What is it like to relive your worst nightmare?
Years later, it still hits me all of a sudden.
It’s the middle of the day, friends surround me, and the sun is out.
But something isn’t right.
There is this feeling, a very uncomfortable feeling in my mind, in the pit of my stomach. I want to leave and go somewhere that is quiet and dark. My thoughts are consuming me. So dark and so monstrous, I was afraid. It’s wrecking me from the inside out.
What would you do if you had to relive your worst life experience over and over until you die?
To always be stuck in the time leading to your most traumatic experience and reliving it repeatedly?
It’s the very definition of hell.
A few months ago, I came across a stranger whose story needs to be shared with the world.
Let’s call him Eleven.
Eleven is a 40-year-old single father of a teenage daughter. Struggling to find a steady income all his life, he has been a part of the criminal justice system, in and out of custody for criminal offences such as petty theft to survive. “I steal food to feed my daughter,” he told me as he struggled to hold back his tears. “I wish I wasn’t the way I was. Sometimes, I wish it never happened. For just one moment of life, I want to forget it happened.”
Starting at the age of six up until his early teens, he was sexually assaulted by several women who were his mother’s friends.
“She invited these women friends of hers to our house and would let them do things to me.” his voice trembling as tears rolled down his cheeks.
Eleven found it impossible to keep a steady job for longer than a few months due to mental health issues that followed after years of sexual trauma by his mother.
As an adult, he experienced divorce, poverty, homelessness and mental trauma that scarred him for life enough to drive anyone to a dark and dangerous place.
“I ran away when I was 13. Homeless. I had nobody. Who would listen to me?”
Now, 40. Eleven tried to kill himself on his 30th birthday. It wasn’t the first time he contemplated suicide. “I was seven when these thoughts first started to occur to me. I didn’t know what it meant. I just felt a rage within me. I can’t even describe how angry I was to be still alive.”
Elevens said he felt separate from society with sadness and desire not to be a part of this world. “I would wake up every single day and (think), ‘I can get up. I can brush my teeth, or I can kill myself. I can go to work today, or I can kill myself.’
He said he felt trapped, horrible, disgusted about what happened to him. He said all he wanted to do was cry. “I was constantly feeling trapped in my mind, and I felt helpless because I couldn’t do anything to stop it.”
He told me that most people with mental illnesses feel that way constantly. “It devours us completely. It eats our insides away until we are nothing but bones. Fear controls us.”
We may know what it’s like to be in life someone else’s life. We may not even understand it. Can we all agree that we are all humans going through different human experiences?
I noticed Eleven was smiling a lot as we talked. He was such radiant and positive energy to be around. When I asked him how he coped with the heaviness of life, he smiled at me and said, “laughter is my coping mechanism.”
Let’s make people feel less alone in their struggle — to help them understand you’ve been there, too, and it’s going to be all right. Let’s be empathetic because we struggle mentally as we struggle to understand what’s next for us.
That day I learnt from my conversation with Eleven that “a day without laughter is a day wasted.”
xx
Yachna
P.S.
(Pic Credits Veryrealfantasy)
