On mental health and the past year
24 Sep 2020It’s been quite awhile since I’ve written and I want to talk about why. Heads-up, this is a pretty hard-hitting post with some heavy topics.
Trigger warning: mental health, depression, PTSD, and sexual trauma.
I stopped writing in 2019 and 2020 because I was wrestling with my mental health.
Depression is different for each person and can take different forms in the same person. I’ve had depression creep up on me like a fog: slowly, quietly, until I can’t see a step ahead of myself.
I’ve also had depression strike like a lightning bolt.
I go to sleep with the ability to feel and wake up dead inside, the power to emote gone.
It’s hard to convey how disturbing that absence of feeling can be.
It’s both physically painful, an internal grating sensation, and like a deafening, terrifying silence or emptiness.
I get this type of depression because I experience panic attacks. I experience panic attacks because I have PTSD. I have PTSD because I am survivor of sexual trauma.
PTSD stands for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It develops after experiencing a traumatic event.
Psychologists don’t know why some people walk away from trauma without a mental scratch and others are haunted for the rest of their lives. I’m in the latter group.
Over the years I’ve learned what contributes to an attack. The attacks are infrequent, two in the last ten years, but can be devastating. I’ve gotten much better at bouncing back.
Frustratingly, it’s still challenging to pinpoint the complex interplay of variables and I can be blindsided by interactions.
In May 2019 I was blindsided by an interaction that triggered the PTSD. For the next few weeks I lived in near-constant fear, reliving my trauma almost every day. This culminated in a severe panic attack which spiralled into a depressive episode.
I lost the will to live overnight and spent the next few months piecing myself back together.
It’s the reason I stopped writing.
I tried, but writing without acknowledging what had happened felt hollow and disingenuous.
For the longest time I had neither the courage nor the ability to write about what was going on –– it’s not unusual for survivors of sexual trauma to stay silent because of shame or the fear of being judged.
Yet for me, healing has only come through surfacing that trauma, being honest and being vulnerable.
In tech blogs we’re not supposed to write about personal stuff, not mental health in software development, and definitely not sexual trauma or PTSD.
But we’re human: we all have mental health as well as physical health –– and many of us who have experienced trauma carry that trauma with us to work.
This is not a choice, we cannot leave these parts of ourselves behind.
Spoken word poet Andrea Gibson in “Blue Blanket”*, a poem about rape, writes:
do you know they found land mines in broken women’s souls? black holes in the parts of their hearts that once sang symphonies of creation
I sometimes think trauma is like that: land mines in our souls.
One of the reasons I read and talk about effective communication and conflict transformation is for self-preservation: I have land mines in my soul.
I also believe the people I work with have land mines of their own.
I want to learn how to better listen and communicate, and encourage others to do so as well.
That way when we discover these land mines we have the tools to diffuse them –– together.
* The full text of the poem can be found here and this is Gibson’s performance.