I’ve gone back and forth about whether or not to write this, but I keep thinking about a show I watched around this time last year and the effect that it had on me. You can read more of my thoughts about the show, Maid, here. I wasn’t ready to acknowledge publicly what I was going through yet, but that show crawled inside my head and wriggled under my skin. I watched the entire series twice in a row. It sounds silly to say this about a Netflix show, but it helped me to start to unravel a lot of what I had been through over the previous several years, which up to that point I had processed as “definitely bad” but wasn’t yet capable of dissecting further.
The show set off a frenetic series of fireworks in my head, setting into motion a domino effect of realizations. Inside my own life, I was crouched in the eye of the storm. I was surrounded by constant chaos and just trying to keep as clear of it as possible — just trying to survive. But the show offered me enough objective distance to start processing things.
That’s why I think talking about these things is important. It’s more than just trauma dumping in public. It can help other people process what they’re going through, or what they have been through, when they don’t yet have the language or understanding to do so on their own.
