When was the last time you listened to yourself breathing? It is a difficult task for me, someone who suffers from C-PTSD. When people in your life who are supposed to care for you abuse you, treat you as if you are not worthy of care, it is challenging to correct this perception, even within yourself. But I am finding as trauma, a recurring tidal wave, threatens to drown me, that self-care is the beginning of healing. It is the foundation for recovery.

If you have to thank someone for letting you be yourself, they have power over you. So I thought watching Summer of Soul, a documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, which segued into Sly Lives!, a documentary about Sly and the Family Stone, the group behind the song, “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).” At times we all feel like mice or elves, about to be squashed. But why? If we are doing nothing criminal, why should being ourselves be treated as a criminal

Empathy is not a tone of voice. Empathy is not a mask that can be pulled on and off. Empathy is neither vapid nor intrusive. Empathy is a way of life, porous like a sieve. Your body is full of holes, and instead of covering and patching the holes, you invite others into the wounds, you allow the eddies and the flows that trap and drown other people to stream into you, through you. In this way, you sense, you feel, you begin to think, indeed, to live, differently.

What violence we are capable of while thinking well of ourselves! We wish no harm to others, but if harming others makes us feel good (or at least, less bad) we do it without remit or remorse. As someone with takeout food in my belly and a ticket in my pocket, I recently sat in the audience of Wallace Shawn’s play, “What We Did Before Our Moth Days,” at Greenwich House Theater in New York. It is not lite entertainment, a rousing, uplifting story of human triumph.

Should I value my life if no one else does? It is a lonely question. A question I have returned to repeatedly, as I, for example, severed ties with my family of origin, severed ties with my workplace of two decades, continue to sever ties with people and with institutions who were supposed to value my life but clearly do not. It is lonely, carrying my life and its value in my arms, like a herder with a single sheep.

The knots that have tied me for the last several years have been undone. Trauma recovery. A brand new day. Goodbye to the liars, the bullies, the bastards, the frigid maidens, the mechanical sadists. I feel like grabbing the hand of Diana Ross and singing with her, “Ease On Down the Road,” from The Wiz. I feel like rejoicing with the dancers of Louis Johnson’s extraordinary Liberation Ballet in the 1978 film to the tune of Luther Vandross’ “A Brand New Day.”

It doesn’t work. Punishing people into perfection. I did not have the misfortune of being abused by world-class abusers, men in the restaurant industry, the ballet stratosphere, or the film industry. My abusers were small-town people with big dreams and few skills. They could scream, bully, pinch, and hit. They could tell you were nothing unless you worked harder, submitted more devotedly, conformed to the ideal they imposed upon you but were so far from themselves.

Winter might be the time for holiday caroling, but quite different sounds emerge from my body at this time of year. As the ice and snow bombard western Canada, an ordinary car ride with my spouse becomes an exercise in terror. The moment I find myself freezing in the passenger seat any unprocessed or semi-processed trauma comes zooming out of my nervous system like an army of flying monkeys. While I cannot purge trauma from my life experience, I can name it, recognize it, ove

Recovering from trauma, I use hatred not as a vehicle for hurting others, but as a vehicle for changing myself, for changing the world. Eventually, hatred will be displaced by joy and curiosity.

I keep living into the same answer. It is the same answer because it is the same question. I give people millions of chances. I don’t start from cynicism. I make allowances for mistakes, fatigue, and frailty. And still I am disappointed. I am hurt, ignored, mistreated, or misunderstood. Time after time, I reach the same conclusion of midnight desperation: No More.

For someone who suffers from relational trauma and medical trauma, having to rely on doctors, surgeons, nurses, and healthcare administrators I don’t trust is a subtle but exquisite form of torture.

Having long been gaslighted by authority figures, I tend to gaslight myself, but I am done. Believing myself is healing, is health.

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