Heard It in a Past Life: Embracing Vulnerability in the Wake of Trauma
About the Series: Heard It in a Past Life
Our favorite witchy queen Maggie Rogers sings the haunting phrase of “maybe there’s a past life comin’ out inside of me” to close out her most somber song, “Past Life," of her 2019 debut album. Her somewhat pensive tone encapsulates how many of us feel when looking back on our past lives — regret, sorrow, disappointment, even anger. Yet, Maggie is attempting to make amends with her past selves through this song, even through her whole album that carries a similar theme. How can we reconcile with our pasts and bring them into our present selves, or even into our future selves?
At Camp Thirlby, we not only encourage our readers to reflect on their past lives, similar to what Maggie Rogers does in her moving song, but to delve into those experiences headfirst through their own personal memoir. Our series to ring in the new year, “Heard It in a Past Life,” to cite her album title, does just this — it showcases the ways in which our Camp Counselors have reconciled with their origins and past selves, relating to queerness, mental health, and more, to bring into the here and now, no matter how difficult that may be. Because maybe, our pasts are more present than what we ever once imagined.
“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter — they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small, cramped dark inside you so long.”
Last week I found this passage underlined in my copy of The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Sylvia wrote this entry at 18; I was 16 when I first read it. I’ve stumbled upon several relics of highschool me lately and I’ve been thinking of the girl who left them behind.
My emotional relationship with Sylvia Plath during those years was a lot like my other emotional relationships: she spoke (well, wrote) and I listened. That’s the dynamic that made me feel comfortable, that made me feel purposeful. The difference between my dynamic with Sylvia and my dynamic in my non-textual relationships was that her confessions often felt like my own. Through her writing, she welcomed me into the small, cramped dark inside her and I found it alarmingly like the one inside me; I felt she and I were dissolving the rust together.
In Sylvia, I recognized my own love of learning and desire for exploration, my own insatiable drive that often morphed into destructive self-criticism, and, in a way I’d never known before, my own trauma. Sylvia’s father died when she was ten. Throughout her life, she carried a sense of abandonment rooted in her father’s fatal negligence of his own health, a sense of abandonment I shared in connection to the loss of my own father to liver failure. At the time of his death, I was twelve. I understood it as an inward, earth-shattering heartbreak and an outward shift in identity. I felt marked forever as “the girl with the dead dad”; Sylvia had been this girl too.
“There is your dead father who is somewhere in you,” she wrote, “interwoven in the cellular system of your long body which sprouted from one of his sperm cells unifying with an egg cell in your mother’s uterus. You remember that you were his favorite when you were little, and you used to make up dances to do for him as he lay on the living room couch after supper.”
In the writing of Sylvia Plath, teenage-me found recognition that I was afraid to look for elsewhere. I lived in a small town world of middle class families who carefully crafted the facade that bad things simply did not happen, not here and not to us. My reality felt like a dissonant, public reminder of the inescapable finality of existence, but I had no interest in being the conduit for the message. In the immediate aftermath, I’d hated the way my home had filled with fruit baskets signed from names I didn’t recognize; I’d hated the loaded way adults asked me how I was doing while looking at me like a battered puppy whimpering to “Arms of the Angels”; I’d hated that I’d become a target at which to hurl stale adages and generic mantras of positivity. To escape it, I did my best to erase the mark; that is, I did my best to keep my emotional wounds concealed.
Simultaneously, away from the realm of adulthood, internet youth culture on forums such as Tumblr had made sadness sexier than ever. My personal trauma sometimes felt like a status symbol, commodified as a token to write about in college essays or make me seem interesting at parties. Still, I was horrified to ever acknowledge it IRL. The reward of intimacy wasn’t worth the risk of seeing my confidant’s face contort in masked discomfort, their eyes darting back and forth in search of the right words to say, as if I would keel over in sobs at anything short of Keats. I convinced myself that my public vulnerability would only make people uncomfortable; it would only push them away.
Instead, I internally grappled with grief that I was too immersed in to fully understand its impact. I wasn’t aware of the ways in which childhood loss would linger in my psyche, the way it would manifest as depression for years after my life had settled into a new normal. I spent my alone time looking for solace in music, writing, and art that embodied a sadness to match my own. I forged an internal conception of myself rooted in my darkness, the same darkness I hid from nearly everyone aside from those who knew the right Sylvia-Plath-inspired monicker to link to me on Tumblr.
And outwardly? Outwardly, I clung desperately to durability. I didn’t cry for years, convinced any indicator of weakness would bring satisfaction to an omnipresent, cosmic bully. I never felt comfortable asking for help or accepting it when it was offered. At 17, my mental health plummeted. I remember numerous engulfing panic-attacks spent isolated in a bathroom stall at school, but I don’t remember it once occuring to me that I could let a friend or teacher know. It would make them uncomfortable or worse — they’d pity me. Worse still — they might think I pitied myself.
In spite of my near inability to talk about my own feelings, I found myself becoming a safe space for others to release theirs. By 14, I had accepted that if I couldn’t work through my own feelings, I could help others with theirs. The mark of my loss read as an indicator of emotional intelligence. It hinted at those with trauma less outwardly visible than a dead parent that I might be able to empathize with their darkness too. Being a support for others brought me closer to the intimacy I craved without requiring me to reveal myself more than I was comfortable with and serving this purpose in my relationships soothed my persistent fear that the people I loved would leave.
My only grandfather passed away three years after my dad. Another three years later, the week before my highschool graduation, my boyfriend of over a year’s father passed away suddenly. I spent that summer balancing my overwhelming desire to make things better for the partner I loved as I watched him mirror the most painful experience of my life and my own pain at losing yet another father figure I had come to depend on. My inability to heal him anymore than anyone had been able to heal me made me feel powerless, as if I had looked into the small, cramped dark inside me and found nothing good enough to give.
When I started college, I traded in my cloaked darkness for snarky self-awareness. I claimed my previous obsessions and emotional crutches in the same breath that I wrote them off as self-indulgent flights of melodrama. My feelings still embarrassed me; my method of concealing them just evolved. While I once made space for the darkness, space to be alone and read Camus and reblog sad Tumblr poetry and be unapologetically emo, I began to conceal this part of me even from myself.
These days, when friends come to me for support, I often find myself encouraging them to take risks and try things that they are afraid of because an experience earned is better than an experienced lost. I insist that even things that go badly will make them grow and prepare them for better times to come. Besides, isn’t it exciting! To be afraid!
I realize this advice is mostly me projecting. I encourage others to stray from their comfort zone because I have felt most at home in the uncertain. I tirelessly scramble to find a sense of security I didn’t feel in my formative years but when that security comes, I feel even more restless.
My strength lies in my ability to remain calm and resolute as my world burns around me, to stay stable while standing on a molten surface. Once the surface solidifies, I feel clumsy. I stumble and topple over, unable to trust the ground beneath me. I expect the solid surface to crack. When it does, I do not flinch; in a way, I am relieved to be rid of the anticipation.
You could say, then, that for the past six months I’ve felt at home. I went through a marathon of heartbreak that began with a breakup from my first love after being together for four and half years and continued months later when an intense fling ended just as disorientingly as it began. And, mostly, I felt fine, until I became aware of the way I was once again digging in my heels in refusal to show anyone that I was struggling. I’ve made negotiations with my reflection, coaxing her into believing that crying now will help her feel better later, but my body has been so conditioned to hide emotions from others that I can’t help but hide them from myself. I fight myself as I write this and hear only the droning of a privileged, self-pitying girl with an ego problem, as if I’m self-indulgent to express that I feel.
Fear of vulnerability is as far from unique as a problem can get. It stems from an essential animal desire: safety from harm. And the fear of emotional vulnerability — how better to avoid being judged than to avoid being known?
Now, I’m coming into a new life. I’m shedding my protective shell. I’m tired of writing off basic emotional expression as opulence. I’m done mocking the things that once made me feel in an attempt to dissociate from them; instead, I’m befriending my past selves and the things that quelled their loneliness, sadness and fear of loss. Nihilism did click for me when I was 17, Beach House moves me as much now as it did the first time I listened to “Zebra” in a tenth grade study hall, and the words of Sylvia Plath still engulf me like the arms of confidant.
I’m releasing my past lives and the words kept too long in the small, cramped dark.
About the Author
Victoria Middleton (she/her) is a third year student at The George Washington University studying journalism and mass communication with a minor in women’s, gender and sexuality studies. She discovered her love for writing as a little girl, typing fairytale stories on her parents old Dell and printing them out before taping them into glitter-glue-encrusted cardboard covers. These days, she thinks honest and fully developed stories about women are even better than fairy tales. When she’s not scheming against the male hegemony of the media industry, she can be found thrifting, watching cult films and TV and badly dancing to good music. She has been known to get overly excited about intersectional feminism, astrology and David Lynch.
