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Trauma

I always considered myself as someone who has not experienced trauma. Early this year I took a psychological evaluation test about trauma and scored a 11. It means that I experienced few to no symptoms of active trauma.

Talking with my therapist today, I realized that I had experienced a fair share of trauma. My body remembers even though my mind doesn’t want to acknowledge it.

I think the very first trauma I experienced was when I first had a severe depressive episode. I had limited to no knowledge of depression, however I experienced it so vividly. I remember sitting on the floor of my dorm’s hallway and wishing it would swallow me whole. Having my body respond to situations I did not know. Like how one day I couldn’t eat because I was so scared and my hands were trembling so I couldn’t hold a fork. For six months I experienced these symptoms, forgot what it means to be happy, or how it feels like.

The second time I experienced trauma it wasn’t as intense. I wasn’t sad. I was happy, excited, confident, hopeful. However I was also volatile, restless and I couldn’t sleep. For two weeks I ran on two hours of sleep. It was exhilarating but my body was taking the toll and I spent four months trying to repair what was broken.

The third time, we were back to being sad. But this was not just sad, it was giving up. I spent a month surviving on just water. I didn’t see a living soul, I would only go out when I knew everyone was asleep. I developed a phobia of going outside or being in daylight. This reminded me that the world was living on, but for me life had stopped. I was just waiting to die and on a few occasions I did try to do that.

All these happened when I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t understand mental illnesses, and I never considered that I would have one. I just thought that that was how people lived. After all we all have highs and lows.

I never considered these as traumas until now. I never thought of how much it affects the way I view the world. I don’t know how to trust my mind anymore. When I sleep for a little more I start worrying that my depression is coming back. I have this fear that one day I’ll go to sleep and wake up depressed or suicidal like a light has been switched off. And this has happened, but for mania. One day I was not fine and the next I was more than fine. It was a nice change in those terms until it wasn’t. I was powerless in regards to what my brain can do and it governed the way I experience the world.

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