Show Me Where It Hurts
For as long as I've been living, I've experienced vivid dreams. Not just the ones where you're flying in the air or running from a tornado - but intricate, detailed narratives with acts and chapters. I've conversed with loved ones from the beyond, and even some who I didn't know. I've had repetitions of the same dream foretelling something that happened a year before it took place in real life. But more than anything, my dreams over the years have been a teacher, a window into the inner workings of that elusive ether that intertwines my soul and my identity as a human being on planet Earth. Some days, it feels like having an entire existence in my sleep is a burden I'd rather not carry because it can quite literally be exhausting. Other times, I treasure it for the gift that it is. Today is one of those days.
When I was in college, my dad bought a condo for me to live in for the bargain price of $80k, a sound investment rather than shoveling out thousands each semester in rent. I lived in a small, two bedroom, one bath place on the fourth floor of a complex just up the street from UT's famed Cumberland Avenue in a neighborhood called Fort Sanders. In this little 800 square foot residence, I experienced highs and lows that would come to define the woman I grew into being and that would permanently alter the trajectory of my adult life. Upon graduating, I asked my dad if he could sell it so I could move into an apartment for graduate school to get a fresh start, and he obliged and even made a decent little profit from it.
Fast forward to present day: 2024 more than anything showed me that I can't run from the past versions of myself. I've always prided myself on my ability to start over and create a new reality when I've needed to. I called it perseverance. I did it after my sexual assault my senior year in college, and I did it again after my divorce in 2015. Growing up in a home where introspection was undervalued and sweeping our problems under the proverbial rug was prized above all, I suppose this method of coping was critical to my evolution and success to this point. But somehow, between 2020 and 2024, a creeping feeling deep inside was telling me I had to face all I had shoved under that rug - my anger, my shame, my resentment, and above all, my fear.
And so, through that time, I've worked on doing that. I've examined generational trauma and its effects on my life and those around me. I've confronted my failures and leaned into the excruciating grief that accompanied them. But lately, I've felt led to accept myself as a whole being: past, present, and future. As someone who has carefully segmented (fragmented?) herself by evolutionary necessity, I simply didn't know how to reconcile this. I have felt so far removed from that naive, hopeful girl of my youth, and similarly, it hurts too much to dwell too long on the young woman who used so many unhealthy coping mechanisms to avoid her shame. It felt nearly impossible to not just hold up these paper dolls next to one other, but to layer them on top of each other as one complete whole.
Until last night.
In one of the longest, deepest nights of sleep I've had in months, I found myself transported back to my college condo, left untouched from the day I moved out in June 2004. As it turned out, my dad had not sold it, knowing one day I would want to return. Walking around surveying it, it didn't seem as fraught with pain as I had remembered it. My mom, sister, and friends showed up, one by one, to help me get ready for a party or celebration I was having later that night. I had taken what I needed when I moved out and for some reason left whatever junk I didn't want or need there, and over the course of the day, we removed load after load from each room. I saw a different memory from each one as I tossed it, but miraculously, the memories held no emotion to me any longer. It was simply junk.
I thought the place was in pretty decent shape, but as more people arrived to help, I also realized it was covered in years of grime that I hadn't noticed. They helped me as we wiped down grimy layers from the floors, the walls, and the surfaces, and oddly enough, the condo's footprint began to expand as we did. We uncovered a lovely small nook with a fireplace and a couch for reading that had previously gone undetected due to the piles of junk blocking it. A friend even had her brother come and do an inspection, and he declared that it was, indeed, structurally safe and sound. My bedroom even expanded slightly into an alcove flanked by empty bookshelves waiting to be filled and a light-filled window overlooking the street below. Then, people began to arrive to celebrate my return, some I knew and some I didn't.
I woke from my dream as if I had been there, my heart absolutely bursting with renewal and an inner peace I am not sure I have ever felt. This place - this previous home - I went back to was my own self. It was my heart before I had papered it over with newer versions of reality. It's been gunked up since those days in college, and I've never gone back to it because I thought it wasn't there anymore - that I wasn't there anymore. But I am.
I haven't known myself in a long time without all the junk - the pain, the trauma, the memories I've avoided for over twenty years. I haven't known an identity without them. But I am in there, and there's more space than I could ever imagine if I can just let go of the junk. The fact that others were there to help me see the possibilities that could exist without it tells me that I need to let people in to see the mess, to help me get rid of it, and to let it go to create a larger, happier, cleaner, and more harmonious space for my life.
It's not lost on me that Dad wasn't there to help me in my dream. He still had died, and that was evident. But he left me this place, having never told anyone he hadn't sold it, because he knew I'd find my way back some day. That was his way of knowing me and showing me he loved me, just as I was, even before and after all the junk and grime had accumulated.
A huge part of healing trauma is reconnecting with our inner child, and if I'm being honest, that's been the most difficult part of healing for me. I've abandoned so many versions of myself in the name of forward progress that I haven't even known how to find her again. That chasm of disconnect was simply too far. But this morning, I feel like in this dream, my dad threw me a line to help me leap over to her. And in doing so, the ruminations of something that resembles hope has brought a lightness I'm not sure I've ever felt before. Maybe - just maybe - nothing was ever wrong with me. Maybe, I could love myself and be loved just for who I am, junk and grime and all.
Or maybe it's all just a dream. But does that make it any less true?
