Trauma is like the monster under a five-year-old’s bed, it feels so alive in our heads
as if we are living it all again but in reality, we are just trespassing some vivid flashbacks. It takes a tremendous amount of work to teach the brain new pathways
to react to certain types of thoughts and situations instead of just going into a fight or flight mode and it takes one single thought and one single compulsive reaction to break that balance.
For me, August is linked to trauma, the trauma of my first ever experience with anxiety, the trauma of a series of mental breakdowns; not for a week but months and being prisoned by my thoughts. Trauma has its ways of showing up at your door again and again and there are two ways to deal with that; you can let it
completely shatter you or you can accept its existence. Both of these are soul-shaking experiences, the first one being anxiety and depression as it is, which
will only lead to more trauma and the second one is a journey of mental toughness but it leads to beautiful daylight. I had started dreading the arrival of August ever since 2021 started, scared by the thought of getting stuck in the shallow darkness of my head again.
So to avoid the anxiety building inside of me, I decided to escape and hide behind
the walls of technology, hours after hours of just trying to ignore that the arrival of the
most dread month was near. But I was not realising that it wasn’t the specific time of
the year that was making me spiral, the problem was the way I was reacting to all of it, I was going back to the old ways of coping; that was running away from it and old ways never open new doors, that’s a fact.
While I was thinking that technology is my safe abode it was doing something opposite of it, with chains of algorithms tightening around my head. It just pulls you inside of it entirely and then there comes the moment of realisation and you know you are an addict to these binary codes.
While talking to a friend online I asked him “Did technology ever disturb your mental
health?” he told me about the time, it was him behind the bars of the cage made by
the thoughts and the oh so addicting algorithms which made me have an epiphany.
While I was afraid of losing the balance and piece I had gained, I was giving it all
away without realising it. The first week of August came in slow but hit me right
where it should have. I decided it was time to rip off the bandage and let my scars
breathe.
The day you face your thoughts is the day you realise how little power they
hold, you realise who is the bigger force and once I did that I came into accepting the presence of my trauma, I realised that happiness and sorrow are parts of our lives
they are not life, so they will keep coming and going and using technology as an
armour to protect you from the sorrows of your life will never help because two
negatives combined only add on to the amount of negativity.
After my fear finally, lessened I realised that I had been pulled in by the magnetic field of the algorithm and that could do a whole new level of damage to my mental health. The reaction is the key, instead of trying to get rid of the unwanted thoughts and feelings I let them be there. Instead of running away and adding on too the damage let the thoughts pass, before jumping onto any kind of reaction.
So, pull off your band-aids and face your fear, even though it’s not easy but you will feel proud of yourself later.
- Inayat Sharma