"I don't know what I'm doing and it's scary."
Sound familiar? As soon as I left school, I felt like a different person. I existed and worked in the school extracurricular system like a pro. Apparently, I had the chops to do well academically too - I didn't know or believe that. Remember the conversations swirling around us growing up about the cousins and the other children doing so well, so why can't we? Same. Story of our young lives. I could, thankfully, fool myself quite well. I lived in a perpetual fantasy world in my head. It probably saved me from me.
As I approached the end of my school life, I became more afraid and anxious about my future and the unknown. If all I was up to this point was everything but academics, what would my life look like if all I had to focus on was academics? Some might ask, why I had to focus only on academics. In my world in 1995, that was what life was - "playing" around on a field and most extracurricular activities were only for fun and games as a teenager. For an adult, it was not part of the equation.
Walking into life after school, I was also feeling vulnerable because I was experiencing some shifts in my health. My hearing had been diminishing since I was younger and in my final year at school, it suddenly deteriorated much more. I needed a stapedectomy done to my right ear at the end of the year and after that, I had complications that caused nerve damage. Of course, I found out about the nerve damage many years after the procedure. It's unfortunate how medical professionals sometimes fail us.
Back to the beginning; I had somehow got it into my head that I wanted to be a chiropractor. I loved the idea of helping people with physical therapy which had helped me so much. I'd even been accepted into the program as long as I had a good pass at the end of matric. I realise that I walked out of school and into the rest of my life terrified and scarred by an unsuccessful surgery. Trauma walking feels like your senses have been blunted and you're entering spaces with no ability to protect yourself. Eventually, the trauma shell becomes your protection.
My first year of study in Chiropractic was a wonderful and also terrifying experience. I was walking around with the weight of my struggles. My pain, the very precise cauterising from my high school persona to my young adult persona - an extremely busy and deeply fulfilled life to one where I didn't know who I was anymore.
Revisiting this pain is hard. Remember, trauma is not remembering the pain from our past, it's experiencing it again as if it's the first time. I need to breathe through it before I come back for more...
