normalcy.

Trauma is a funny thing. It comes uninvited when you feel your best, and leaves you a sobbing mess when you thought that you’d actually had a pretty good day, all things considered.

You might have had one good day, it says. But never forget the myriad ways that life has ruined you, rendered you unable of experiencing any real joy, the way that normal people do.

I am currently putting off cleaning out my refrigerator so that I can write this instead. I am an extremely normal person, who has a fridge that needs cleaning, who has laundry that needs doing, who has a partner who is distracting me from these tasks by sending me memes. I’m already dreading when he comes over tomorrow and my fridge is a nightmare.

I have a very normal job, that pays normal money. I have a normal apartment. I am in a very normal relationship that is extremely nice. If someone looked at my current life on paper, they would come to the conclusion that my life was fine. Boring, even, by some accounts. What that someone would not realize is how much effort it takes for me to simply exist in normal spaces, every day. They would not realize how much effort it takes to wake up in the morning and say to myself, I will not let my trauma win today.

I am a person who loves knitting. I love magic. I really don’t care for Android. I have a love/hate relationship with running. I hate coconut. I love prestige television. I play the flute. I love New Wave music. Sometimes, I just sit on my balcony to feel the sun on my forearms. Always, I stop what I’m doing to run after an ice cream truck. I love bees. I contain multitudes. And I have trauma.

I tell a lot of stories from my adolescent and adult life. They’re entertaining stories. I won’t pretend that they aren’t. I have lived a life of intrigue. The only bummer about that is that for every fun story of a random tattoo that I got in a foreign country, I have three stories of deep trauma that are best left untold. I tend to think that they go hand-in-hand — the laissez-faire attitude that I have of life is tightly bound to the horrors that I have endured throughout my life that no one has ever had to account for. Perhaps if I had been more sheltered, I would be more afraid of things. Maybe I should be grateful for my trauma. Maybe I am. But sometimes, man … it sucks to think about.

I am a survivor of trauma. Many times over. Some of my earliest childhood memories involve trauma, and large swaths of that same childhood have been stolen from me by my own mind. I don’t remember a lot about my childhood, because my brain is trying to protect me from that which would hurt too much to remember. Silly brain. It took away all of the fun things — like that pool party I had when I was five that my mother was horrified to discover that I had no memory of; and it kept all of the horrid, shitty things — like that time that I bit my lower lip until it bled so that I could be quiet while my cousin violated my body in a room full of sleeping family members when I was seven.

This is a story about trauma, in general, and not all of the specific injustices that I have endured, though some of them will come up during this. If I were to list all of the trauma I have lived through, you, Reader, would be horrified. You’ll probably be horrified for me after reading this to begin with, even though I only plan to refer to the instances of trauma that have shaped me in context.

I’ve been through it, is what I’m saying. And so have you, probably. And maybe someone reading this feels the way I do, and doesn’t know how to articulate it. To that person, I want to say: this shit sucks. I hope that it gets better. I don’t know if it ever will, but for you and for me, I hope it does.

I only started going to therapy in the last year, and honestly, I think I need to fire my therapist, because I don’t feel comfortable with her, but that’s another essay for another time. What I will say is that none of this trauma has come up in the last year of our professional relationship. I’d rather just blast it on the internet, I guess.

This morning, I woke up. I washed my face and brushed my teeth. I made a cup of coffee. I got to work at my normal job and dealt with normal job things all day. Once I was done, I casually talked to a close friend, and that friend and I got onto the subject of one of the traumas that I have carried.

There is really no easy way to say this. When I was fifteen, I was kidnapped by one of my exes, driven halfway across the country, and almost sold to a pedophile. The only reason why I survived that was the fact that the man who intended to buy me was already being watched by the FBI.

I was interrogated by the FBI at fifteen. I was deloused and put in a detention center for things that were not my fault. I was humiliated and grilled for things that I had no comprehension of.

I can’t and won’t go into this story further, but I did tell this close friend the entire story one night, because I thought that it would scratch the itch of an Entertaining Lesley Tale. The manner in which I orated the story was one of detachment: “Can you believe that this WACKY INSANE THING happened to me?” What my close friend didn’t know, and what I never could have predicted, myself, was that it took me three days after telling that story to pull myself out of the deepest depression that I had experienced in at least ten years.

And this is only one story, out of many. I think that I didn’t realize that this was significant, the more I became distanced from it through time, because of all of the Other Times that very bad stuff happened to me, but that I believed myself to be distanced from over time, as well.

See, I have never sought therapy to unpack any of the consequences of that experience, and that became evident when I couldn’t get out of bed or eat for days after I told my Wacky Story.

I don’t blame my friend for this. At the time, I thought, Yeah, this is definitely gonna be a banger of a story. Just one more notch on the Insane Lesley Story Belt. I need to learn, for myself, that my trauma is not that. My trauma is actually real, and it does matter, and it is not just a crazy story of a thing that happened to me that one time. Thinking about these awful, terrible things that have happened to me for long enough will still incapacitate me for days at a time. I think that my emotional detachment from this experience, and those like it, was a defense mechanism to survive, but now I have to sit with it when I reference it, and the fact that something can reduce me to a mess like that twenty years later is a real trip.

My sister and I are currently estranged. I hope someday that this will not be the case, but that’s her call, not mine. Before we became estranged, she once said something to me that stuck with me, and I don’t think that it was a good thing that it did. She said to me:

I think about everything that you’ve gone through, and I think, ‘Lesley never had a chance at life.’

Now, I know that this might seem deeply sympathetic, and maybe it was, in her own way. But my sister and I are estranged for a few reasons, and her continued emotional abuse of me is one of those reasons. Her statement did what she wanted it to do, for awhile. I started questioning myself. I started asking myself: Did I ever have a chance? Do I have a chance? Why even bother?

The reason why I bother is that I am a human being who is worthy of the space that I have been given. I’m worthy of enjoying a good cup of coffee when I wake up. I’m worthy of feeling the sun on my skin. I’m worthy of being praised for getting something right. I’m worthy of being educated when I get something wrong.

It has taken me a very long time to accept this. Sometimes, I still feel like I’m failing, because I’m not meeting the most neurotypical of society’s standards. I am thirty-seven years old, and yet:

I don’t own a house.

I will never have kids (my choice).

I have never been engaged or married.

Despite this, I have heard from some people that they want to “be me” when they grow up. I have come to the conclusion that this is due to my general arrested development when it comes to giving a fuck — about my own life, about what anyone thinks of me, about what I do with my money, about what my family expects of me.

The truth is, I gained this particular attitude and outlook because I have endured an unfathomable amount of trauma in my life, starting from a childhood so early that I don’t even remember it, to now, in my late thirties, when I can finally just breathe and sit with it.

My trauma is a part of me. It has shaped who I am. I have to accept that, even if I really don’t like thinking about it.

The last year has been traumatizing for the entire world. We are all now learning how to get back to a semblance of normalcy after … whatever that was.

Fear. Anger. Terror.

I know all of these very well. The state of the world is what got me thinking about all of this. How I was invaded at seven. How I was almost sold at fifteen. How I was groomed by a disgusting married man who aligned himself with teens through his business at seventeen. How I was hit at twenty. How I was broken down to nothing at thirty. How I felt the continuous need to meet my former abuser, just to make sure that my life was better than his.

Sometimes, I have a bad day at work, or I feel mentally lazy, and honestly, I just want to scream, “I have been abused for my entire life and I’ve only had a handle on myself for four years! Lay off!”

But I don’t. And I can’t. There’s no allowance for that. There never has been.

Violated as a child: still have to make sure my parents are happy. Violated as a teenager: still have to pull through to get to adulthood. Violated as an adult: still have to smile and wave so that I can have a good, normal job and a good, normal apartment and a good, normal partner, and how will I ever know the joy of needing to do laundry or needing to clean the fridge as long as I’m still fretting about how sixty percent of my sexual encounters have been non-consensual?

So I am reminded of my trauma, and I laugh it off. It’s a crazy story, I say. I sit on the floor and cry. I wash my face. I clean my fridge. I do my laundry. I feel normal again. And I have fucking succeeded. Being normal, in itself, is an absolute win for me.