My Grandmother is one of my best friends and biggest role models.
Even when separated by distance, she’s always been by my side. She has shared my joy and shed tears with me and knows my secrets. She’s always given me a space to talk, and she listens with open ears.
She reminds me how brave I was for going to a new school during my freshman year of high school to study performing arts, which was something so different from what I was used to and what anyone else in our family did. In college, I struggled with extreme emotional stress and health issues, oftentimes wondering if I could graduate. She was my biggest cheerleader, pushing me to keep going and believing that I could do it. To this day, she reminds me of the accomplishment of graduating.
She reminds me of my beauty when I don’t think that I’m beautiful.
Each year, she made an effort to attend my school’s “Grandparents and Grandfriends Day,” always flashing a smile and making friends with all who met her.
When we would go on walks around her neighborhood, she’d charge ahead at twice my pace, even though she used a walking stick to support herself, bounding ahead of me as I panted, “Hold your horses, Grandmother!”
While I know she’s in some pain, she’s the healthiest 90-year-old I know. Never once have I heard her complain about her health, and from her bright smile, you’d never guess she had anything wrong.
When I was growing up, she’d bring her boombox to my family’s house when she visited. She listened to audiobooks while my sisters and I ran around like little maniacs, screaming and playing. All the while, she wouldn’t even bat an eye but just listened intently to her book.
For hours, she would drive me through Oklahoma to my cousins’ house, playing intense classical music while she twirled her fingers to the sounds of the flutes and clarinets. At the time, I couldn’t stand classical music because I was a teenager and wanted to fit in with the music everyone else was listening to, but through my grandmother, I grew to love classical music.
She gave me the confidence to study engineering and not fear the stereotype of not fitting in. She earned her doctorate in math when it was a completely male-dominated field. I knew that I could do it, too, because she did it.
At family reunions, she tells the same funny stories from her life and her kids’ lives that I’ve already heard ten times, but I laugh along genuinely because I love hearing them again and again.
I spent many of my spring breaks in Oklahoma with her. I couldn’t have cared less about soaking up the sun on the beach and partying with the other college students; I just wanted to soak up every ounce of wisdom from this incredible woman.
Oklahoma was never my favorite place in the world because I thought it was boring, but there is never a dull moment with her. When I did complain about being bored, she came back with a sarcastic, “If you’re bored, then you’re boring.” Her biting wit rings true to this day.
If I took a nap on her couch, she would wake me up like a boot camp drill sergeant after 30 minutes and tell me I needed to get on with my day, that there was so much I needed to accomplish. No moss ever grows under her feet.
When I struggled emotionally, I would often call her five or six times a day, and she would pick up the phone every single time, even though it always took a bit for her to adjust her hearing aids. She would break a complex problem down into smaller steps, helping me set goals, and say, “Go accomplish this task first. Go unpack one box. Then, call me again, and we’ll set the next goal.”
She is busier than I am — constantly on the go, meeting with friends, playing bridge, and attending church. Regardless, she always picked up the phone to be sure I was okay and told me she’d call me after the game. She’s never not picked up the phone or returned my call almost immediately. Her only caveat was, “Don’t disrupt my sleep because that would be rude.”
She has taught me much about love. She says if we dare to love, we will be hurt, and vice versa. The human experience is full of love and hurt, but she has always chosen to love.
Whenever I had a calculus question, she would answer it for me, even if she had to dust off old textbooks and spend hours refreshing her memory on the intricacies of derivatives and integrals.
She has a heart for helping others, tutoring students for free, and offering her home to those in need.
She knew that I stopped dancing after growing up with it as my favorite passion. She took me aside and said, ”Natalie, dance around your apartment without a care in the world; no one’s watching you.”
She gave me the courage to stop caring so much about how others perceive me and said, “If someone doesn’t like me, that’s their problem.”
She helped me stop worrying about being criticized: “The only way to not get any criticism is to do nothing at all.”
She suggested I keep a notebook of the names of all the people I meet at work, along with some positive identifying qualities about them. She told me to wear a big smile and call people by their names; it makes them feel seen and loved.
So many times, I’ve found myself at home crying, terrified of my grandmother’s impending death. It’s so scary imagining her being gone. I wonder how I will handle it. I know it will be like a piece of my heart has been ripped from me. I’ve saved all her voicemails, knowing that at least hearing her voice will be a connection when she’s gone. Sometimes, I’ll even intentionally let her calls go to voicemail just so I can have one more little memento of her.
I know we will make many more memories together while she’s here. She is my best friend. I love you, Grandmother. Happy 90th birthday!
Photo by CadoMaestro on Pexels
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For the longest time, I thought I was inherently “messed up” and broken beyond repair. I spent about a decade running around in circles in the medical system trying to figure out what was “wrong” with me and how to “fix” it, managing all this while attending school and holding full-time jobs. I thought the way I felt in my body was “normal” because I had no sense of what the other side was. My complex trauma symptoms manifested as crippling anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive symptoms (in the form of religious and moral scrupulosity), extreme dissociative symptoms, insomnia, sleep paralysis, night terrors, and narcolepsy. My symptoms began at age 13 and continued into my mid-twenties. In general, I endured multiple types of traumas throughout my formative years, including numerous situations of both individual and large-group interpersonal cruelty, some of which caused me to have to switch environments. Due to what I was going through, my body couldn’t fathom what was happening, and my nervous system shut down. I felt guilty for simply existing. I saw danger everywhere, operated in a panicked survival mode, and lived in fear, anxiety, and isolation. I did my best to appear “normal” on the outside, keep a smile on my face, and control what was happening on the inside, distracting myself with extreme workaholism and doing nice things to serve others. I took active steps to keep branching out in confidence again, but these traumas kept piling onto each other and overlapping, so I couldn’t fathom what was going on. I wasn’t ready to give up yet, though, because I knew my family and friends would be distraught if I did. The most difficult and heartbreaking part of my story is that the two communities I set out to seek healing in—religion and the medical system—caused further trauma when some religious leaders, congregation members, and medical professionals chose to take advantage of my vulnerability for their own motives. In most of these situations, I didn’t even realize I was a victim until outsiders pointed it out for me and that my vulnerability and naïveté made me a target of malicious people. Each future situation of being targeted was just salt on the wound of the original incident. As an extreme empath, I absorbed the negative emotions of others as if they were my own, and I did not know how to release them from my body. In my solo healing process, I had to quite literally disappear from everyone and everything to protect my vulnerability and allow myself to process what I had been through during my formative years using my own mind and body without the persuasion or invasion of others.
What I went through all those years was so severe, and my symptoms and physical body reactions as a result were so excruciating that I went as far as to see a neurologist, concerned that my symptoms were the result of some sort of nervous system disorder. However, he returned with no paperwork in his hands to inform me that there was nothing wrong with me but that I was simply completely traumatized, and my body reacted accordingly. I finally realized that my symptoms were not the result of an inherent mental or physical illness and began to take a trauma-based approach to my healing after many years of believing that I was “sick” for the rest of my life. My true progress began when I finally rejected the lies that were told to me that I would have to “manage my symptoms” for the rest of my life and made the decision to believe for myself that I was fully capable of healing from my excruciating pain, even if others did not believe in me. I still do have tough days and moments, but I have gotten to a place where I am consistently living a quality of life that provides peace and comfort in my mind and body since I have given myself the tools to overcome my tough moments when they return.
Many C-PTSD survivors receive numerous diagnoses before ever hearing anything about complex trauma, and some are overmedicated to try and “fix” their symptoms, usually to no avail and with further side effects. I was told I would need to “manage my symptoms” and be on medication for the rest of my life. It was all lies. Today, I am on zero medications (including sleep medications) and am completely divorced from the disease management system.
I am excited to share many tips for natural, somatic, and holistic healing that have helped me overcome my complex trauma symptoms, such as extreme dissociation, excruciatingly painful flashbacks, severe sleep challenges, anxiety, hypervigilance, worthlessness, and more. I began to pursue unique methods of healing after many years of not seeing much progress through westernized care, and this was the catalyst for fast-tracking my healing. I have so many exciting tips to share related to grounding, nervous system regulation, somatic healing, and more to offer survivors other ways they can learn to regulate their nervous systems on their own without spending any money. I aim to help survivors overcome their feelings of self-guilt, blame, and humiliation and help them realize that their bodies had normal reactions to abnormal situations.
I am on a journey of rediscovering who I am at my core after letting so many other people infiltrate my mind for far too long. The five most important things to me in my life (in order of importance!) are: my health, my happiness, my family, my friends, and my creativity. My parents, my sisters, and my friends are my absolute rock and biggest cheerleaders. They were cheering me on all those years, fully believing that I was capable of overcoming my excruciating pain, even when I did not believe so myself. While I was repeatedly able to forgive others and extend the olive branch, I was never able to forgive myself. My loved ones kept telling me that there is nothing I need to feel humiliated about and that I should be able to see what everyone else sees in me. I have finally given that kindness to myself and have started to see what other people saw in me all along.
I am so glad I didn’t give up when my pain felt unbearable. I know what I’ve survived. I know the work I’ve put in to overcome it. I know that I still chose to keep a smile on my face and be kind in the face of it all. In reality, it’s because I didn’t want another person to go through even one ounce of the suffering I was in. I am finally living a life of consistent peace and contentment, and I am sharing my story from the other side. My story is not a story of defeat but a story of victory.
I have enjoyed embracing the free spirit I always was and adopting a simpler life to focus on the things that are meaningful to me. I am still healing every day. I believe our healing is a lifelong process. I made the decision to escape my version of the rat race (big city life) and move to my happy place. I am catching up on many hours of much-needed rest and spending lots of time outdoors. I am reconnecting with the people I lost while I was in isolation. I invited the passion that saved my life growing up—dance—back into my life. I am passionate about fighting for other survivors in any way I can.
I hope that by sharing my story, I can convince other survivors that there was never anything wrong with them to begin with and that they are capable of living healthy, happy, and fulfilled lives. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I did not become a voice for the voiceless and share how I overcame it. I aim to live my life in love of both others and myself, understanding that everyone has a story of their own. I am grateful to the CPTSD Foundation for giving me an opportunity to share my story.
“My story isn’t sweet and harmonious like invented stories. It tastes of folly and bewilderment. Of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.” ~ Hermann Hesse
