How I decide what to write about in a post is usually easy: its whatever topic has been nagging at me the most lately and taking up all my headspace. I write it out as a cathartic release, as if the idea is trapped inside my skull and my words somehow burst a hole through the bone allowing for the thoughts to escape and (almost) be forgotten. It’s usually random what kind of events throughout my week might bring a certain idea or concern to the forefront of my mind, but whenever it does pop up, I can immediately feel that it will be my next topic. It’s a similar feeling to having a song stuck in your head for days – the more you listen to it the more it makes sense and the deeper the meaning you can draw from it. Other songs might pop up, but nothing quite feels like that one does, so you keep going back to it. Picking a single idea to focus on for that period is usually easy. Bu there are times every once in a while, where becomes a daunting task to choose just one.

Today is one of those days.

Even as I’m typing this out, I’m finding it difficult to produce cohesive meaning within the sentences because my brain is skipping from idea to idea so fast that I can’t mentally hang onto a single thought well. I’m not really a stranger to this experience. Like many people, I was diagnosed with inattentive ADHD in my young adulthood, it being completely missed in my adolescence. My mind often works fast, but I’ve had years of practice being able to navigate the flood of thoughts without medicine to help me and that’s the way I prefer it now. It’s what I know, and what I feel more comfortable with. But there are still times when there’s just too much going on that I can’t even get a foothold in my mind to keep me mentally steady. It feels like I’m standing on a rock in the middle of a hurricane, blindly reaching my hands out into the powerful wind hoping that I can get a handle on something, anything that will keep me steady long enough to finish a sentence.

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It’s the next day. I started this post yesterday but couldn’t finish because my mind was too all over the place. Today has felt calmer; I’ve been exhausted but as least I can think. Even so, I still had a difficult time picking out a single topic to focus on. And maybe I’ll find it along the way here; maybe I won’t. Not every piece will be cohesive because it’s all a reflection of me and I am by far from put together.

One of the main things that came to my attention this week is about the trauma I carry with me. It’s not special in any way to say I have trauma; most people do at varying levels. I won’t go into detail about exactly what it is here – that will take some time of getting comfortable (and if I’m being honest, time to make sure, again, that the people who know me in real life don’t know these words are mine). But I carry a lot of traumas from my childhood that has shaped who I am today. I have started therapy, stopped it for various reasons (excuses) even though it was helping, and haven’t gone back though I should. I guess I thought I was better enough to be alright on my own not realizing how deep it all goes, and God knows this shit is woven into my DNA at this point. But I was scrolling online during some of my free time, and strangely enough, a string of videos and articles with 1 common theme kept popping up: “Things you didn’t know were trauma reactions.”

If you and I sat down and talked for about an hour, I could point out all of my personality flaws as I see them and connect for you exactly how my trauma caused them; how they still continue to drag me down. I’m a people pleaser to the point of being a doormat at times; I can’t take compliments in any capacity and will always deflect attention away from myself. I self-isolate, though I’m trying to be better about going out and do things with people I want to be friends with. I talk about wanting to do things, but never actually do them. There are hundreds of things about me I could explain away with trauma to you, and you’d probably get bored or be super over hearing the word ‘trauma’ by the end of it. These are all things I focus on regularly; all things I hate about myself.

But there’s also a lot of good to me as well. Despite what I went through, I am a highly intuitive person: emotionally intelligent and compassionate. I have a strong work ethic and strive to be seen as reliable to my peers, both physically and mentally. I become a core employee of any workplace I enter, even those in which I have never had experience with the work. I show up earlier than everyone else and stay later than most. I am strong and am a rock for others to lean on when needed. I am the responsible one in many areas and am constantly challenging myself. These are some of the things I like about myself. These are some of the things I cultivated with my own efforts and my own strong will, which I developed alone. Or so I thought.

What I learned from scrolling this week, was that these things while often seen as positive attributes in a person, are often born out of a response to trauma. These things, which the videos and words described in precise detail, like the over-committing and overworking yourself to your work (showing up early and leaving late) to be felt as valuable can be trauma response and a form of self-harm. My emotional intelligence and compassion for others, born out of trauma and depression. Putting the weight of being responsible on myself and not trusting others to do so – trauma response. The skin-picking which I thought was similar to nail biting, a bad habit I managed to quite years ago, also a form of self-harm/deprecation (which honestly makes more sense now that I think about it more). Though this wasn’t the intended message of all of those posts I’m sure, what I took away in a single thought was “Everything I actually like about myself and thought made me valuable, every good quality I thought I had managed to grow on my own was all just a by-product of the trauma that already ruled every other aspect of my personality.” I felt like maybe I didn’t even know who I was after all. All I’ve ever known is the me that’s carried and grew around these burdens – if they made up the good and the bad in me, then who am I without them? This is something I’m honestly a little scared to find out. But that was just one of the things that’s been on my mind this week.

Another was a relationship in my life that’s being strained. It has been for years, and it’s had its high and low points. It’s the reason I’m sick and am so messed up, but it is also filled with a disproportionate amount of love for some that’s caused as much pain as it has. Recently, for a variety of reasons, it’s been coming to a head. I was talking to these friends (at least that’s what we’ll call them for now) because we were supposed to meet up this weekend. It’s usually fun when they come around; always good to catch up and just hang out. But this time was different because the relationship has changed. I knew it would be an awkward visit, as there have been many things that have happened since last seeing them, most of which was bad. But they won’t bring it up; they never have. It’s not really their style, and when I tried to bring it up, it just caused more issues and cause a blame game to happen that only worsened the situation. So, I knew, going into this visit, we’d make small talk the whole time. Pretending like nothing was wrong – pretending like there were no problems currently affecting everyone involved. We’d make small talk about the weather and what was wrong with our cars and the price of everything going up with inflation. And I hated it. We were too close for this impersonal way conversation. I’ve known them my whole life, and to diminish our once meaningful talks to this watered-down conversation reserved for strangers in passing hurt. I was exhausted before they even arrived at the idea of keeping that up for hours.

And yet, there was still other things on my mind this week as well.

I read in my free time, mostly crime/thriller genre works fiction, but every once in a while, a non-fictional book that I feel I can learn from. Right now, I’m reading a book about the bittersweet in life, and why we as humans are drawn towards sadness and longing. The author, Susan Caine, was a familiar name to me as I read her previous book, “Quiet,” about the power of introversion (a book I highly recommend to anyone who would describe themselves as an introvert like myself.) I have instantly become very connected emotionally to both books as they describe feelings and thoughts I’ve felt and known for years but have never been able to put into words. The book about longing is a necessary yet painful reminder for us that there is value in the moments where we feel excruciating pain for that which we love. It pulls to attention all the times in my own life I have felt the intense desire for something I wish I could have: the longing for what I strive for and crave. I won’t go into too much detail here about it, as again, this may be a later post, but the central idea I have gained from it so far is that longing is born out of love and is one of the greatest expressions of that love that humans can produce, a beautiful and simultaneously devastating sentiment. This book is amazing, and I can’t wait to review it further once I have finished it and sat with its offerings. This has been another thought on my mind this week.

So, with all of these strong ideas that each bring up their own world of emotions and trains of thoughts, how do you choose just one to focus one? Sometimes this is easier for me than others and this happened to be one of those times when it would be nothing but struggle. Sometimes when I pick just one, the others go quietly away for time only to reappear later when I can give them more of my attention. Sometimes once I pick an idea, the others fade away only to be forgotten for months. This time, when trying to pick one, I felt like I was physically trying to pull it to the front of my mind only for the others to be dragged along with it. They have been all stuck together for some reason, and when I start to focus on one, the others demand attention as well. Sometimes one of them become an individual all on its own that grows into lesson to be learned from, and sometimes the mass of them fights in the space in my mind not suited for pulling apart such complex topics. Sometimes, the mass wins. It’s becoming a pain actually, as this doesn’t allow me to focus deeply on any one idea to derive deeper meaning from it. All I’m left with are surface-level understandings of these emotions with the hope one day I can understand why they truly mean so much to me.

But I know they will dissipate into their respective corners eventually, if I have the patience to wait for it. They’ll all hide their claws and put away their bared teeth and coexist together in my mind once again. They’ll wait their turn for me to pull one to the front to study it, and then they’ll peacefully go back leave each other alone. But for now, it feels like a cage match raging inside my mind and exhausting me before the day has even begun. For now, I am too tired and worn out to fight back and force them to behave. For now, the mass wins.