BEAUTY FROM THE BREAKDOWN

“It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory.” ~ Paulo Coelho

Nothing can be as haunting and frightening as your past. Nothing can be as educational and inspiring as your past too. Be kind to yourself. ~Britt

I want to share with you all a very personal, painful and exciting process I’m going through. I have terrible post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. Starting from a very young age, I experienced some very stressful and traumatic events, at least to me, and as a result began to never feel safe, in control of my environment or okay. This led me to develop anxiety, OCD tendencies and the assumption that there must be something wrong with me and that I wasn’t good enough. Early on in my life, I began detaching from myself. I didn’t feel that my identity of Brittany was acceptable and so I searched externally to validate myself. This not surprisingly led me to want to be perfect at everything, stand out from the crowd with successes and to put an enormous amount of performance pressure on myself so that I could take on an external identity and hide Brittany. To make a long story short I became a stranger to myself. I have been through so many horrific events throughout my life that my way of dealing with them was again to detach and numb out. It was a way to cope and survive, and at the time it served me well and perhaps protected me from truly seeing and feeling the severity of the pain and dire situations I experienced.

I personally believe that all people who develop something destructive or negative in their lives to help them cope, such as an eating disorder, addiction, working too hard, or (insert your own), have one thing in common: there is a core issue that caused a degree of pain large enough to need to find a way to cope and/or numb out. Often these core issues develop when we are young and we don’t have the skills or life experience yet to come up with positive ways to cope and therefore we cling onto anything that helps us manage and frankly, survive. I’ve always frustrated the heck out of every coach, therapist, treatment center and doctor because they were never able to get me to reach the core or root of my “problem.” I had become so well versed and accustomed to turning my head the other way and pushing the pain away that my core issue was buried far too deep to access, and honestly, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to address that pain. I didn’t want to do that work. I wasn’t ready. I remember years back right before my eating disorder started. I was offered a full time scholarship to one of the best tennis academies in the United States. The head coach told my mom something along the lines of, “Whoever finds the key to unlocking Brittany’s potential will hold one of the most talented individuals I’ve ever seen.”

This brings me to share with you all a first hand look at a new chapter in my life. This past week was the start of winter quarter at Cal Poly and I was so excited and looking forward to returning. What happened over the course of the week was nothing short of pandemonium. I had never in my life experienced the type of emotional breakdowns, anxiety, pain and tears as I have over the past 7 days. I was completely taken by surprise, was confused and wondered what the heck was going on. I can tell you exactly what is going on and it’s the process I’ve been waiting, or rather needing, to go through for over 20 years. I finally connected with myself, with Brittany. I was staring my past in the face, but this time I was not just reciting the facts in a detached manner; I was re-living it in all its ugly brutality. It was not a pretty sight. I’m a very independent person and I don’t share my personal life with too many people besides in my journal, of course, and a few select friends and family. Learning to open up about my personal life is challenging and a completely new thing for me. I’ve become so conditioned to suppressing my feelings and always smiling that when I became overwhelmed with actually feeling, understanding and connecting the dots of my life, my emotions came out sideways as some would say. It scared me. I had never felt so out of control, vulnerable and scared. I didn’t understand. But now I do.

For me personally, school has been one the most traumatic parts of my life starting from preschool right up through UC Davis. So here I am back at school and absolutely loving it, but this quarter it finally hit me. What hit me? Preschool, elementary school, middle school, high school, college and everything in-between. I opened my eyes for real for the first time and realized that I was in the very environment that traumatized and scared me more than anything. In fact, school has been such a painful subject in my life that to give you a perspective, I’d rather re-live my worst days dying at 56lbs or stepping on the scale for the first time reading 221lbs than re-living my best day at school. This, my friends, is exposure therapy at its finest. I’ve been crying so much lately and I never cry, but it’s such a healing cry that I find myself smiling and almost laughing through it. This is the most painful, liberating, therapeutic and exciting thing that has ever happened to me. I’m slowly ripping off the Band-Aids and my wounds are so gruesome I almost can’t look. But guess what? The bleeding stops, the wounds are forming scabs, the scabs are turning into scars and the scars are fading into triumph, peace, freedom, healing and recovery. The work is happening. I’m ready now. I’m strong enough. I’m holding my ground, while my emotional floodgates have been forced open. I’m becoming me again; my disconnect is disappearing. It’s the most beautiful and almost indescribable feeling and process. Because if I can be me… if I can be Brittany, which is all I ever needed to be… all the external pressure goes away. I have no reason to hide behind having to be “the best” or “perfect.”

And you know what holds the key that no professional in the world, no treatment center in the world and no medication in the world has been able to find to unlock me? Cal Poly. I swear, the Universe has quite the plan in store for me. Returning to my core trauma and pain has been the best gift I have ever received. Simply reading the textbooks – even developmental psychology – is giving me insight into what happened to me early on; it’s allowing me to remember and re-live the pain, but then understand, heal, move on and have hope. I love my psychology professor so much that I unconsciously catch myself smiling 95% of the time during her 2-hour lecture. But the other 5%? I’m full of goose bumps ready to burst into tears composed of pain and ah-ha! Yes! That makes sense and applies to me! So Cal Poly, you hold the last key to the “incurable,” “hopeless” and most perplexingly complex case. You are bringing me back to my childhood and allowing me to connect the dots of my life so that I am no longer a stranger to myself. And so everyday that I walk on campus, I bleed and I heal.

School is academics, which I love and take incredibly seriously, but for me it’s also countless years of PTSD therapy, anxiety therapy, bullying therapy, identity therapy, self-esteem therapy, growing up again therapy and eating disorder therapy. Basically in short, I’m finding balance. I’m finding Brittany again, who I left behind decades ago. This exercise of healing is excruciating, exhausting, disturbing and simultaneously the most beautiful and worthwhile challenge I have ever been presented. I’m finally releasing. Letting go. Freeing the old beliefs, the junk, and the negativity. It will be a process and it won’t happen over night, but I won’t give up. I’m going to be brave. I’m going to continue to face it. And as a result I have an overwhelming feeling and intuition telling me everything is going to be okay. My anxiety, perfectionism, pressure, OCD and nagging negative thoughts are already dramatically decreasing. I’ve never felt so light and free and I’ve only just begun to truly heal.

I believe some of us don’t ever fully recover from certain traumas or fully let go of our “Band-Aids” such as eating disorders. Sometimes we go about life just fine… but from my personal experience there is still a disconnect occurring. Maybe you aren’t in danger of dying, maybe you aren’t actively doing something destructive, maybe you are even very successful… but I believe in order to truly reach a sense of acceptance, peace and ultimately recovery you have to get to your core. You have to do the dirty work and you have to get ready to be an emotional wreck. And you can’t make yourself do it. It just seems to happen when you are finally ready. At least that is true in my case. But don’t settle for pushing your past aside. There is a difference between moving forward and forgetting the past and making peace and accepting your past.

I feel that being able to work through each year of my life starting at 3 years old will allow me to feel a special type of empowerment. Because yes, my past is one that would make most people cringe, scream and run the other way. But once I stare it in the face and realize it can’t hurt me anymore, I will be able to live my present life and future with so much more to offer and with so much more happiness and authenticity. What a blessing my professors are. What a blessing all my wonderful classmates are. What you all are reading and for those of you who know me in person, witnessing, is the beginning of my transition from feeling like I just woke up from a decade long coma to feeling like I know myself inside and out. And I have to admit I am starting to love and accept every part of myself. I am now going to be able to share my story and own it wholly. I’m starting to piece myself together bit by bit and as a result am coming back to life in a way more amazing than I could have even wished for. ~Britt