They told me to keep quiet, to keep the peace, to make him comfortable. So the Trauma danced around in my head, migrating into my chest and hardening my limbs. I carried the weight of it on my shoulders and in the pit of my stomach. I felt its unnerving embrace as I tried to sleep and eat and talk and survive.

It dug its teeth into my skin and burrowed inside me, permeating into every cell of my body until it became me and I became it.

I detached myself from reality. Familiarity ceased to exist, as the people that I once knew and trusted suddenly looked like imposters.

Who can I trust? Where can I go? Where can I feel safe?

Then came the chronic emptiness and numbness. This was the easiest part. I had shoved the trauma so deep inside that I couldn’t feel it but it had taken all of my other emotions down with it. I was a vessel, a stranger to myself.

The nightmares and the sleep paralysis began shortly after. Then came the immeasurable anger, which felt like a ball made up of lead and fire sitting inside my chest. An anger that I could only take out on myself.

A relentless state of high anxiety stopped me from eating and sitting still.

I became hyper-vigilant at all times. I trusted nobody, not even the strangers walking by me in the street. It felt like my life was fake and some kind of sick, twisted joke.

Being alone was debilitating but being around people made me feel empty. Binge eating just to feel something. Starving myself out of guilt and shame. I felt a profound nausea whenever I’d catch a glimpse of my body. Crying in the shower and in front of the mirror became a regular occurrence.

It was just one trauma, after many.

I had once believed that he measured my worth beyond my damage but then he damaged me too. Plummeting my self esteem into the ground. He took advantage of me until he had drained me of my resources, until there was nothing left to take and I had no value to him.

And then I was alone. Left to bear the consequences of his actions. Left to pick up the pieces of me that he’d broken.

Being perpetually re-traumatised with every trigger and every reminder. Suffocating under the burden of my silence.

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