Who Are You Trying To Be?

Have you ever asked yourself that question? It’s something that I am starting to ask myself.

Beyond drowning my lungs in coffee and cigarettes, I don’t really know how to heal from sexual abuse. I am learning that talking it out here on the blog sure, that helps, reaching out to others helps.

I am watching Buffy again and I am astounded of how jealous I am of the slayer, at least when she’s feeling like crumbs she can go and kill something.

That seems a lot more active than doing the internal healing thing, especially because these wounds so often feel like they will never heal.

There are days when I feel like I am doing exactly the right thing, and other days when I am completely lost, but the one thing I know for certain is that I know exactly who I want to be.

I want to be the person who helps others learn to heal, I want to be a healer…which is really quite funny when I think about it, because for years I ran away from wanting to help others.

My friend slash teacher Rachel used to tell me all the time that I am a Brujah Witch, or what some call an “African Healing Witch”, it is a Brujah’s job to help others heal. I never wanted to be a healer, because I was in such a dark selfish place, but I am finally ready to learn the skills of my ancestress’s.

I know there is a lot for me to learn, but I am not sure exactly what discipline I want to engage in.

I could go back to school and become a Nurse, but that doesn’t really interest me. I think I want my focus to be on healing the mind. I think that’s the thing that will help me the absolute most.

I feel like learning to help heal others will heal me in ways that I can’t quite comprehend yet, and I am excited to see what that looks like.

I tried twice going to school to learn how to heal others, I wanted to take some classes on counselling, but they told me that they didn’t think I was ready, apparently they could see something I couldn’t, and they were absolutely right.

I don’t know if I will try again, but it is something I am thinking about, in the back of my mind, for when the time comes that I am ready.

I had a counselor once who told me to learn to hug my feelings, she just kept saying that over and over again, what she was trying to tell me was to embrace the way I was feeling, to let myself feel the feelings, but that didn’t translate well with her method.

That is the problem I find with a lot of Mental Health Professionals, they may not have real world experience the way I do, so while they mean well, they don’t necessarily know how to communicate with people like me. It is a skill set that comes with time, but people like me often do not have time to wait for the Pros to catch up.

If you want to be in the mental health industry, and plenty of people have asked me, I have always said you need to make sure you have a proper support system and for some people, myself included, that means going through counselling yourself.

It takes a lot of energy to deal with people who are suffering, and you have to make sure that you have the proper tools in place even before you start.

So my focus this week is on getting counselling, and unfortunately that process is going to take longer than a week. I can’t afford it on my own, and I’ve already been denied for funding once. Hopefully my old Doctor has a record of what happened when I was sixteen, that particular event was reported to the police, so if she has a record there is a good chance my funding will be approved.

I am trying, at my core, to be someone who finds purpose, and that quest is leading me to believe that I was put here for more than just to be a girl who got raped a lot.

I think that I have a divine purpose, and I believe that God is with me, even though I don’t feel comfortable praying anymore, I do believe that the higher power is with me, encouraging me to keep going even when I feel like giving up.

I feel like a person who is on a journey of self discovery, and I want to be the person who shares these new discoveries as loudly as possible so that other people can learn from them. I am excited about my future, because there is comfort in knowing who you are trying to be.

When I was a kid, I tried to be every body but me, it was the most confusing time of my life, but now at the ripe old age of thirty-seven, I have found that it’s because your youthful days are supposed to be confusing.

They’re also supposed to be a lot more fun than mine were, sure I had some good times, but they were far by marred by the dark times.

I am almost ready to let people back into my life, but I know that forever more, I am always going to wonder if I can fully trust them. That’s a byproduct of being abused and broken down. I can’t change it, but by accepting it I can learn to be careful with my own actions so I don’t hurt good people accidentally.

Part of healing from mental health trauma is understanding that our actions have consequences of their own. We have been hurt terribly and as a result we learn just how and when exactly to strike to hurt others. It’s a powerful weapon against abusers and innocents alike, and we have to be careful not to slay the innocent ones when we don’t mean to.

I am realizing that I am sick, but I am absolutely not weak. I am one of the strongest people I know and that gives me faith that I am going to be exactly who I want to be, when I want to be, how I want to be regardless of what anyone else thinks.

I am going to be okay.

So are you,

Sending all my love,

Devon J Hall