***

I recently read an essay by Melissa Febos, “The Heart-Work: Writing About Trauma as a Subversive Act,” from 2017, which was later expanded and now appears as the first chapter, entitled “In Praise of Navel Gazing” in her 2022 collection of essays “Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative.” I read the original article on my laptop as I ate comfort food at a wooden picnic table near the lake. I had run away for the afternoon, taking time with myself, sorting through some uncomfortable emotions, and feeling raw. As I absorbed her story, tears appeared on the horizon. I was moved both by her compelling arguments about the transformative power of the truth but also by another layer of realization of my own hard stories pulsing in my veins, chanting in the half-darkness, waiting in the wings for their moment in the sun.

***

“This is the way adults love each other.”

“This is a grown-up secret, just between you and me.”

***

I’m seventeen, and I’ve agreed to check into Long Beach Memorial Hospital for a substance abuse treatment program for teens. I see the gray melamine meal tray, complete with a wooden spork and green Jello, in my mind’s eye. I am filling out a questionnaire. “Have you ever been sexually abused?” I mark the yes box. I feel defiant and strong. I am finally telling the truth. Do I understand the true freeing power of honesty at that time? It’s not how I do today, but somewhere in me, I am so tired of keeping secrets. My adult cousin had molested me when I was about 3 or 4.

I hadn’t thought that checkmark all the way through to the avalanche effect it was about to have. I was underage. My parents had to be told. Was it going to have to be reported?

Big surprise, they weren’t surprised. They already knew. Apparently, I had told them when it happened. Why did I still feel so betrayed? What could a young child have possibly told them anyway? Did they know to ask the right questions? Why was nothing ever done? Why did I still feel so unsafe? Why was my dad still buddy-buddy with this man who did what he did to me? Why did I feel like it was my fault?

***

“Men will only ever want one thing from you.”

***

My dad told me this multiple times, starting in junior high school. There was always a “look” and a “tone” that went along with this. I assume he thought he was protecting me. In high school, he told me I looked like a prostitute once and made me change my clothes.

My dad also repeatedly told friends and family the story about the summer I was developing, and he saw me in the rear-view mirror but hadn’t seen my face, just my body, and found himself gawking at me. Internally, I cowered in shame. Why was he proud of this fact? Why did I feel so dirty? What did I do wrong?

***

“If you really knew me and all my secrets, you wouldn’t want me, love me.

You’d run screaming in the other direction.”

***

The point in my life when I finally stood in the face of the truth at last and looked eye to eye with my own alcoholism and destructive patterns, my own Jekyll and Hyde, the wasteland of my tattered soul, was the same timeframe I started writing again. Among other things, writing saved my life and resurrected my sanity. The true transformation took root; my pen and ink were soil and water. With guidance, I began to look with clear eyes at myself and question who and what I was and what the hell was I doing in my life, not to mention asking and answering the questions starting with why. I dismantled secrets, washed clean the lies (including those I told myself of what was and wasn’t ok), and turned the clean laundry back right-side-out. I had lived in an inverted reality and didn’t even know it. The shame rode so deep in me. I couldn’t look you in the eye. I most certainly couldn’t even hold my own gaze in the mirror. I was dead inside. Too many secrets. Too many lies. For far too long.

***

“I had to walk back through my most mystifying choices and excavate events for which I had been numb on the first go-round.” – Melissa Febos

***

As I laid myself bare on the table, ink drained from me like blood. I felt like I was in a detective movie, making one of those link charts of stories and suspects, causes and conditions, trying to unravel an unruly ball of tangled yarn. I spoke of all my personal unspeakables, first on paper, then out loud to another. I told the stories and mistakes. I told how I hid and lied and cheated. I told things I could barely understand the meaning or implication of at the time. I recounted what I experienced, what had been done to me, and how each unhealed trauma had deepened my predisposition for the next, how I had become so broken and bent that I didn’t and couldn’t attract anything else. I had come this far and understood at a deep and visceral level that if nothing changed, nothing would change – that if I didn’t bring absolutely everything into the sunlight, then the simple truth was that I may not be able to move forward. And I already knew what backward looked like. No longer acceptable. Hope only lay ahead, in the unknown, in the light of day.

What happened next appeared gradually, like an acorn transmuting into a sapling, eventually growing into a mighty oak. Or maybe the better analogy is the beautiful lotus flower rising up out of the muck and mud at the bottom of the pond. I no longer have secrets. I may choose to keep something private, but the chains of silence no longer bind me. There is nothing that I have experienced, thought, said, or done that at least one other human being knows about. And there is sheer freedom and joy in this. I no longer feel the need to hide. I meet my own gaze in the mirror, and I know that someday, my stories of transforming my lived experience will help others transform theirs as well. No mud, no lotus.

***

“I say that refusing to write your story can make you into a monster. Or perhaps more accurately, we are already monsters. And to deny the monstrous is to deny its beauty, its meaning, its necessary devastation.”  — Melissa Febos

***

I began to feel grateful for pieces of my story. My escape into alcohol and, later, drugs may have been killing me, but it also medicated me and kept me alive in some ways. The pain that I endured both at the hands of others as well as at my own is a touchstone to growth. I don’t necessarily want to purge my past. Purify, transform, transmute, yes, but my battle scars are well-earned and, at times, even treasured. This is the rich and fertile soil that can help others transform their own.

. ***

“Navel-gazing is not for the faint of heart. The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery. To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you. For many years, I kept a quote from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet tacked over my desk: ‘The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.’ ”  — Melissa Febos

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash

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Adina Lynn LeCompte

Adina Lynn LeCompte is a sixth-generation Californian. After having lived in varying parts of the US and abroad in Florence, Italy, she has come home to roost, splitting her time between the Central Coast and the Foothills of Yosemite. She holds her Bachelors of Arts from UCLA (Language & Linguistics), her Master of Arts from Middlebury College School Abroad / Universita’ di Firenze (Language & Literature), and studied 4 years in the MDiv program at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Over the years, she founded several successful local businesses and worked as an interfaith hospital and hospice chaplain.

Adina is a working writer, an award-winning poet, and is working on her upcoming book “Spilling Ink: Write Your Way Into Healing”. Additionally, she has designed an interactive transformative workshop by the same name that uses writing as a tool for healing from trauma, especially abuse and grief. She is also co-author of several compilations of poetry with her husband, John LeCompte, who is also a writer. (“With These Words, I Thee Wed: Love Poetry” was published in 2023.)

Her most recent exciting endeavor is being a part of the Bay Path Univeristy’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction, with an emphasis in Narrative Medicine.

writeyourwayintohealing.com

You can and are capable of being a person of goodness, bravery, honesty, and authenticity; no matter what has happened, no matter what you have or don’t.  You can and are capable of pursuing, learning, obtaining, and achieving anything you choose. And you can face each loss, fear, goal, dream, purpose, growth, and change with empowerment with your own mind and heart.  These are my words said with conviction.

Today I am 41 years old and have experienced the deaths of 14 people in my life, 12 of which occurred after 32 years of abuse and beginning with my brother’s passing, two months after I got sober.

Each death was sudden; from 8 hours to 5 months; from murder to COVID-19.  Like what most of us assume we’d be granted; I wasn’t allowed presumptuous time to spend with each; to say and do everything I probably would’ve had any of them died from the naturalness of old age.  Yet I remained sober experiencing it alone because my childhood friends were not supportive of me and I was already estranged from most of my family for the following reasons.

I grew up in an abusive home; blood, bruises, broken skin, topped with verbal and emotional abuse inflicted by both parents.  It was often my mom said how stupid I was while she knocked on my head or a worthless, piece of shit human I was.  Particularly harmful was that I was too repulsive to look at because I had my dad’s blood in me.

However being a God-believer, not in the religious sense but simply a higher power, I know God made me a spiritual warrior.  I say this because what I have overcome almost seemed insurmountable.  Had it been up to me, a typical human, my spirit could’ve stagnated inside a living corpse and my soul might’ve wandered Earth seeking a different body to possess to escape what’s happening within.  Or perhaps I could’ve allowed my addictions to bury me alive.

While yearning for any kind of peace and witnessing the ‘crazy’ that people do to each other, our planet, and our animals, I wondered “Does peace exist?  If so, where does peace begin?”

After I worked through the anger, entitlement, and victimization issues, I came to a place of more inner peace and realized there is a bigger picture.  Retrospectively, when things seemed unfair or hopeless, my life took a phenomenal upswing, and harnessing those memories keeps me moving through the traumas. 

Crumbling

A few months after my friend Mikey died, I was walking my dogs around our neighborhood until a woman runs a stop sign and hits us with her car.  A few months following that, I was sexually harassed by a co-worker, stalked and physically threatened by him, reported to Human Resources, and then laid off 3 weeks later.

My brother died two months after I got sober, Mikey was the ninth to pass, and his brother Thomas (the seventh passing) died 18 months earlier.  They were a part of my chosen family whom I spent holidays with after I no longer spent it with my blood family.

My sanctuary family kept dying but I chose to continue to work hard on my sobriety and career because I had plans.  I was going to pay off my debt, buy a place for myself and my canine companions, and create time for self-care.

My mind and body were nagging me for a mental break – to decompress from an abusive family and grieve from the nine people, by that time, that passed, whilst remaining sober.  But when Mikey died, I felt and heard something in the right-side of my brain jolt, shake, then shift.  It was in that moment I knew innately, consciously, “I was never going to be the same.”

I was diagnosed with C-PTSD; confirmed by brain MRIs, therapy, doctors, and a book I love “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D.

Before my diagnosis, C-PTSD had a negative, uncontrolled effect in both my personal and professional life.  But today I’m learning more about it and moving forward with awareness whilst finding and applying tools to manage my life with more control.  Yet of greater importance, my God (or my angels or whatever is looking out for me), having a support system, and those who hang in there with me by not taking things personally are all what keeps me here, intrepidly.

Never Give Up on Love

Despite what I went through; I never give up on my love for others nor myself.  I never give up on being honest, growing, healing, and learning.  I never give up on being a good person; doing what I feel is best for myself, others, and the world around me.  And I never give up on having a new family and new friends whilst doing my best to live in the present with what is.

I take full responsibility for my life and learned not to blame others nor God for what has happened.  I also take full responsibility for the hurtful effects it has on my loved ones when I disassociate because from what I have been told, “You’ve been gone for 10 years!”

The couches I slept on, families of friends who took me in, therapists who put their academia aside and showed me love, support, care, and acceptance helped shape my internal perspective.  If it weren’t for all of them, I’m unsure if I’d believe in love and people as if no tragedy occurred.  I’d like to think that I’ve walked through hell and back like I owned the place.

Today I have people who support and respect my sobriety and/or also sober.  Today I am building healthier relationships with people who want the same as me. Today I have a workplace that understands C-PTSD because they experience that with their family members and that helps them deal with me.  I meditate for 1-hour, do Pilates, read, and write almost daily, socialize and help others when I’m able and am a total beach bum.  The most rewarding is enjoying a home that  I created that’s safe, supportive, and peaceful.

C-PTSD is part of who I am, not who I am.

I am proud of who I am.  I trust how I live.

My abusive past reminds me who I don’t want to be, who I’m not, and what I don’t deserve.  My past regarding the people who have died, helps me remember that I can and will have again, a family and friends to lean into; safely, peacefully, and happily.

Yes, I have flashbacks and triggers which can throw off my day unexpectedly.  I still tend to disappear (disassociate) because I think a threat is lurking, so hypervigilance and adrenaline take over until I feel safe.

This is part of my story and whether people admit it or not, want to be seen.  They want to be understood on a “this is me” level and our world needs more love beyond people holding onto their family, friends, and careers for dear life as if nothing else matters.

From my personal experiences, no one died from opening their hearts and homes wider for me, let alone humankind. Acknowledging with gratitude, this radical acceptance is what helped and helps me thrive wholly as someone who lives with C-PTSD.

“Life happens with or without my willingness to participate helpfully or destructively.  I’m capable of sitting with how shitty things feel and transmuting it into something beneficial for myself and my surroundings.  I’m responsible for my life no matter what has happened.”  – Monique Nguyen

Monique Nguyen is a California Native.  Construction Project Manager by day.  Writer & Humanitarian by night.

Monique Nguyen