“You are weird but you can’t help it.”
That’s what my classmate Neil wrote in my eighth grade yearbook.
“Dear Julie: You are weird, but you can’t help it. Have a great summer. Neil.”
Screw you, Neil (is what I should have said). But I held my tongue and nodded my head, because his assessment kind of fit; it made sense to me. This was just one more confirmation that I was indeed weird, and that nothing could be done.
I grew up a misfit, feeling weird, left out, and misunderstood.
I was the eighth in a family of 11 children in which there was never enough money. All of my clothes were worn-out hand-me-downs, and sometimes there wasn’t enough food in the cupboard for all of us. We received cheese and peanut butter from the government.
At school, I became an expert at tucking the holes of my socks into my shoes and feigning deafness at insults about how ugly I was because my father couldn’t afford to buy braces for my teeth. I came to know myself as unworthy of care, love, or kindness.
As the target of violence and sexual attention by male family members who were much larger and angrier than I, I came to know myself as powerless, and my body as community property.
The adults who were supposed to protect and care for me were absent so I became hyper-vigilant to all the disaster that was sure to befall me at any moment: cancer, abduction, and (thanks to some seriously messed up religion) dying in my sleep and going to purgatory to suffer for my impure thoughts.
That was my normal: fear, oppression, neglect. It’s no surprise that I recreated that same dynamic in my adult life.
After 15 more years of fencing with addiction and abuse, I finally recognized that my entire world had been built on the belief that what I needed didn’t matter—that I didn’t matter—and that my main purpose was to make sure everyone else around me was happy, no matter what. After all (I must have reasoned) others are less likely to abuse you, or reject you, or shame and belittle you if you make them happy. It was the logic of a child, seriously flawed, and completely ineffective as a mechanism for self-protection, not to mention inherently impossible because abusive people can never be happy.
In the end, I just ensured that I was surrounded by miserable, dysfunctional people who devalued me and caused me pain.
I finally decided to stop being driven by all the hurts and crises. I pulled the rug out from under my life. It wasn’t graceful, and it wasn’t skillful; my goal was to simply survive it. Yet regardless of my desire to change my life, events had been set into motion that had to play themselves out. The bell had already been rung with a heavy hand, and for a long time there was little I could do but bear the reverberation. I was separated from my children and displaced from my home. I lost almost all my friends, my finances were ruined, my health was destroyed, my church condemned me, and most of my family was disloyal or distant.
Two decades passed before there was silence again, before I could begin to hear myself think, before I came to understand why I had always struggled so much and that what I had been experiencing all my life had a name: trauma.
Even today, shades of past events continue to zip across the vista of my mind: The sight of the chicken coop sneering at me as I pass by my childhood home, “More Than a Woman” on the radio, the sounds of a football game playing on TV, empty pages in the photo album of my kids growing up. My body, thoughts, and emotions drive themselves into high gear when I encounter these vivid reminders of what was, and I experience the past as though it were still happening.
My mind, it seems, had become wired by trauma, altering the way I think. This was a defense mechanism or maybe the naive mind of a child trying to make sense of an unsafe and complicated world. Many of the negative personality traits I live with today—my fledgling confidence, my tentative nature, my fear of rejection—are the shadows that remain from a sun that set long ago.
You can’t successfully live in both the present and the past at the same time. I was seriously stuck.
I spent most of my life learning how to live with trauma. The question remained whether I could learn to live without it.
Deciding to “get over” the trauma was one matter. Doing it has been a never-ending journey. The causes, conditions, habits, and—maybe most powerfully—the momentum of trauma are not so easy to tame. Trauma is a wild stallion, refusing the bit, kicking and bucking at the sight of the corral.
So yes, Neil, I am weird. And no, I can’t help it; it’s how I’m put together. But I can try to heal, to think differently, and learn to respond to the world in new ways.
It won’t be easy, but I have hope. Hope to heal from the lost years with my children, hope to rebuild a tattered career, hope to move the needle of my financial well-being, hope to learn how to think better of myself, of the world around me, of God, and of others.
I have hope to break my trauma ties. And let my freak flag fly.
🕊 & ❤️
Julie
Julie Scipioni is the co-author of the bestselling novel series for women, "Iris & Lily," and author of "Taking the Stairs: My Journal of Healing and Self-Discovery.” Julie’s debut solo novel, “downward facing dogs” is also now available on Amazon. For more information and to order, see Julie’s Amazon Author page.