"Giant Swamp Teddy"

about this piece

I've been thinking a lot lately about how trauma shapes people, and working through another wave of struggles with trauma from my childhood. It disturbs me greatly not only how some things that happened years and decades ago affect me so intensely even now, but it also disturbs me that so many people don't even understand this about trauma. It terrifies me that I have made most of my important self-defining and life-trajectory-determining decisions under the influence of a few terrible events in my early life, and that I may never finish undoing that damage. Not just the damage from the event itself, but the damage from how I coped with it in the aftermath. And I can't even readily share much about it because, well, it's a buzzkill and the disgust people feel over what happened to you is more important than the compassion you need as someone who experienced something that changed you. Yeah, I'd rather not think about it either, buddy. Unfortunately that's not a luxury that's available to me. Maybe it never will be.

My trauma lumbers through the ruins of my brain everyday much like this inappropriately gigantic teddy wanders through this dark, dank apocalypse landscape, getting more fucked up and grungy all the time, but never dying, never relenting. The teddy is eternal, he can never be destroyed, only adapted to, like a hurricane or an active volcano.