It is not that something different is seen, but that one sees differently. It

is as though the spatial act of seeing were changed by a new dimension.

—Carl Jung

As all people do, I have carried upon my heart and mind the imprint of trauma. I didn’t choose it or choose to carry it. The imprint happened. I did not know.

None of my traumas have altered in any significant way. They remain as fully in my memory as the mind that kept them. It is no longer a story I tell, but a story that tells me. I no longer work in vain to push it away, bury it, or otherwise distort with excuses, rationalization, or minimization. The imprint I carry reflects the pain, confusion, and horror of my childhood and beyond.

People have tried to own my story pushing and pulling at it as though it were a lump of clay to be shaped as they saw fit for whatever agenda they had. And how much I wanted the more acceptable version of me to be true, to settle into a softer version of me that could live and love and play with the abandon of an unsoiled child.

But I remained me, trauma imprint and all, and mine was indeed the only life before me to live. The stories and lies and assumptions were for other minds and hearts to feel better, or to feel absolved from any responsibility to help. After all, if you say it never happened you are free, your conscience is clear. You sleep soundly in your righteous belief that I am the problem and not anything you have done to me.

No, nothing has changed and yet everything looks different. I remember thoughts and feelings as my brother led me up the stairs to his room. I remember pretending it was not me. I remember standing in the hallway afterwards among the fresh washed sheets drying inside out of the cold NY winter. And I remember not knowing what to do, who I was now, what happened; I just stood there with the detergent scent in my nostrils knowing nothing and everything had changed and knowing I could neither go back or forward.

What is the knew dimension that makes the same truth look different? Knowledge. With knowledge comes acceptance of me after decades of fighting against being me. Knowing that it was not my fault, knowing the trauma altered the very air I breathed, the way I saw, felt and acted. I can finally own all of me though so many people still sit on the fence grappling with the truth that only my brother and I know. He will never tell, and to many, I cannot be believed.

I use to care. I use to feel a need to prove I was who I said I was and what happened to me, especially to those I love. But that was not the key to the door of freedom. I needed to own my own life, be proud of me, accept me, and befriend me.

My traumas will never look exactly the same again. They are a major part of me and I am okay with that. Now there is a hope of those empty words “move on” actually happening, but not by burying or turning away from it, by embracing all of me and treating me with the love and kindness I have denied myself so long.

I am not through learning, but the landscape already looks like endless possibilities stretching out before me.