There are weeks when very little appears to happen from the outside. This wasn’t one of those weeks. If someone had been watching me from a distance, they might have thought it was fairly ordinary. A few coffees with my parents. Some messages to friends. Time spent with my folks’ dog. A bit of television. Some sleep. A few phone calls.
Nothing remarkable.
Inside my head, however, it feels like I have climbed a mountain. Unlike Kate Windsor, who was probably helicoptered to the summit on her three peaks challenge.
One of the cruellest things about trauma is that it hides its battles. The biggest victories rarely look like victories at all. They look like answering the phone when every instinct says not to. Reading a message you’ve been avoiding. Getting dressed and leaving the house. Staying awake so you might finally reset your sleep pattern. They are tiny moments that most people would barely notice, yet they can take an extraordinary amount of courage.
Living in a Brain That Never Quite Stops
There were the practical worries too. Was work going to call? Had my fit note been accepted? Had I actually been paid correctly? What would happen if something had gone wrong? Every time one question was answered another quickly appeared, as though my anxious brain was determined never to run out of reasons to stay on high alert.
Anxiety doesn’t politely knock on the door. It bursts in convinced the house is on fire. Then, once one room has been checked and declared safe, it immediately starts searching the next one.
The frustrating thing isn’t that these worries exist. Most of them are perfectly reasonable questions. It’s the intensity they arrive with. My nervous system doesn’t treat uncertainty as a problem to solve; it treats it as an emergency to survive. Which is exhausting.
Meeting the Different Versions of Me
One unexpected gift from the last couple of weeks was finding a new language to describe what has been happening inside me.
For years I’ve described myself as anxious or depressed, but neither word has ever felt quite big enough. This week, I started mapping the different versions of myself instead. There’s Trauma Bionic, always scanning for danger; Peaceful Bionic, who quietly reminds me that safety still exists; Hopeful Bionic, who somehow keeps believing recovery is possible; Pig and Master, who represent different relationships with pleasure, confidence and control; and the Gardener, patiently tending to healing without expecting overnight miracles.
At the centre sits the integrated Bionic. Not a perfect Bionic. Not a finished Bionic. Simply the real me, with all of those different parts overlapping and working together.
It isn’t about having multiple personalities or pretending to be someone else. It’s about recognising that every one of those parts developed for a reason; some are overdeveloped, some are starved of attention and development by my past trauma. Some protect me. Some comfort me. Some dream. Some carry grief. None of them is my enemy.
For perhaps the first time, I wasn’t asking, “What’s wrong with me?” I was asking, “Which part of me is speaking right now?” This feels like progress.
Grieving the Life Trauma Stole
Something else has become impossible to ignore.
Sometimes I open social media and see groups of friends laughing together. People flirting, dating, travelling, celebrating birthdays or simply sitting in a pub enjoying each other’s company. Sometimes it’s nothing more than someone posting a cheeky photo because they’re feeling confident.
Most people probably scroll past those moments without thinking.
For me, they can hurt.
Not because I’m jealous of them.
- I’m grieving the ease.
- I’m grieving how uncomplicated those moments appear to be.
Trauma doesn’t just steal moments. It steals possibilities.
I often find myself mourning the version of me who never got to exist. The man who might have walked into a gay bar on his own and met new people. The man who might have accepted invitations without his nervous system screaming at him to leave. The man who could simply enjoy attraction or intimacy without his brain trying to calculate every possible danger.
I grieve the friendships that never began, the relationships that never had the chance to grow, the adventures I talked myself out of, and the countless mistakes I never got to make because fear had already made the decision for me.
Those losses don’t appear on any medical record.
Yet they are among the biggest losses trauma has given me.
Another Loss I Didn’t Expect
There is another loss I’ve been slowly trying to come to terms with, and it’s one I don’t speak about very much.
Following my hip surgery, something changed.
I still become aroused. I still masturbate. I still ejaculate.
But the orgasm itself has largely disappeared.
It’s a strange thing to explain because, from the outside, everything appears to work. My body goes through all the same motions, yet the moment that was once accompanied by an overwhelming wave of pleasure is now… mostly silent. There’s little or no sensation at all.
The cruel irony is that post-nut clarity still turns up exactly on time.
So I can lose the desire, the fantasy can evaporate, and all the complicated emotions that sometimes follow can still arrive, yet the moment of physical pleasure that used to sit between them has largely gone.
It’s difficult to describe just how confusing that feels.
Part of me keeps hoping it will return. Part of me wonders whether this is simply how life is now. Neither possibility is particularly easy to sit with.
Sex has always been complicated for me because of my past. Trauma already made intimacy feel like a landscape full of hidden traps.
It’s tempting to dismiss this as insignificant compared with everything else that’s happened in my life.
But grief doesn’t work like that.
We’re allowed to mourn the small losses as well as the life-changing ones.
This is one of mine.
I may never get the chance to properly understand what intimacy means to me now, if I can enjoy it in a way that makes me feel complete.
I don’t have the answers yet, and I may never do.
I’m simply trying to make peace with another unexpected change, while holding on to the hope that intimacy is about far more than a single moment of physical sensation.
The Men Who Hurt Me
People sometimes assume that surviving abuse means living with constant anger.
You may think it weird, but many of us don’t.
The people who groomed me and the people who raped me changed my life in ways they will probably never understand. What they did was unforgivable.
But I don’t spend my days consumed by hatred.
- Not because I’ve forgiven them.
- Not because what happened somehow became acceptable.
Simply because they have already taken enough from me. I don’t want to hand them the rest of my emotional life as well.
I’d rather spend what little energy I have trying to rebuild the life they stole than allow them to occupy my thoughts every single day.
The Quiet Wins
Despite everything, this week wasn’t all darkness.
My folks’ dog, let’s call him ‘piggy’, reminded me, as he always does, that some things in life remain wonderfully uncomplicated. He still demanded his scritches, his ear scronches and, after rolling over to proudly display his “private areas”, the obligatory tummy rubs. As far as he’s concerned, I’m still his best mate, and whether I’m anxious or calm makes absolutely no difference to the important business of making sure he receives the correct amount of attention.
There were other small victories too. I managed conversations that would have overwhelmed me a few weeks ago. I read messages that my anxious brain wanted me to avoid. I found moments when the noise quietened just enough for me to notice it was there.
Moments like that matter.
Healing Doesn’t Always Look Dramatic
Recovery is a strange thing.
- Sometimes it looks like breakthroughs.
- Sometimes it looks like tears.
- Sometimes it looks like finally understanding yourself a little better.
And sometimes it simply looks like reaching Sunday.
- Still here.
- Still trying.
- Still curious about the person you’re becoming.
The trauma stole many things from me, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. It stole confidence, experiences, relationships and possibilities. It stole entire versions of the life I might have lived, and I suspect I’ll always grieve those losses.
But despite everything it has taken, it hasn’t taken everything.
There is still a part of me that laughs. A part that dreams. A part that still hopes there are friendships waiting to be made, adventures still to experience and love, in whatever form it eventually arrives, still to discover. Despite what some of the other Bionics try to tell me.
That part may be quieter than I’d like at the moment.
But it’s still there.
This week, that was enough.
I survived another week.
Sometimes that’s a victory worth celebrating.
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