Swiping Right on My Old Self
Because after all of that navel gazing it's time for this Adult Child to grow the fuck up
This blog post is dedicated to Jenna Ryan, YouTuber. Her channel is SelfLove U. Recently Jenna was released from a sixty (60) day stint as a political prisoner for what? standing in front of a broken window at the Capitol on January 6th.? While I am unfamiliar with all the facts that lead up to her incarceration, I really could give a rat’s ass about it. What bothered me is the meanness of the media and the haters. And though I do not agree with her political views, I do not give a rat’s ass about that either. That she has survived all of that and is thriving despite all this shit hitting the fan inspired me to write this piece. Thanks for all you do, and are about to do, Jenna.
So, what did I do during the lockdowns?
I spent a lot and I do mean a lot of time on the internet and ruminating. I mean besides the overwhelming fear and anxiety of catching Covid, and the fear that if I did catch it that I could kill someone, well what else was there to do? Learn how to speak Mandarin? Learn how to play the banjo? Learn how to code in Python?
So yes, healing my own personal childhood trauma and recovery became a personal quest for me during the lockdowns.
When it comes to the subject of my personal trauma, I would have to share things about other people, some related to me, some not, and when you do that, you get all kinds of shades of grey thrown your way, not to mention the legal trouble I could get into if I spill too much tea.
So, what was my motivation for me falling down this rabbit hole?
Well, once upon a time I fell for this guy, hard. He was not that into me, but against my better judgment I chased him, he strung me along, bread-crumbed, future faked, flaked, swiped right, told me I was crazy and then he discarded me.
Oh, and I should add here that this summarizes the same pattern that existed in other big traumatic break-ups (with friends, lovers, bosses) over the years - not all certainly because I have some awesome friends and bosses, etc., but I’m talking about the big nasty ones that altered the course of my life.
And for the life of me I could not get him (them) off my mind try as hard as I could. It has been a hella long time, and I still can’t block out this latest dump tape from running like a background program in my brain, and I felt like a sick fuck because of it. That is, until recently.
I really do not want to say much about the guy, because he really doesn’t deserve to be honored except that in a weird way, I am grateful that he was the catalyst that led me on a journey of healing some kick ass old wounds that I had no idea were tearing me apart. The fact that he triggered all these horror-show past relationships was a huge red flag that I conveniently ignored. He was cute, so that is an excuse, right?
As a matter of fact, I can say this honestly and without flinching in any way that I have learned more about my inner workings in the last 2 1/2 years than I have in the last 30.
And I must thank the algorithmic gods of social media that brought me to this place of understanding. There are really awesome content creators in this space from Melanie Tonia Evans to HG Tudor, and from Gabor Mate to Peter Levine, and on and on that provided me with the “tools and understanding” that helped gain some knowledge, wisdom, and spiritual perspective.
I learned that early childhood wounds cause trauma, trauma damages the brain, because you have a damaged brain you do not work right. You are by default a dysfunctional human being. When it comes to the way your personality develops over time you either become a whiny, clingy, tearful, sniffling doormat of a co-dependent (hey that is me!), or a Snidely Whiplash narcissistic psychopath (like the guy). You are both needy, self-absorbed, and just well, like I said you have what people say when they are “trying to be polite” issues. I know I am reducing these concepts a lot, but if I am traveling three floors on an elevator this is how I would summarize what I learned.
Let’s just say that when you have the kind of “crappy childhood” I have had, when it comes to relationships, particularly intimate ones, it’s like being forced to play baseball in Yankee Stadium during the World Series, without ever having played little league, much less knowing the rules of the game, and expected to hit the ball out of the park.
That, of course, does not negate that no matter how hard you work on yourself, no matter what form of therapy you chose to heal yourself, no matter how you recraft, reframe, revision, EFT, EMDR, the story of something shitty that has happened to you, something shitty has happened to you.
Bombs drop out of the sky and destroy everything that you ever worked for. Tornadoes whisk your favorite pet up into the sky and across the rainbow bridge. Drunk drivers kill an entire family’s blood line just by passing out at the wheel. You lose a job two days before your retirement.
I do not care what anyone says, nothing can heal those types of wounds for good. Shit that happens to you may not define you, but if you survive it, makes you who you are.
People are cruel and fucking mean. This guy was meaner to me than a sorority sister hazing a fat girl during pledge week, and that was on a good day.
Sure, I ugly cried for a week after the break-up, and honest-to-God the pain felt as fresh as if I were a teenager who had been stood up during senior prom. Somehow the healing modalities that I had learned over the years were simply inadequate to cope with this extraordinary amount of psychic pain.
But after a few days I pulled myself together. Of course, I did. Did I do that by tapping away the pain? No, not really. I just asked myself this question: what else have I survived?
I recalled the time that I was called over to my friend Charles’ house to clean up the splattered brains of his brother. His brother was playing with guns and drinking alcohol with a friend. They were playing Russian Roulette and he pulled the trigger, and the bullet blew his head off.
I remembered the times it was part of my job description to wrap corpses of people with whom I had been talking to days before this was when I worked in an ICU at a local hospital.
I remembered when one of our beloved cats had been strangled and we had to bury the body of Bangles the cat underneath the apple tree in the back yard. Now that was hard.
I remembered the time I was in an L train car that killed a man that had fallen on the track in front of his 10-year-old daughter. 35 years later, I can still remember her screams.
When I was five or six, I saw a man killed during a riot outside of my house.
Somehow, I lived through those events, not to mention the countless times my heart had been broken by faithless and useless men and women, who in retrospect did not even deserve a passing glance from me, much less my fealty and love.
I survived all that and am still standing, and if that is true one can always move on.
Of course, I will need to take the time to grieve, but after a while you get tired looking at your navel and you feel the restlessness and have an intense desire to do something like live your best life. There comes a time, finally, when you must declare that you no longer will allow your trauma to define you. You have to heal, of course, but then you have to get up like Grampa George in the Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory movie, suit up, put your shoes on and walk your fine ass out the door, because you have the golden ticket of your life, and it along with your own Fate is in your hands.