#NerdsUnite: On a Quest to Find my (Bat)manhood: Learning to Accept My One Bad Day.
<editorsnote> Nerds, meet my buddy Taco. (Funny how the important the word "buddy" is in that sentence.) We've been Facebook buds for sometime now, but he's about to embark on a personal quest and has asked to write about it. I only have one more thing left to say ... HIT IT TACO!! </editorsnote>
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @Redknave
There’s a saying, that for addicts to get better, the first step is admitting they have a problem. Same holds true for me and my trauma. For the longest time I tried to rationalize what happened to me. It always ended up with me blaming myself for the events that transpired. Okay, to give vague details about my One Bad Day: a family member hurt me when I was younger. Let’s call this family member Joe Chill. For those that don’t know, Joe Chill was the man responsible for the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne, Bruce’s parents. So Joe Chill fucked me over when I was younger. And from that point on I’ve lived in a near constant state of fear that only recently has been getting fixed.
All those years stuck in that moment of hurt. I’ve spent the good part of my life trying to figure out why it happened. Why did this event have to happen to me of all the billions of people on this fucking planet. Why me? I started to think it happened because I was weak. Too weak to protect myself, to say no, to stand up and defend myself. I hated myself for this, for allowing this to happen to me. Years ago, I tried thinking of ways that this event could have been avoided. I started thinking if my father didn’t leave when I was only a few days old, maybe my mom would have been home to take care of me. Or that if my brother didn’t keep getting detentions when he was in high school, he could have been there for me. I started thinking that if I could erase the memory of it, maybe it wouldn’t hurt anymore. Or that if I had a time machine, I could change my timeline and the rest of my life would have been better.
None of this helped. I kept running away from what happened. Trying to convince myself that it didn’t happen or think of ways that I could make it not have happened. Erasing my memory wouldn’t work, because the scars of the attack would have remained. And time machines don’t exist. The more I thought on this moment, the more my memories came back. I did try everything a 5 year old could do to defend themselves. No matter what, this event was going to happen. Once I realized this, once I accepted that this happened to me, that’s when I could finally get better.
It took me years to accept my trauma. I just had to logically disprove my irrational musings. Years of just fighting myself over what happened and what could have been. I needed to go through every single moment of those years. It’s the only way that I could have fully accepted what happened to me.
Acceptance isn’t just admitting something happened, but not trying to blame it on others like I tried to do with my mom and brother. It means not running away from the facts, like me trying to find ways to erase the memories of it, don’t do that. It means not hating yourself for things that were out of your control. Acceptance means acknowledging that things happened and no there’s no changing that. These are the cards I’ve been dealt, and that’s fine.