Have plenty of experience, too much of it traumatic experiences. So how does one maintain hope through it? How does one hold on with fingernails to something they have never experienced, a real life? Although I have not yet arrived at perfection or the perfect life, I finally have seen triumph of hope.
It has been over 9 months since I last wrote in this blog space. The sharing of personal struggles regarding trauma was depressing me. I had come to the end of one life-threatening heath crisis after another. I was finally on a substantial healing path.
The darkness of writing about trauma was supposed to be lifted by relieving myself of all the secrets of a lifetime of abuse and trauma but it was having an opposite effect on me at the time. I was finally healing and taking steps back into such a dark past was not allowing me to move forward as quickly as I could.
Now I can see that while I remained ill, not even writing about tidbits would reduce the misery of the effects of lifelong troubles. Although it was useful at the moment in some small way.
I would hear from others who would read the blogs and identify with trauma in their own lives. Just as I am touched by reading others stories about how they survived and felt through their experiences of abuse and trauma.
Sharing our experiences are beneficial in a sense of community and trying to allow ourselves and others some sense of bond to another human when life has been so difficult.
It is when the darkness within us gets spewed out that it is destructive instead of healing for ourselves and others. That is a fine line that no one person has the rulebook on. In a way, we have got to self-govern ourselves, doing our best to identify spewed darkness instead of light.
I am glad that I took a break from writing in this blog space. Whether anyone else saw it or not, I felt the brewing darkness. It had an odd feeling of transformation to something better but I did not know how to get there, on purpose. Felt more like taking a ride instead of a well thought out plan.
Sometimes we have to follow our gut instincts and do what we think is right for the moment whether we can fully explain or understand it ourselves. Isn’t that truly the goal of growing up anyway?
Then my health shifted. There were a few life-threatening events that allowed me to see my own self-worth when no one else would. It gave me more hope than usual. Then my body suddenly took a turn for the better, releasing the darkest of darkness that had always haunted me. It was gone.
As my health increased, the darkness quickly decreased. It has been a lifelong journey to see the moment hope triumphed and all the experiences could easily take a back seat.
There has been very little in my experience of this world that has shown me purity, kindness, wholesomeness, much less sincere love. My faith has been my rock, my foundation and my salvation. The sicker I became, the more I had to rely on one much larger than myself or I had no chance at survival. I placed my hope in my faith.
I placed that hope and faith in my body as well. The human body is created to heal, not self-destruct. My body was self-destructing to get my attention and it was my job to make it do a 180.
Through all the diseases, illnesses, life-threatening troubles, I truly believed that a body could heal, with simply a will to live. Even in the depth of illness when my heart was 100% blocked in my ascending aorta and the rest of my organs were functioning at only 1%. I believed that regardless of my lack of knowledge in the exact processes, a human body could come back to life and heal. The word regeneration kept coming to mind. Each organ could regenerate, as long as I had a will to live which meant believing in hope even when I could not see it.
The belief could surely be stronger than the physical. It felt more like a slight glimmer of hope than the devastating state of death my body was in. But I knew that I knew THAT I KNEW it to be true, I could heal as long as I could believe in hope.
There were times when my physical body could barely muster up a heart beat and I would gasp it into being. Times when I could not roll out of bed to walk around the house. Times when the pain was so intense I was sure I was being tortured by human hands and the devil himself. Times when the delirium from malaria like Babesia was so constant and intense for 7 months that I was not conscious enough to muster up a thought, much less hope. Yet hope was always there.
Through all the abuse, the numerous health crisis’, the abandonment issues, the intense loss, hope was the one and only remaining factor.
I do not understand how anyone would choose to live without a glimpse of hope in their soul. I can understand how people give up without it.
Our experiences do not have to match up with the hope we can envision, no matter how ill we get or how much abuse and/or trauma we endure.
I implore anyone who has reached their limit to believe in hope, even when they cannot see it. Giving up on hope can be a death sentence.
There is a whole life to live, whatever time we have left and in whatever fashion our bodies and minds take us. It is real, we are real humans, we are worthy of life and breath. Ta-tidily-don’t-give-a-hoot to all the naysayers, abusers, narcissistic people, unloving and even the overly grumpy ones! This is our life to live and it is time to believe in ourselves!!
Sit down, slow down, breath life in.
Maribeth Baxter
