Reclaim Your Story

In high school I asked my English teacher to read over my personal essay for a scholarship program. As he got towards the end he put his head on his desk, looked back up, and with tears in his eyes asked me, “How did you make it?”

It was my first time understanding that my life wasn’t like everyone else’s and that it extended far beyond being poor. You are exposed to more trauma by virtue of poverty — hunger, insecurity, the cold — they are all cousins of an unstable or non-existent income, but I never realized how shocking it could be to others, or that many of my experiences were darker than that. Separate in their own realm of festering ugliness.

His tears made me uncomfortable, like most emotions do, and I laughed it off. With a shrug of my shoulders I responded, “I don’t know. I just did?”

As the year progressed, so did the opportunities to contextualize my existence. College essays, scholarship programs, and speech competitions all presented platforms to explain myself, my past, my goals. Universities in particular were notorious in their seemingly benign requets, not thinking that “Explain your biggest obstacle” can be, for some, a question that asks us to flay ourselves at the alter of higher education.

Each moment became the anxious hemming and hawing of desperately determining how much to share, or how honest to be.

At the same time I was being asked to bare my soul or articulate my perspective, I existed in a world in which pandering was seen as the deepest sin, that merit was exclusive of context, and sad stories are just that — sad. As no one knows how to react to their imagined reality being broached by what are the ugly facts of life for many, the reaction is negative, or so overwhelmingly emotional you must act as the balm for their now blemished sensibilities.

I was in constant fear of my achievements not being my own, or having to comfort others over a reality that wasn’t theirs, that I withdrew into myself. When I did try to connect with others, it felt impossible. At 18, 19, I had never had the luxury of making the mistakes and memories of my peers, and couldn’t connect with what seemed to be their universal experience. A barrier always existed, and I admitely was too frightened to overcome it.

As I entered university I let people make assumptions based on my outward appearance. I shared that I “grew up poor” or had even experienced abuse, but never gave details. My perception at the time was that my privileges outweighed my experiences, and that I was always walking a fine line of acceptance. Admittedly, I know I offended people in my pathetic attempts to connect, but I also felt a new discomfort at their often unchecked classism and anger at not feeling that I had anyone. I alienated myself, even as I tried to become a part of a community.

It wouldn’t be until trauma entered my life in such a way that it set off an avalanche internally that I began to reckon with my past, or better yet, reckon with the ramifications of going without professional help for so long. I became messy, unlikeable, angry… Stuck in a whirlwind of psychological scars, feeling less than safe to share my true experiences with others, and fueled by toxic habits, I descended into mental chaos. As anyone that bore witness to my blacked out breakdowns can tell you, I was incapable of expressing myself in a healthy way, or in a healthy setting.

If you were a part of that time then this is hard to believe, but as I was seemingly unravelling, I kept most of the pain and fear buried deep within. I did not feel soft or vulnerable, spurred in part because no one seemed to think of me that way.

No, I felt tense with a wild, buzzing irritation — at the world, at my fear, my inability to get it together and measure up to the bright potential that had become lost in the darkness over the years. That tension would ebb and flow, but it would remain for years.

Even as I’ve evolved and grown mentally and emotionally, I’ve not been keen on sharing the world from my perspective, even as I’ve felt the itch to write and connect with a larger community. I had been inundated with so many conflicting messages on how and why and when I could share my story, and how I should process the responses of others in reaction to my life that I shut down and slowly developed a crippling anxiety to interact at all.

To close yourself off to an entire piece of yourself makes you incapable of healing, floating through life in a partial state of completion. I had always loved poetry, art, writing, speaking, and I slowly killed those joys because I refused to see my past as a valuable and valid lense through which to interpet the world. My distaste for sticky sympathy, or feeling forced to mirror the shock and horror of the listener, or my revulsion at being a trauma/poverty porn success story for the untouched to hang their hats on was a weight that dragged me down into the darkest places in my mind, which I kept shuttered up as often as possible.

It’s no way to live, and the imbalance left me existing in a constant state of disarray and angst. It’s taken an achingly long time to get to where I am today- not out of poverty, or far away from the physical people and places I associate with the evil, or pain. That was relatively easy.

No, I mean spirtitaully, mentally, emotionally. Those spaces within yourself that can require inhuman force to travel. It’s been a slow crawl to be free enough to accept that this sick tension in the world that both silences and exploits the poor, the deeply traumatized, the survivors is not my tension to ease, or break, or bear.

My teacher did nothing wrong in crying. He was a kind and empathetic man, and did not drip with horror and disbelief. He was always free of that condescing care. He was sad for me, as a human that had value and worth, but congniscent of acknowledging that I was not damaged, nor resilient. I was just a girl fighting hard to get out.

I think he also saw that there were layers, a silent violence and terror, that I didn’t outline in that essay. That I may never share with anyone, but that are integral to how I walk through this world, and what I create. It’s a freedom to accept that — a freedom in realizing that it’s not pandering, my achievements are my own regardless of how I incorporate details of my past, and that I do not hold the burden of how others respond.