I Am Done Hiding: The Thing I've Been Too Scared To Share

I am about to enter my 24th year on this Earth and I realized that I am not living up to my fullest potential. I constantly have ideas, dreams and desires but I end up doing little to nothing about them because I am always too scared. ''What will they think of me'' or ''what if it's stupid'', ''what if it's not good enough'', these are the things I worry about and so I end up sabotaging it for myself before I even get started. This is a pattern most of us struggle with and I think it's really a shame. The people we look up to or think are brave, are exactly the ones who dared to just do it. To at least try despite all of the selfdoubt and insecurity and believe in themelseves no matter if no one else does. There is an incredible amount of potential in all of us, we are all here right now and we don't even begin to grasp what we are actually capable of. The greatest achievments that ever happened were because someone dared to go beyond what we've known until that point and see what else there is. And I know there is so much in me. I know everything I've been through up until now has been for a reason. What I wish to see in this world is only half of what I am doing myself right now. I can't expect others to share their stories if I don't do it myself. So here I am. It is scary but I have been scared most of my life and it hasn't gotten me anywhere. Now is the time, more than ever and probably for most of you too, to share your voice and use that fear to create something out of it. I pulled this card the other morning and I knew it was time:

When I write about pain, I really mean the pain I've been feeling since I was raped. Three years ago. I can say I have come out the other end after several hardships in my childhood like growing up with a mentally struggling and partly absent father, a messy divorce of my parents, moving several times, an abusive ex-partner of my mother, a year of chronic pain but nothing felt like this. I remember partly how numb and frozen I felt the first weeks after the assault. To this day the only reason why I knew I had to open up was because I was scared to death that I got pregnant that night. After a luckily negative result, I was surprisingly doing well and did what I thought makes the most sense. Going to a doctor and seeking out a therapist. But I was disconnected from my whole body and felt like I was watching myself from the outside. In therapy I would talk about it like it was normal, but I had no feelings, no emotions. For someone who has always been very in touch with my feelings, I knew I was not the same person anymore. After the numbness came anxiety, panic attacks, triggers everywhere that reminded me of the event, nightmares, not being able to sleep at all, sadness and pain like I've never felt before, a nervous system totally overstimulated and a constant feeling of not being safe. I would cry for hours and hours, my eyes so swollen I could barely see. I was so afraid of touch, even from my loving mum who just wanted to hold me and take away my pain. But that was it, no one could take it away. Not even now. And nothing helped me, nothing made it easier, at least not for a long time. Watching movies became unbearable whenever there were intimate or violent scenes, as well as being out alone in the evenings and darkness. In therapy I noticed how I was still so disconneted from my body whenever I talked about what happened. So I found a trauma informed therapist who offered Somatic Therapy. It changed everything. Finally I started feeling again. I was able to learn to let my body speak. The amount of energetic release I witnessed by mostly shaking uncontrollably, was fascinating. I have learnt so much about my body with this type of therapy. I believe it was the best thing for me to get me started on my healing journey and trying to accept what had actually happened. The sessions always brought a lot up. Over time though, my body slowly started to learn to calm down. I also learnt that my panic and triggers are normal responses after this highly traumatic event. That the pain I was feeling and constant crying was a way for my body to release stress. That my nervous system was overstimulated all the time and it couldn't self regulate anymore. I learned to be compassionate with myself and love my body because all it ever did was to protect me and keep me alive. A part of the after effects the rape had on me was the shame I felt. Shame for not stopping it, not defending myself. I just froze. I did nothing. Until I learned about the brainstem and how it governs the biological response of our bodies by either fight flight or freeze. It was hard to accept that my bodys natural reaction was to freeze instead of fight. I blamed myself for the longest time. But learning about the human survival response has helped me to understand why and how my body reacted the way it did and actually protected me (I will write more on this topic in a later post). Within the first year I was not able to work. I was lucky enough to have had such a wonderful support system from my family. I would not be here today if it wasn't for them. I could not have done it without help. Still to this day I need help and I am learning there is no shame in that.

After this year I then slowly found my way back into ''normal life'' but I didn't feel normal at all. I realized how the me before the assault was gone forever, that my old normal would never come back. It changed everything. I saw the world with different eyes. That's when the grief hit in. Grieving my old self, grieving what will never be and grieving what shouldn't have happened to me. THIS! I realized I lost a sense of innocence, I lost confidence I thought I had, I lost my joy and hope. I have actually just recently learnt that grief is a very important part of the healing process. There's just not enough talk about it and it is often not recognized. I feel like I still to this day grieve sometimes. With that being said I still today have a lot of the symptoms. Sleeping is still difficult, nightmares every week at least once, anxiety, sadness, having flashbacks and sometimes panic attacks. Yes it's been a few years since, but on some days it still feels like it is happening all over again. There is no finish line in recovering from something like this, there is no magic pill and there is no road map. There is no easy way. But thankfully we live in a time where so much knowledge is available, people who have been through it, different forms of therapy and slowly even a conversation. Trauma, no matter what kind, has a major impact on your whole system. It affects everyone differently. I am by no means an expert, but I have been through it and I want to share how its has been for me. It is extremely difficult to navigate through healing any kind of trauma, it is exhausting and can feel so lonely. I have been feeling lonely since it happened. I think it's part of the reason why I want to open up now, because I have felt so alone in all of this. I had so many questions about everything, questions about how to ever be intimate again, if what I'm feeling is normal, or to simply read about someone elses experience to not feel so alone. I googled a lot, but there isn't a lot about this. And I understand why. I mean it has taken me all this time too to share. The ''Me too'' movement has opened up this new door but it is not enough. There are so many people who have been through the same, so many more who will probably go through it and it breaks my heart to think about that. That's why I am so passionate about opening up and creating something out of it. In hope other women and men have the courage to do the same and that the shame around that slowly falls away. That we can normalize needing help, talking about the heartbreaking, horrible things that have happened to us, that make moving forward so difficult.

I wish I could say it gets easier with time, but I can't. All you learn just helps you to navigate through the days a little better. You realize you are not what happened to you. The triggers will become less intense, you will learn how to self regulate each time more, you learn to love yourself not despite what happened but exactly because of it, and you learn just how resilient you are. It will never make sense. There might never be a silver lining in all of it, and no, you did not deserve this. But what I truly and deeply believe is that everyone of us, has the ability to heal and love. That deep pain will crack you wide open if you let it. Slowly and over time, and once the light finds its way in (which it will), it will fill you with new hope, strength and the capacity to love not only yourself, but others, in a way that will transform pain into absolute beauty.

You are love, you are light and you did not deserve this. But you will heal. You will love again. I am here, and so is everyone else. If it's too heavy to carry all by your self, place your pain down, and we will walk this way together. From the bottom of my heart, with all my love, Larissa