD, most of the situations that raise the alarm are not actually of any real danger to you. But some of them are. And your nervous system doesn’t care which is which. It cares about keeping you alive.

PTSD is not something you can ‘logic’ your way out of. The body responds only to our lived experience.

(Side note: I think there’s an added complexity for women, too. We know that men are the thing we need to be most wary of. And we need to be wary of all of them, because you don’t know up front which ones are going to harm you, or how much. Which ones are only going to harm you a little? Which ones would take your life if they had the chance? Better to be safe than dead. If you think I’m being dramatic, then you’re lucky to have lived a sheltered enough life that this does not seem like a fact to you. Congratulations.)

But I’ve really been struggling with the concept of sharing anything about my life that involves other people. Other perspectives, other truths.

By sharing mine, am I hurting those who see it differently? Maybe. But my conclusion for now is that this is part of the price to pay for what I’ve chosen to do, for doing what feels right and important to me.

I don’t mean that their perspectives or feelings don’t matter. Only that this is not necessarily the place for them. And I can’t put the hypothetical disapproval of some individuals above my own purpose or authenticity.

⊹

For the past few months, I have been seeing a counselor at a center for women who have experienced sexual assault and abuse. They are called Nok, which means ‘enough’ in Norwegian. It’s been really good so far. Hard, obviously. But good. It has taught me that there are probably always blind spots in your mental tapestry of healing; things you didn’t think were a problem for you, or things you thought you’d healed but here you are, still living out the same patterns.

It has also given me some new perspectives on self-respect, personal boundaries, and consequences for the guilty.

At a recent session, I talked about never pressing charges against anyone because I didn’t want to hurt them. I thought about the things they might lose if I did. I wasn’t sure if they deserved those consequences.

And my counselor said “what about the consequences this had for you? What about the years you lost when you got PTSD from what they did to you?”

I’d never really thought of it that way before. I’m aware of the childhood and teenage years I lost to survival. But when it comes to the crimes committed against me (and they were crimes.), it’s almost as if my brain just treated that as a fact of life. Sure, I didn’t really get to have normal 20s like other people, because I was either recovering from traumatic events or in the middle of new ones. And yeah, I didn’t really feel like I started living properly until I was 33, because it took so long to heal enough to be able to do that. But that’s just the way it was. That’s how this first part of my life turned out. It was probably just as much my fault as theirs, right?

Well, no. Committing a crime is a choice, and the responsibility lies with the person who made that choice.

It’s almost funny to be told that this is also a normal way of thinking for people who have PTSD. To hear professionals describe my case as “classic”. We become so understanding that we ‘understand’ while people are actively harming us. We ‘understand’ that they hit us or verbally abused us. We ‘understand’ that the legal consequences of those actions would hurt them, and we don’t want to hurt anyone, especially because we’ve been hurt so much ourselves.

I protect people from the consequences of their own actions. It’s one of my most deeply established patterns, and it’s one I think I have to break. The hardest thing about no longer doing this is that it feels selfish. It feels selfish of me to allow consequences to come to other people. To show anger when someone has wronged me feels self-indulgent.

To report it when a crime was committed against my body felt too dramatic and unnecessary. After all, it’s not like they stole something or killed someone.

But isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

This is another thing my counselor helped me realize. That a crime committed against “just” my body is still a crime. It impacted me deeply. Why should I be understanding of the person who did that, let them get away it, allow them to be free of consequences… when I am not free of them?

⊹

Yesterday, I met with my lawyer for the first time. She is, along with my counselor at Nok and therapist Elin, more proof to me that the right people will come into your life at exactly the right time. Any sooner, and you might not have been ready for them.

I’m so incredibly grateful for all the strong women who have come into my life in recent years. They inspire me to be strong too, even when it’s hard. Maybe especially when it is.

After all these years, I finally feel ready to take on the fight that past me couldn’t.

I intend to put the responsibility where it belongs.

And I want to send a message to myself and to other people who have experienced similar things. A message that says “what happened was real and it matters”.

It’s not okay just because it was me it happened to. But until very recently, that is how I thought about it. “It’s fine as long as it’s me, because I could handle it” (could I?) “as long as it doesn’t happen to anyone else, because that’s the thing that bothers me”. Why didn’t it bother me as much when it was me? I’m asking rhetorically, of course.

I know the answer.