I Couldn't Stop Thinking About It....
PART ONE:
I heard a story recently that I couldn’t stop thinking about. Each morning after I had heard it I would wake up and it would be the first thing I would think of. It went on like this for at least a week. The story was about a woman who was raped in Central Park. One year later she committed suicide. Her family said that a part of her died that day. I didn’t stop thinking about that or her for weeks. I would think of her and I would wonder. I wondered if she ever felt like she had a safe space to feel what had happened to her. I wondered if she knew how to be her own safe space. I wondered how many people wanted to be there for her and didn’t know how to feel those types of emotions with her and ultimately failed. I wondered if she knew how to feel pain like that. I wondered if she knew how to be there for herself because most of us were never taught that. We weren’t taught or prepared for the trauma we will endure. We weren’t prepared to hold people in their traumas either. I wonder how many people told her to “let it go” while she was in the thick of it and how impossible those three words sounded to her in that year. I wondered if she kept it secret and hidden because of shame or the fear of making others uncomfortable. I wondered less about if she could let it go and more if she could ever let it exist.
I believe stories come to you when you need them the most to help you process your own experiences, because they do. This story came to me shortly after I endured my own trauma this year on Easter Sunday. A man that has been stalking me for over 8 years sent me a death threat on a voicemail. He came to my place of work looking for me with a loaded gun. The details of that story is for another blog post and another time but what I want to tell you today is that the feelings evoked from that experience were unstoppable. What I was going through on the inside was enormous. Enormous. I needed time and space and healthy rituals to help me move through those emotions. Luckily I have been through many traumas before and I have learned tools to heal and I used them. I also want to say that I lost count of how many people knew the story and asked me (only one week later), “Have you let that go yet?” I bit my tongue but I wanted to scream.
My healing process includes breathwork, meditation, movement and writing. Every. Single. Day. Many of you may have read some of my poems about this event.
Storytelling and writing are one of the key components to my yoga practice today. Yoga means connection and writing connects me to parts of myself that I wouldn’t know unless I wrote. It allows me to both express the parts of myself and be heard. If you follow my blog or read my poetry you may think that I have been writing my whole life or that it must feel natural or that I used to write all the time when I was a young girl and somewhere along the way I stopped. I won’t say any of those things today because none of them are true. I never wrote. I mean never. “I am not a writer”, I told myself. I didn’t think I was any good.
That all changed about four years ago…
xo,
Diana
