Trauma Informed Healing and Ramen Noodles

Ramen is delicious right?

In my perfect world I've conjured up in my head, my life has order and routine and enough time for everything. All of it. In my real life where I actually reside, trade offs are constantly made between what I want to do and what I need to do. And the line between the two isn't always clear. Sometimes taking care of my health, physical and mental is pitted against my needs as a grad student. Meal planning is for post grad people- students eat on the go - walking between the library and their next class. But I'm too grown to live that ramen noodle life even if that's about the budget in working with. I also know that for me, not getting enough exercise, sun light, quiet time, and clean foods affects my mood and ability to concentrate. But knowing what you need and the ability to prioritize those needs does not always feel possible or even encouraged. I feel like the message I receive in this culture of higher learning is. that the time for health comes later, after you are a student. Students are supposed to be stressed, and hungry, and unhappy- the price I pay for access to education now. Student loans the price I pay later. I struggle with the culture of glamorizing exhaustion at the expense of well being for the sake of education. Why can't becoming the smartest version of myself also include learning how to have a work, life, school, health balance? And while I try to create that for myself, I am still working within a culture that tells me I can sleep when I'm dead. Or graduated. Whichever comes first.

Trauma informed Ana

This week I had the opportunity to find some compassion for my birth mother which is a bit of challenege seeing as I never knew her past the age of 2, remember nothing about her, and  will never have the opportunity to since she passed away when I was about 12. I have spent some time doing grief work and forgiveness work for her and my father throughout my adult life but I haven't always gotten the opportunity to find compassion for her. And so this week, through opening myself up to loving and supporting women who shared a similar journey to hers, I was given the chance to extend that compassion to the memory of my birth mother. These women are my teachers. They are my birth mothers. They give me the opportunity to know her struggle without ever having met her. They give me the chance to love her journey without having witnessed it first hand. They give me gratitude for not having to have lived it first hand as her daughter. I've always known that I've ended up with the mom I was supposed to, with the life that makes sense for my journey. But because my life is so different, I haven't always been exposed to the darkness of what she might have suffered or the possibility of the redemption she might have found at the end. These women teach me to love her by allowing me to love them. I never imagined this to be a possibility when I was an angry teenager who felt abandoned by her birth parents and like I didn't belong anywhere. And yet last night as I tearfully thanked these women for being my teachers, I healed a part of me that while no longer angry for many years, is still emotionally sore in many ways. I want to believe that as I heal these pieces of me, that I learn to love myself more authentically and that it translates to taking kinder and better care of myself. That the energy that was needed for holding together the stitches of where my heart is broken by feelings of abandonment is now released to work on self care. Energy cannot be destroyed. Just transferred. And so I send that energy that for so long has had to hold hurt pieces together towards the parts of my body that need energy for laughter and having it in me to call back a friend at the end of a long day, or get in a workout or read a good book. That's what I believe healing can do for me. It transfers the energy needed to keep me from falling apart towards giving me the opportunity to live a fulfilled and more balanced life <3