living in my own apartment has really showed me the full extent of how Fucked Up my living situation was. i'm not even talking about the abusive parent thing here. i mean just the physical environment. we grew up in a shitty dilapidated old farmhouse.
it always smelled just a little bit like piss. whether it was human or animal piss varied from time to time. human piss got less frequent as my dad stopped getting blackout drunk so often. animal piss got more frequent when my parents got a little dog that they didn't bother to train; i started wearing shoes indoors all the time
there was a terrible mouse problem. they weren't as bad upstairs but you could still hear em skittering through the walls at night. they were worst in the kitchen. certain cupboards had it worse than others, so we tried to store things based on that. you had to store the pantry staples in thicker containers: ideally metal or glass- if you used tupperware you'd have to replace it every couple months cuz the mice would start to chew through it. the everyday dishes and cutlery were kept in one of the areas where mice didn't bother to go, but stuff like mixing bowls and pots and pans had to be scrubbed out before you used them, just to be safe.
and then there were the bugs. having at least obe bug in the room with you was the rule, not the exception. especially in summertime. especially during the night. i'd have to go to bed with about a dozen bugs in my room (not even counting the gnats, of which there were several dozen) every night in the summer, because trying to get rid of them was a waste of effort. there were spiders with bodies the size of my big toe and legs the length of my fingers. spiders were mostly consider good, though, because one spider would eat multiple other bugs. but i got used to the bugs, for the most part. left over from that is the fact that i now have to consciously remind myself to put bugs outside when i see one in my apartment, instead of just leaving them there.
winter was worse than the summer, though. for most of my childhood we relied primarily on a wood stove (using logs my dad would cut throughout the year) in the living room because heating the house with electricity was too expensive. the air was dry and smelled a bit like soot.
we'd sometimes supplement that with electric wall heaters or space heaters if it got too cold for the stove to keep up with, and my dad would fuss over the cost the whole time. but the heaters were pretty weak and couldn't keep the house warm if the fire wasn't running. the fire needed constant tending, and if me and my sister were home alone (we weren't allowed to manage the fire as children) it would get cold very fast. we wore our winter coats indoors after we got home from school, before our mother came home from work and lit the fire (which had to be snuffed out in the morning when my dad left for work, so as not to risk another house fire. (which happened once but everyone was home and we could call the fire department so it only burned the roof by the time they got there)). it'd get extra cold at night, both because the outdoors cold colder after dark and because no one would be awake and actively adding fuel to the fire.
but even with the fire and the heaters, it was almost always a little bit chilly. you generally had to wear a jacket or robe over your pajamas at all times, and keep a blanket wrapped around yourself as you went about your day. i'd spend most of my time either curled up in bed or gravitating to whatever heat source i could find. i'd sit up so close to the wood stove that my skin would get red hot but i'd stay there til the cold that'd dug its way into my bones cooled off. or me and my sister would get into fights over who got to sit in the warm spot in front of the good electric heater.
i went to sleep at night, curled up in a tight little ball, half a dozen blankets on me, covering up even my face, arranged so there was just a small hole near my nose to breathe through. in the mornings, i'd pick out the day's outfit and then lie down on top of it for a few minutes so i wouldn't have to put cold fabric directly onto my body (cold denim is The Worst). i became a master of getting dressed under the still-warm blankets in my bed.
as we got older and my dad got too old to keep chopping firewood and we got Slightly Less Poor we got more electric heaters and stopped using the wood stove. and some of the problems caused by having to rely on fire went away, but it was still often very cold inside
i. think i might've been legit traumatized by those winters.
it sounds almost silly to call feeling cold traumatic. it was so minor compared to most of the traumatizing shit that happened to me as a kid. and it wasn't like, ever deadly cold. we were never at risk of homelessness. it probably never even dropped below 55F; it wasn't like my cousins who spent a couple years having to wear winter coats indoors all winter. but. i think it was still trauma, in a way.
but like. every year during autumn, i feel this sinking sense of dread as i realize it's getting colder.
a little of that is just cuz i hate winter for normal reasons. i have no cold tolerance. i'm scrawny and mildly anemic. my brain interprets cold sometimes as a sharp burning pain. even when i'm fully bundled up (and i mean REALLY bundled up, not just throwing on a winter coat and a hat, i'm talking 3 layers of clothing under the coat type of shit) the cold creeps in. having to walk to and from places often ends up feeling painful from the cold. and i love being outdoors and being trapped inside drives me bonkers
but i think a lot of that dread is legit a trauma response.
or even when i'm chilly for just a bit too long, i sometimes even end up crying. not because the cold air makes my eyes water, not from the physical pain of the cold, but because i get a feeling of helplessness that i couldn't figure out the source of til just now.
