Healing from trauma is amazing! When you are finally able to not feel the anxiety you once did when presented with a reminder of your trauma, it’s a very liberating feeling. Truly. But here’s something that healing does not do. It doesn’t actually take away the memories. And sometimes that just sucks. I feel like there are things in my past that had the potential to be good memories, but they are now forever tainted. Maybe it’s because of the kind of memory I have or just the fact that the traumatic pieces had more of an impact on me.
Here’s what I mean. Today I was looking through my Timehop app. It shows me pictures I’ve taken and posts I’ve made on social media on this date each year, going as far back as I’ve been posting on Facebook. I came to this picture from two years ago:
August 11th, 2023 was at the start of my year as a principal. I took this picture because I had chosen the jelly pedicure at my local nail salon. I had never had one and thought it was pretty neat. So I took a picture and even a video of my feet sloshing through the jelly (which had the texture of applesauce by the way). But before I could remember how that jelly felt on my feet, I first remembered that during that pedicure, I had a lengthy phone conversation with my “mentor”. She had called during it and we talked at length about some issue that had happened at school. I have been trying hard to remember what the issue was. I honestly can’t remember. I don’t even know who we were talking about.
I got kind of angry when I realized that this fun picture triggered a memory of what was actually happening just after the picture was taken.
But it’s o.k. There’s a blessing in this experience. Multiple actually. I saw this picture and felt angry, but I didn’t feel anxious. I didn’t feel how I felt when the picture was taken. And honestly, the anger only lasted a moment. Long enough for me to sort of roll my eyes and think “really?!”. The other blessing is that I don’t remember what we were talking about and what was so bad that my “mentor” had to call me after school on a Friday to discuss it with me.
All of that is healing. It doesn’t take away the memories, but it makes it so that the reaction is less severe when they pop up. My wish for myself is that I get to a point where this picture will come up in my Timehop 10 years from now and when I look at it, I think “that was a pretty neat pedicure”. And then I keep scrolling.
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