CN: trauma processing, dissociation, neglecting activism
For the past year, I have been significantly less involved in activism, at a time when the need for involvement is more than ever. I haven’t posted anything on this blog in months, despite multiple crises that impact vulnerable people world wide, all while hurdling toward a terrifying election. That has eaten at me constantly and yet I could not find a way around it. I finally figured out why.
Between 2008-2010, I made many big life decisions that opted me out of the safe, predictable path for my life. This caused some direct threats to my safety and it took many years for me to stabilize after. I don’t think I truly understood just how at risk I was at the time (and that was with the various forms of privilege I did have: a decent education, my skin color, my body shape, my social skills, knowing plenty of people who had money even when I did not, enough youth to ignore my disabilities etc.).
Some of you may know that for the past few years, I’ve been finally receiving appropriate treatment for Dissociative Identity Disorder. After 13 years of therapy that wouldn’t seem to stick, I’m finally making concrete progress. I am now diving deep to heal both the traumas of my break from safety, and the many traumas before that caused me to be in that situation. This has resulted in activism being difficult for two reasons:
The first is that my healing has necessitated decoupling obligation from motivation. A life long habit, I had to stop using the fear of upsetting people to fuel everything I did. I had to stop dissociating from the feeling of not wanting to do something, in order to do it. This required completely relearning how to motivate myself to do anything. I am still learning how to use new forms of fuel, which means that any task that isn’t immediately gratifying is extremely difficult for me to do. I am constantly behind on basic chores and responsibilities to just take care of myself, so I can rarely take on anything else. Planning a trip to a city just two hours away for a single day completely maxed out my capacity and took me more than week to recover. I wouldn’t have been capable of planning that trip even 6-8 months ago.
The second obstacle is that while I am healing from the trauma of choosing to leave behind safety and security in favor of authenticity, trying to make thematically similar choices in the present day quickly triggers those traumas in a way it didn’t when I was dissociating from them. Activism is the art of choosing, not just the path less traveled, but the direction where there is no path at all. It is absolutely worth risking safety and comfort to do so to secure safety for people who don’t have it. And currently, when those traumas are triggered, I am completely debilitated by them.
Being in tune with the pain and terror that others are suffering, right now, does not result in action or motivation for me like it used to. Not because I don’t value their lives but because I am so overwhelmed by the horror of that reality that I shut down and cease to function. Necessity no longer translates into movement, for me, at least not right now.
My commitment to myself is that am choosing this path of healing so that I can return to fighting for others in a way that doesn’t destroy me. When I was the most engaged in activism was also when I was increasingly absent from my own life due to the amount of dissociation required to function day to day.
In some ways, I am choosing my own safety and security over the fight to secure those rights for others. In other ways, I am once again prioritizing the more difficult path of authenticity to myself, over endless dissociation to survive. I have the privilege of making that choice and I live with that awareness and am grateful for it literally every day. But there is no way forward for me where I choose to use dissociation for necessity “just a little bit longer” or “until this crisis is over.” There is no way for me to regain long-lasting functionality that doesn’t require me to lose it entirely for a chunk of time. Either I do the work needed to quit dissociation, or I never stop fracturing myself into smaller pieces to uphold necessity.
Note: If you are in a place where you can’t offer compassion or understanding for where I am in this, that’s fair. I ask, though, that you don’t tell me that, not during this stage at least. No amount of self-interrogation, introspection, or assumption-questioning has resulted in my capacity to act being increased. No matter how important you are to me, it is extremely unlikely that your persuasion would change that.
I believe my current state is temporary. I will be back to fight as soon as I’m able.
While you’re here, I did make a new T-shirt design for my Etsy store. The design brings me joy and if it resonates or empowers you, I hope you’ll consider buying one.
About the writer: Kella Hanna-Wayne is the creator, editor, and main writer for Yopp. She specializes in educational writing about civil rights, disability, chronic illness, abuse, and Dissociative Identity Disorder. Her work has been published in Ms. Magazine blog, The BeZine, and Splain You a Thing and in 2022, she released a self-published book of poetry, “Pet: the Journey from Abuse to Recovery“. You can find her @KellaHannaWayne on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Medium, or view her wide range of creative projects on KellaHannaWayne.com.
At Yopp we're dedicated to providing educational material for social justice that emphasizes the individual experience of lived oppression and helps you understand the whole picture instead of memorizing do's & don'ts.
