It's a May Day Mayday
May is also Mental Health Awareness Month
Happy May Day!
Today begins Mental Health Awareness Month and I am choosing to be more aware of my own mental health needs by handing myself a May Day basket of self-care choices. If there was ever a month that begs me to do this, this is this one!
This May Day is bringing a bouquet of challenges—both personally and for my family members. While having a rare time of “awakeness” in the night, I wondered if ChatGPT could create a Haiku to describe it. Not bad! That final line brings me hope! Not sure how mayhem does that, but I’ll take it.
May blooms, chaos swirls,
Mayhem dances, May's bouquet,
Mayday whispers calm.
Aside from the almost impossible month ahead of me, I have spent the past few days reflecting on some life patterns that grew out of my earliest childhood experiences. This past six months, I have come face to face with additional layers of my story that make the life I managed to live seem truly impossible.
I now have a much clearer picture of how trauma impacted me and how good I was at hiding it. I was a child who learned to get up every day, control my behaviors, and hide my pain. The goal was always to look like a “normal” happy child and make myself enjoy life. It looked like resilience and strength, but underneath that exterior was a devastated nervous system.
Healing the impact of traumatic events over the past ten years didn’t magically turn me into a person without childhood trauma. It also didn’t change that my young life included minimal experiences that could have built healthy self-regulation skills through co-regulation and nurturing. Also, healing in and of itself did not fully change the patterns that helped me survive.
My life has felt fundamentally different because I no longer used the “get up and live and act like it is enjoyable” pattern to seek validation. The healing of layers of shame allowed me to create a life filled with opportunities and fulfillment. It also enabled me to redeem my story by bringing hope to others. So much goodness has come through my determination to heal!
The truth is that my body gave me a mayday call long before May arrived. For about a year, my overwhelming desire has been to set everything down but that felt like giving up.
Acceptance and giving up are not the same thing!
This has been a challenging life lesson! Since last fall, I have slowly been setting life down and doing additional healing work. As I end my time on the Attachment & Trauma board and finish grading my papers for the course I am teaching at Tabor College, it is possible to put work on pause.
Is it possible to continue healing a heavily damaged nervous system at seventy?
Time will tell.
So, while May is going to be a challenging month for my family, I am grateful that I am not out there trying to fly a plane at the same time. I will also be stepping away from social media for the month and the postings here on Substack will likely not be as consistent—though I would never leave writing behind!
My self-care always involves writing—it is the air that I breathe.
Thank you to all who support me! I am bringing this plane down for a soft landing and at the end of May, we shall see what the future holds. I imagine I will be doing ample reflecting along the way that will show up here!
Take care of yourself! You matter.