Where's My Trauma?

So I listened to a podcast about Emotional Eating and the guest mentioned over and over that overeating often stems from unaddressed trauma and that's why it's more prevalent in black and brown communities.

It made me wonder. Question if you will.

Where's my trauma?

You see my parents raised me together. They're actually still married. 31 years last month. They were both in the military and then they both worked until one of them got sick. They're both college educated. I've never really wanted for anything until I got married and we were young, dumb and broke. And even then, if I swallowed my pride and called my folks? I didn't want for anything. I've never been sexually abused. Never really physically abused either. (I was spanked but that's another discussion for another time entirely.) My point is my childhood was pretty average. And yet? There's the depression. The anxiety. The emotional overeating. The rage. The fear. The inability to get out of my own way.

Why do I struggle so much? Where's the trauma that is supposed to be the reason for all of this. Am I the reason for all of this? Is it brain chemistry that causes me to crave human interaction and at the same time push it away? And if that's the case then what hope do I have? I have nothing to definitively work through. Plus every time I turn around there's hormonal fluctuations that put me back at square one.

What hope do I have?

She Struggles. I Hesitate.

So. Early this year in the spring I announced to my husband that I wanted to separate and get a divorce.

I filed paperwork to get a custody order signed by a judge to have something legally binding as far as travel outside the state goes.

Well I rescinded that paperwork. Because our court date landing during an underway and his command couldn't decide whether or not they wanted to allow him to stay behind to go to court. I just cancelled it rather than not taking off the time from work and risking being in contempt on a motion I got started. (Getting time off work without advanced notice is hard.)

He'll be changing commands in the spring so I guess I'm waiting until then. Scheduling and rescheduling court dates seems like a hassle.

Anyway. He's frequently going out on underways. This last one was 22 days.

My daughter STRUGGLED. She missed her father so much. She cried and she cried and then she just went numb and told me he wasn't coming back at all.

It gives pause. This is right for me but is it right for her? Happy/healthy parents is supposed to equal good childhood right?

The Gates are Closed

There's a cycle that I routinely go through.

I say something. I have the best of intentions. Sometimes I want to commiserate. Sometimes I want to examine. At any rate the intention is not to hurt.

I am misunderstood. By someone I feel knows me rather well.

There's no pause. There's no desire to double check and see if I meant that. I am unapproachable. I am beyond reason. The negative intent assumed from my words is taken as fact and I am to be charged at full speed ahead.


I have a tendency to share with people relatively quickly. I follow my heart (platonic or romantic) where ever it may lead. In spite of being in the same situation thousands and thousands of times I still hope and get excited. So I open myself up. Because that's what you do when you're forging new friendships.

It is....it's hurtful to keep sharing intimate parts of myself with people just to end up at this place. This place where I'm the loud angry black woman all over again. Where people that I have shared secrets with, or given money to, or had in my home feel like their only choice is to talk about me instead of to me.

People rarely ask me what I meant. They just assume the worst. I know I'm the commonality so I'm the problem but I can't figure out how to fix it. I'm just...tired. Tired of having my feelings hurt or having people I thought I knew assume the worst of me.

Good Old Days? Not Really.

Got a court date to establish custody finally. I can't really articulate how I'm feeling but this video speaks to my mood fairly well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yYV9-KoSUM

No matter how much deconstructing my marriage hurts I have to remember it was never really as good as I thought or pretended it was. I just have to take the lessons and move forward.

A Whackjob by Any Other Name

For as long as I can actively remember I have gone by my middle name. My first name is rather common and traditional and I was always searching for...something. To be more, to feel special. So I went by my middle name.

I don't want to do that anymore.

I feel this overwhelming need to distance myself from that girl. She's the girl who fell in love with this impossible dream of forever love. She's the girl who was foolishly hopeful. She's the weak girl.

I want to be the strong mama who does the very best for her babe. I want to be the strong woman who establishes her career and makes something of herself. I feel like I'm growing away from that middle name persona. Obviously I'm not having a complete personality change but...I'm not the person I was when I got married and I'm grateful for that. If I'm honest I'm a little embarrassed that I was the person I was in my past. All of the red flags seem blindly clear now but I guess that's to be expected.

I'm still kooky. I'm still me. But I'm a more mature me and I want my name to reflect that.

Not as Excited as I Should Be

I start my new job on Monday. I should be over the moon. I am not. I'm part resentful, part nervous and part agitated.

A year ago this was not part of my life plan. I never intended to go back into the classroom in this capacity. Now I am and I'm worried the negative experience I had before will repeat itself. It probably won't but I'm nervous. I'm not in a good place to handle stuff like that again.

I'm also overwhelmed with my situation with my ex. I want to have an amicable, reasonable divorce where each person feels like they're being treated fairly. He's refusing to have conversations with me so of course that's not where we're at. He keeps complaining about how I'm going to screw him over and then he puts me in a position where I have to screw him over because I'm not a mind reader and I can't guess what he wants out of a situation. It's a self fulfilling prophecy of shit and I'm exhausted with it already.

This is a Weird Way to Say Hello

Let me set the scene:

Marriage: Imploded. We've never been overly kind to each other. Very strong emotions, negative and positive, on all sides. Much mistakes However. In 2015 I discovered that for two years, while I was ushering our child through infancy and dealing with him being gone on and off due to military obligations, he carried on an emotional affair. Well not completely. I mean he did tell her he loved her and told her if he ended up getting put out based on weight that he would move south to be with her but it wasn't just that. There was also two years of dick pics, vag shots (from her obviously), videos from both of them and lots of sexting. So. Uhm...I cried. I railed. I showed up at his job and lost my shit. (Do NOT do that. Not cute, not sane, just no.) Counseling was brought up and he set it up but he refused to leave the home to give me space and when neither of us liked the counselor we stopped going. I got busy with a new job and I just..I couldn't do the heavy lifting here. I didn't break us why was gluing us back together all on my shoulders? The job was for the school year and it was a complete shit show (more on that later) and I got buried. School and personal relationships went on the back burner. Fast forward to summer 2016. School is out, I have quit the job and I step out of the fog. I feel like things are unresolved. Now it's important to note that through all of this, my ex has vehemently denied cheating. And I quote "I did not stick my dick in her. She is in Florida. I did not cheat." This attitude combined with the passage of time prompted him to be disgusted at the fact that I was still unsettled about it and accuse me of wanting to be miserable and looking for reasons to be upset. Oh and again in case I had forgotten he didn't actually cheat. So I did. Fall 2016 I slept with someone I went to middle school with. I wanted him to hurt like I hurt and I'd hoped that the resulting hurt would spur him into moving out and leaving me the fuck alone. It did not. You would think after 8 years I would know that he can outstubborn me but you'd be wrong. It's been almost a year since I told him and for a variety of reasons I'll get into later July 2017 I told him I was done and moved into another bedroom.

The World at Large: Complete clusterfuck. Charlottesville was last week. In spite of it being 2017, Nazis are still a thing. How the fuck does that even work? Who knows? 45 is....himself. Unprepared, no desire or willingness to get prepared and seemingly hellbent on killing us all. Times are bleak.

Now that I've shared THAT, let's talk about why I decided to write. I've been reading and just finished Nevertheless by Alec Baldwin. I've loved his work ever since Ghosts of Mississippi, a movie I was entirely too young for when I saw it. (For a period, my parents would let me and my brother watch any movie civil rights related regardless of the rating or content. I think they were concerned about us growing up predominantly around white people and sought to correct that.) Currently I am enjoying his most recent animated piece The Boss Baby over and over again because my 4 year old is ENTHRALLED. 30 Rock is comfort food in television format. I am Liz Lemon in a lot of ways and one day I'll find my Jack Donaghy and I'll be better for it. Anyway, between the marriage disaster and a blow up with a group of internet friends that bothered me not because it was them but because it brought up childhood insecurities; I'd decided to delve back into a childhood hobby that I'd let life cast aside. Reading. Sure I still read but it was all on my tablet or phone and it was free stuff out of the Kindle store. (There ARE some gems there, and some quality stuff goes on sale but a lot of it is predictable and poorly edited which is why it's free in the first place.) With all of the...sadness and disappointment in my life I decided to check out a bunch of books after I'd spent a day furiously typing out lesson plans for school. I walked past a display and there was Alec Baldwin's memoir. It was in the biography section. I immediately swooped it up. I read a romance novel first (check out Shayla Black's stuff she's really quite good) and then I set myself to read Baldwin's book.

One of the things I enjoy about Baldwin's acting is his voice. It's warm and soulful. You feel like you can trust him. So it was fantastic for me that as I started to read I heard the words in his voice. It's where my brain went and I followed. It's a fascinating read. It's like a Who's Who in Hollywood AND Theatre. There's names mentioned but it's not in a pretentious way. Very matter of fact. I did things. These are the people I did them with. Carry on. He pulls no punches either with others or himself. He described his disappointments with politics and acting in vivid detail. He made messes and then shoved his nose into those messes. He called people out for their bullshit. A lot of celebrity biographies hedge their bets like they're afraid of burning bridges or getting sued. Baldwin has zero fucks to give about that and it's refreshing.



It just filled me with a sense of hope. I feel like my life is this one never ending storm of mess but I'll make it out live because most people make mistakes and I'm not special (in that regard). Reading about how him and Kim Basinger used to feel for each other and how it all fell apart solidified my thoughts about how neither one of us (my husband and I) are demons. We're just people who fell in love with possibilities instead of who we actually are.

Then there was the political ancedotes. As a black woman I want white people to reach across the table and give a shit. Not because it validates my existence but because with the way the system is set up you need white people. You need the white people who are middle of the road and just want to bury their heads in the sand to stand up to tip the scales. In a landscape where it seems everyone would rather be comfortable than right it's nice to see someone with such passion.

It read like an old friend sitting and telling stories and as I read the last page I thought "I'm gonna be alright".