Bargaining and Depression

TW: Assault

Bargaining

My bargaining stage has been a decades long race to stay ahead of the trauma.

In 2005, after not facing the assaults for eleven years and still refusing to accept they had any effect on me, I made a deal with myself. Maybe some kind of higher power? If I did what I was “supposed” to do, find a nice guy, get married, the kids, the normal life (according to the patriarchy), I could create an entirely different life for myself and never have to revisit those nights again. Or really anything that happened in the years that followed.

Reading that now sounds childish to me. Almost like if I promised to be “good”, I could forget the consequences for when I was “bad”. But I truly thought the assaults were a result of some flaw of mine. I had a deep sense that I could not be entrusted with my own well-being. I clearly could not trust my instincts, so I believed anything that lit me up, the spark, the magic, whatever you want to call it, was the wrong choice. If it felt good, then it was bad. Lead with my head and not my heart. Because my heart was an unreliable narrator.

I suppose it’s not as out there as it sounds. People reinvent themselves all the time. Move to a new place, go by a different name. Social media was in its infancy so it was easy back then.

Literally the first night I ventured out of my isolation I met the man who I would marry. I had a clear vision of what I wanted.

And for a while, it worked. He did turn out to be nice. We got married. Eventually, had a son. I now know some of the panic I felt while enduring the miscarriages was due to the fact that they threw a wrench into my (society’s) plan. There was this odd sense of relief after I had my baby. As if I leveled up and could breathe a little. As much as you can breathe with a newborn and undiagnosed post-partum depression.

Life happened and it became easier to forget what I was running from.

Depression

I am no stranger to depression. I was depressed after the assaults but hid it, from myself and those around me. Depressed while with an abusive boyfriend and self-medicated. I was depressed before and after I got married. It has been my constant companion.

The past year has been a seesaw between feeling hope and confidence, or despair and self-doubt. Processing this trauma, I’ve had both good and bad days, with the bad days feeling oddly comfortable, like a weighted blanket. As I’ve been writing about the girl I grieve, that weight has been lifted off me. This feels foreign.

Lately, I mourn all the lost time. The what ifs are impossible to ignore. Who could I have been without the assaults? Without the blame I placed on myself? How much more energy do I give to something that wasn’t my fault?

The answer is none.

There is a mantra I have heard repeatedly in the past year: Let go of the things that no longer serve you. Guilt and shame from acts of violence committed against me thirty-one years ago certainly falls under this.

I used to roll my eyes at that phrase. As if it were simple. I carried both with me for so long they had become a part of me.

On my desk, there is a whiteboard I use to write down ideas. Across the top in red there are three sentences:

I was assaulted.

It wasn’t my fault.

I did not deserve this.

All things I knew in my head to be true but never felt true. After decades of gaslighting myself, I’m at a place where I can honestly say they do now. And I can finally let go of the things that no longer serve me.

Heart and head on the same page.