i started my own mini crohns flare up

Drowning - Radio Company

i started up a mini flare, and i caused it.

i’ve been pretty stable so far w my crohns, but my emotions have been numb. life feels bland, and it’s hard to express emotion. that disconnect, that lack of being able to tap into the emotions i know im screaming inside, scared me. everyday i’m trying to figure out the best way for me to take care of myself, being that im the only one going to do it. and i thought that my emotions, my feelings, were hiding because they were scared, and i was supposed to lure them out, even if it feels uncomfortable. i was thinking w my head-not my heart, not my gut. i thought the feeling of sandpaper rubbing against this train of thought, the drop in the gut, was a sign that i was starting this intense healing process of opening myself up to feel more. to connect with a part of me i considered lost. but it was never lost. my feelings are being felt-they never left. they’re just not being expressed and thought through in the capacity that i expect them to be. they’re taking on as much as they can be at the moment.

i’ve been doomscrolling on tiktok inbetween taking shifts, and when im unable to sleep, and i was given a video of this gorgeous girl who talked explicitly and openly about her family’s abuse. the things they did and didn’t do, and how she was living on her own away from all of them now, like i am. i immediately felt so connected to her story. i may not know her personally, but her pain, her survivor story, was scarily similar to mine. and hearing her talk about it so openly on the internet, risking herself in the way i have never had the courage to but have dreamt about, lit a fire in me. i started watching all of her videos. i became familiar with the pattern that was her life, her struggle. and it felt like me, because it was me—that struggle is shared.

every time her videos would pop up, i would cry. emotions i haven’t felt and expressed came up for this girl that i haven’t been able to feel for myself. even in parts i didn’t relate to, that same emotion was there. hearing her voice crack, her throat bobble as emotion bubbled up while telling the horror story of her childhood—it broke my heart. she frequently would answer the question-why she was posting about it, talking about it the way she is—and she said it was to inspire, encourage, and give a platform and light to people going through what she is/has gone through. she wanted to make people feel less alone, and for her to not be alone in doing that. and i just saw so much of myself in that message.

i thought this newfound emotion i was expressing was a sign that her stories were a pick in the ice of my hard exterior. i thought i needed to hammer, to poke and prod harder as the surface cracked and spread larger. i hoped that when i hit the water sitting still beneath, waiting for spring to come, that it would start flowing in the way it naturally has yearned for since before winter. but it’s been a while since it’s been spring. or summer, or fall. no matter the weather or the season, that ice stayed there. and that’s because the climate has never changed. the people, the places, have always been cold to me. and it’s because of their chilling presence that i wasn’t able to thaw, to have my tears flow in the way i was expected given my circumstances.

the other night i made myself some dinner after my shift and a long day—air fried fish and a salad. i saw on that girls tiktok that she was posting youtube videos of more explicit, in depth memories and conversations that were too long to post on tiktok. i wanted to watch it, but i didn’t know when. i always want to create a comfortable, safe space for myself before i feel or express any feeling, because otherwise i feel scared and unsafe and exposed (a pattern from my childhood trauma), so i did that with my food, and the blanket of the night in the comfort of the sinking couch in my den. I found her youtube and played it, imagining if we had swapped places—i was the girl on the screen, talking to the camera, and someone who related to my story, or was just curious and loves true crime, clicks on it, eating their food in their home and watching like it’s entertainment. like my abuse, my cries, the screams i once whispered in the halls of my childhood have dwindled and dimmed to just that—a podcast, and a quiet but unheard “i relate” from a girl in a life who isn’t yet able to be vocal about her situation in the way she wants, because she’s still tied to her parents against her will so her life saving medicine can continue to be funded, as well as her college.

i listened to her story. i thought about the comments i left on her videos as she talked about how thankful she was for a community that listened and sadly related to her story. i thought about her response to one of my comments i left on her page, telling me i deserved better and im heard. i thought about the replies to my comments i got from people, the profile views and comment likes that followed after a trauma dump ive never done on the internet before spilled out of me after bottled up emotions were forced out of myself in a way that led my thumbs to be relentlessly blunt and confessional. i thought for a bit that my thumbs have betrayed me, taking over before my mind got scared and stopped them, but once i got responses, and responses to my responses encouraging and sending love to other people through the screen, i realized that that’s all this was—a community of healing and moving on.

there will always be risk. there will always be a downside to posting, to being blunt, to name calling. in accusing and convicting. in telling the people through the screen a story built on trust and growth in such a way that hate is expected to roll in with the responses the world gives back in return to such bravery.

i say this all now with my heart and thumbs only halfway in believing and feeling confident enough to take on this fear of being perceived. in being seen as no one other than the broken little girl i was when life brought me down in a way no one should ever have to go through. and i realized, digging deeper, that that stemmed from shame. not shame now, of her, but shame then—her embarrassment, her sense of feeling at fault for being hurt, trying to bring reason into senseless infliction, was still within me. still inside that inner child, that still lives within me.

my thumbs now are flying across the keyboard of my screen, desperately running down the path of reason into hopes to run into the end where truth must lie. but i find that i have done a loop, and i’ve been led back to myself. and that’s my truth. the truth.

i’m going to be messy. i’m going to make mistakes. i’m going to over share and under share, be vague and blunt. i’m going to make decisions that will affect my future, and reflect my past. i’m going to choose my voice over silence, the confusing healing process of grief over the forceful reliving of pain that’s misguidedly taught as healing. i’m going to share my story, slowly but surely, or fast and loud, in the way my gut tells me too. because if any voice in my head of mine is the real me, it’s the low grumble of my gut. the same one that has dealt with my crohns since 4th grade. the same one who has developed a disease purely from the stress of the abuse of my parents i could never escape. the same gut that feels the punches being thrown at it by those who “love” me, and make me feel out the pain while i beg the tiles of the bathroom floor to believe me in that they “didn’t mean to say or do that to me”.

but pain is more telling than we know. its screams, it’s soft pokes, its relationship with food, our daily routine, and our mental health, is all the more telling. it tells us in the most bluntest of ways whether we’re doing something wrong, or if wrong is being done to us—way before our mind can reason it. pain is felt—but not always seen and heard. but it is always. felt.

the forever irritation of my colon will be an eternal reminder, a blunt parent, a tough love partner in my relationship with my own life and everything in it.

for the majority of my life, i thought of this disease as something i was burdened with purpose. back when i fiercely followed in god, i was told and believed that this pain that held me hostage in the bathroom for days, months, years, in a state one might think im on the brink of death (which at times i was), was given as a reason. a gift and a curse, pain we should blame eve for, but thank god that it’s not forever, as long as we hope and pray for the day death comes. i loved my family, my parents, and my god too much to “accuse” them of being as cold and calculated as the disease that developed under the stress of their care. i believed i was able to survive pain no one should ever feel, while being refused the care and relief i was needed because i was just wallowing on the bathroom floor in pain “for attention”, for the purpose of being strengthened to tackle an even harder adulthood—a fate that was more painful than the one i was experiencing then. and in that thought, that teaching that was told to me in stories, judges, jokes, dimmed the light at the end of the tunnel. because what was the point of making it out to only be shoved into another type of pain, expectedly worse than before?

i couldn’t imagine life being worse than how i had it. and being told that adulthood was more depressing than the time in my life where i was a child, i believed that the future was grim and nothing less. i believed that happiness was a myth and that life was nothing less of a prolonged punishment. a chaser for the hell that is to be raised for existing if we do not submit everything we were just given to a god that loves us and the pain he allowed us to wallow in.

everything has purpose until that purpose is no longer lighting up the end of that tunnel, and life consists of the cold cell walls of a path leading through the darkest hours of my childhood days.

that all being said—i caused this mini flare im having to sit with at this moment. it’s been about two days, and im immediately brought back to a tortured side of myself that hasn’t felt this close to me since she was crying last—which has been a long long while. this reunion is bittersweet and eye opening—the way we’re meeting is not the safest, and not the smartest—but as always, my gut warned me. and im now reaping the consequences.

i ate my fried fish and salad kit on the couch, opening up the first video of this girls youtube channel. i’m eating and watching, feeling the weight of respect and sorrow for this stranger that has wiggled into corners of my day to day. the stories she tells are indeed just as she said they’d be-long, blunt, and in desperate need of a trigger warning. i listened to her trigger warnings, but ignored them, even tho i knew damn well i was the kind of person that needed them, and i should’ve clicked away.

forcing myself to eat and watch as the emotions and horrid crimes she experienced slipped off her tongue felt like strapping my inner child to a chair in an empty white room, eyes pried open towards the large screen playing her video. my gut rubbed like sandpaper, warning me to leave before it got worse, but i told myself that it’s subtle pinched of pain were growing pains, and im forcibly giving my inner child the validation she “needed”. it turns out i was wrong, and my gut was right. as it always ends up being.

if i follow my gut, my mind, body, and heart will follow. and living truth will be enlightened.

i forced myself to listen while filling my stomach of self love with a side of the desperate need for a hug. there i heard things her mom did that my own dad did, and it forcibly brought back memories of trauma i was not meant to process yet. i mistook the pain in my chest as my souls attempt to jumpstart my feelings and my healing process. but i was wrong. i ended up having a panic attack. the emotions, the memories, being grabbed out of the fog and forced into the blinding light of my awareness with the horridly familiar firm hand of my father with the bending wrist of my mother.

i ran to the bathroom and threw up every bit of food i ate that day. tears snot and sweat came up as the feel of a once trusted hand felt me up in a way i have previously forgotten about to survive. words, intentions, and a clearer lense on moments i had tucked away deep in my mind. thrown out like a leper.

i had a flare up stomach ache that lasted hours. fhe ac in my apartment was already broken, and it was easily 92 in there. in between episodes i managed to bring in the box fan and a heating pad when i started to get spotty vision from the sweat dripping into the trash can toggling my shaking knees. sobs bubbled out of me as i was brought back to the times where i was being cared for and comforted by my mother, in the same sort of state i was in. her back rubs, her caring words, her ice cold water she’d bring me. and i thought “i would love to be taken cared of right now. i can barely make it taking care of this on my own in this heat”. i debated texting her. breaking the bland, cold, distant messages we only send each other now, with a cry of help she’s been waiting so long for. but then i’m taken back to my childhood— a series of events, of trauma inflicted in a family that revolved around promotional self image and throwing crimes under the rug in the name of love. i thought about the countless times i begged for help, to be seen and heard, to be brought to the hospital when i could get off the floor, or when my throat was closing up to an allergy they always said i was making up for attention. none of my pain was acknowledged or responded to unless it started to affect them and their image.

i knew one thing for certain—that if i did call her that night, and she came over, she would, despite everything that’s happened, and the way she’s done this my whole time of knowing her, she would still use my pain as an opportunity for a lesson as to why i’m not enough and what i need to do that’ll benefit her and hurt me in order to gain that worthiness i “lost”.

the pain was never an act. never will be. and if someone doesn’t want to believe me, then that’s up for them to decide. but it won’t affect me the way it might another, being raised in a home where the people who knew you the most still accused you of lying before you were capable. who used childhood mistakes and growing pains as opportunities to dig their fingers in further into the brain, the life, the future they wanted to play out through us.

i remember my dad told me that god created humanity knowing that they’d disobey and that theyd sin, which would lead to generations of pain and death. i asked him why he would create us to begin with if we were always doomed—and he said it was for his entertainment. because he was bored, and he likes watching us, and being involved in our lives, and we should love him for that. we’re programmed to do nothing other than to love him, no matter our reason for being here.

i remember crying to god as his intentional pain blinded my vision while he held a nostalgic hold on my gut and twisted in bored infatuation in hopes to be entertained by my screams.

i remember asking god why he loved our pain, and what about it satisfied him.

i remember my dad telling me part of being a good daughter is forever loving and being in debt to their abusive parents. because enabling them and never expecting change was a form of love jesus would profusely say to do—love unconditionally. accept the flaws, the pain, the abuse, in the name of love.

growing up, i did not know love without pain. and pain without love. i was taught that the two don’t ever come without the other, and that itself was a blessing to praise god for.

i started a mini flare up for the first time in about a year because i went against my gut’s pleads of not hearing those stories, not forcing those memories into the light, and not digesting equally heavy pain in large portions-or else it’ll come up. like it did for me.

so from all of this, in the state i’m in on my bed with my heating pad, i learned this—that my gut should be louder than my head, and that can only be achieved by a megaphone of a listening ear—which i have, and will point towards my stomach—where proof of my internal scars exist in the form of a lifetime suffering disease.

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i love yalllllll 💕🫶🫂 sending warm hugs and a thru the screen palm to face hit to whoever hurt you 🤗