Tag: trauma

Feeling listened to and understood changes our physiology; being able to articulate a complex feeling, and having our feelings recognized, lights up our limbic brain and creates an “aha moment”. In contrast, being met by silence and incomprehension kills the spirit. Or, as John Bowlby so memorably put it: “What can not be spoken to the [m]other cannot be told to the self.”

Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma
(via abrce)
Source: jumbocrab

I won the Lambda Literary Award this year, and it was one of the best feelings of my life. And three days later, for no damn reason and every damn reason, I left therapy and felt my mood crashing. I tried to drive to a friend’s birthday party, but the directions were complicated and I circled five times before giving up and driving home. I crawled into bed at 3 PM and found myself staring at the pillbox on my dresser, thinking, I’ve got 5 Ativan and a bottle of good bourbon, is that enough?

And I thought, whoa. And I thought, I am 37 and I just won the Lambda Award. I can’t tell people I want to kill myself. On my Facebook status update.

I slept. I texted a lover I’d had the sweetest access intimacy with to ask about Wellbutrin. I called friends. I called my witch naturopath in Toronto, who saw me, on Skype, for $20, and asked me, ‘What does the depression feel like?“ I told her it felt like a slow soft river, that it was good I had a lot of great things in my life, but even when I was in them right then, I couldn’t really feel them. And when things did get bad, the direct line to Ishouldjustkillmyself was well marked out. 

suicidal ideation 2.0, queer community leadership, and staying alive anyway: part one of a work in progress.  Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha