shariew

Finding joy unpacking boxes. Sounds easy right? Not when you are talking about unpacking emotional boxes that have been packed up and shoved down into the corners of individuals minds. This is a trauma response to extreme emotions both good and bad. How do I know this? This is my life.

Which Boxes To Open?

That is the question, because they don’t get labeled when they get boxed up and stuffed away. We don’t have a label machine in our brain that sorts them good from bad. They are just sent down the conveyor belt of our nervous system to their resting place to be opened at a later date. It makes opening the boxes a 50/50 shot of a good day or a bad day. Am I going to relive the birth of one of my children? Or, am I going to replay the moment I considered would those kids be better off without me? 

You see the issue. When they aren’t labeled, and you don’t know what you are going to get, you don’t want to open any of them. Why not leave them sealed? Leave them collecting dust in the corners of your mind. You don’t do this because they are your memories. I honestly can’t tell you what it was like to hold any of my children for the first time. I don’t remember it. I don’t remember their first words, first steps, first laugh. I don’t remember a lot of the joys of motherhood and life. I want to remember more. I want the joy of those memories back. So now I have to go unpack some boxes.

Danger of Dark Boxes

Opening up the boxes of good memories is what I want. It is not all of what I am going to get. Just like individuals who go to auctions for storage units. I am going to get a lot of junk I don’t want or need. I am going to come across. Trauma, loss, death, shame, anger. Everything I couldn’t deal with at the time emotionally and just locked away is now going to have to see the light of day. I am going to have to take one box at a time good or bad and live those emotional memories and make them mine.

Why

To find joy. To find joy in the good memories and to find joy in the fact I survived, thrived, and overcame the bad. Now it is time to own it all. Joy is everywhere and in everything. Even in tragedy and trauma, Loss, Fear, Birth, Achievement, Failure, and everything in between. This is not going to be easy, and I am not going to do it alone. I will be seeing a trauma specialist, and relying on God, friends and family to see me through. I will make it. I will find the Joy in the Pain, and I will incorporate all of it the right way. I will clean out the storage of my mind, and unpack those boxes.