A symbol. A gesture. The thumb, pinky and pointer fingers raised to emulate the sign for I love you, becomes twisted by ptsd into something far darker. A sign meant to symbolize love becomes one of trauma. Our first day in India we met a group of girls that we would be spending time with this month, they reached out their hands with that symbol as a sign of friendship, they hold out their hand and expect you to do the same, you connect fingers and rotate your hand until you end in a handshake and they say “friends”. A moment meant to be sweet and pure, an offer of friendship and love from a child, makes my heartbeat quicken and my chest tight. I try and fake a smile, and count my breaths, in 1… 2… 3…, hold, 1… 2…, and out 1… 2… 3…, trying to steady the anxiety that makes me want to run and never stop.
Ever since I was raped, my life became about avoiding my pain, sometimes that meant avoiding obscure triggers, and other times it looked like trying anything I could to just get the pain out. But I couldn’t cut away my fear with blades, and I couldn’t scrub away my shame in the shower. I couldn’t dull my pain with adventure, and I couldn’t outrun my emotions by leaving the country. For years I tried to ignore the significance of my trauma, brushing over both events as just another day, just something that happens to some people and I happened to be one of them. No big deal. But no matter how much I rationalized, no matter how much I suppressed, the feelings never left they just manifested in every other area of my life. Shame, guilt, and anxiety became the air I breathed, anger, disgust, and depression became the water I drank. I could no more remove these things from myself than I could remove my own heart. Broken, unworthy, unclean and hollow, became my identity, the shackles binding my every movement, my every interaction with the world.
Eventually I could no longer run, I could no longer hide from the reality of what had happened to me. It was then that my past became my identity, and for the first time I took on the role of victim, I began to feel it, that weight I’d been carrying for years now had a name and a focus. Coming onto the race I was very familiar with the shackles of my trauma and my ptsd, but I had lived with them for so long I no longer remembered what life looked like without them.
Ashamed, broken, and worthless.
The three words I would’ve used to describe myself 6 months ago. On the race I’ve experienced amazing and heartbreaking places; people with incredible stories of pain and restoration, people whom God was faithful to heal and bring freedom to. From the Caribbean to Africa to Asia, I’ve witnessed the love that God has for his people in every country and every culture in the world, but I never experienced the fullness of it for myself. So I chose to pursue true deep healing, the kind that brings real lasting freedom; these last months have not been easy and I’ve wanted to quit and go home a dozen times, but I’ve been allowing God to show me who I truly am and what my real identity is and how loved and valued I am by the creator of all things. Throughout all that pain, even before I had a relationship with God, I was never hidden from him. There’s never been a moment where I was not valued, loved and adored by my God, and my awareness of that fact did not make it any less true.
Loved, free and powerful.
The three words I now use to describe myself. My ptsd isn’t gone, and lord knows I have my moments. A lot of them. However, it no longer feels like endless pain and fear, instead I feel hope that it will pass and a level of peace that I’m not truly alone in this pain, that there’s freedom waiting at the end of it all. My desire is to see every person who has experienced this special kind of hell find freedom from it. For every woman to understand that they are loved, valued, and clean. So I continue to walk in this journey towards complete and total freedom with the hope that my story will maybe help make that journey easier for someone else. With hope that soon a gesture will just be a gesture and a thing will just be a thing without the threat of a memory taking over, I choose to continue to seek freedom from ptsd, because a sign of friendship from the amazing powerful girls in India should never be anything but what it is which is beautiful.
