Survivors of Childhood Trauma, What Grounds You?
Survivors of childhood trauma, what grounds you? What puts you in your body, gives you joy, reaffirms your strength?
It changes for me, depending on the day, the mood, the weather within and without.
It suddenly occurred to me that I needed a pair of ballet shoes.
When I was young, ballet shoes were leather, then they were canvas. The canvas was thick and tough with a leather sole. It could have been the stuff of a sack to hang over a camel’s back and get you through the desert.
My dance teacher at the time, who was loud and tougher than any shoe, demanded our ballet slippers be tight, too tight. They pinched our toes and cramped our feet until finally our ever lengthening digits burst the seams.
However much they hurt until they broke, we had to look right in them, thin and squeezed, even if we were dancing at the community center on what was considered the wrong side of the tracks.
When I told this story to the man who last week sold me a new pair of shoes, he laughed.
The good thing about being an adult, he said, is that you can choose your own shoes.
And my new shoes are the best. The canvas stretches as much as I stretch, as much as my life has stretched since those awful childhood days.
It is as if I am wearing nothing but grace, nothing but a tiny bit of protection, to prevent my nerves from being rattled by anything sharp or out of place.
And as I slide and reach and turn, there is a new ground beneath my feet, a new way of jumping and landing, free of the harsh strictures of the past.
Slightly better than bare. Naked but not raw.
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