Though like honestly, I’ve been rethinking these words lately.
(For screen readers: The main post is a picture of a courageous knight and the text, “The world should have protected you. But you have been asked to protect it. What an honour. What an injustice.” Then there’s a closeup on the tears on the knight’s face. And I added the tags #the problem with becoming the kind of hero you needed yourself #is that it can’t change the fact #that nobody came for you”)
And in the essence, that is still true. There’s still a fundamental injustice that can’t ever be righted. And yes, I have seen a ton of heroes pour themselves out trying to fix the injustices of everyone else, while the wound inside of them is never ever healed. After decades on decades of saving everybody else, they are still unsaved. They have still not received the love and care and attention that were their birthright.
But for myself, I’ve noticed a few things that have really helped me heal and reclaim what I should have had.
My work gets me very involved in other people’s healing processes. This is very peculiar to my field–I don’t think a paramedic or a soldier would get the same experience as me. But my work involves helping people heal from trauma. I spend much of my week up to my elbows in the work of healing, growing, and becoming more whole. I give people the time and attention and compassion and empathy they should have had. We talk about the processes they go through to heal, and I research the tools and resources that help them. This means I am constantly surrounded by knowledge of what would help me–I can use the same techniques or apply for the same programs as the people I help.
My work and interests have led me to make a lot of friends in the same position–basically, other wounded helpers. We are all very used to ignoring our own needs and taking care of other peoples’, so around each other, we’ve often ended up in standoffs to see who can be tricked into betraying their needs and emotions first. Over time I’ve learned that it’s okay for me to lose those standoffs and admit the truth and accept the love and attention my friends want to give me.
Being in a community of similarly traumatized and disabled people has taught me the importance of modelling good self-care and destigmatizing asking for help. Even when I haven’t wanted to ask for help for my own sake, I’ve rigidly forced myself through the process because it’s beneficial for everyone else around me (and their engagement with the process benefits me).
So basically… when I wrote those tags a year ago, it felt like there was still a small, scarred, eternally unrescued child tight inside my chest, someone untouched and inconsolable. And it felt like she might have been stuck like that forever. Simply doing the work and ignoring my own needs would keep her like that until we both died.
So it was doing all of the things above with the explicit intention of reclaiming my birthright–of saying, “I should always have been protected and I should always have been loved; so I am going to protect myself and let others protect me, and love myself and let others love me.”–that she and I finally started to heal. I can’t just stop whatever I’m doing and touch that knot of pain in my chest anymore. It’s a lot more sheltered, scabbed over, and threaded through with connections to strength and love and my larger sense of self now. It takes a really deep hit to elicit that distress in me now.
That healing was not the prize I was handed for the number of monsters slain. It was a potion I brewed continually out of harvested monster bits and fed myself on a regular basis.
From my work I’ve observed it’s possible for this process to happen even if you don’t become a hero–but I think some of us are so hurt and scarred that we just can’t approach this topic with any sort of vulnerability. We need to be able to practice the forms and rituals a thousand times from the other side, giving out that love and protection, before it feels safe and familiar enough to receive.
kianamaiart
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romaincrisis
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