My Beautiful Detour by Amy Oestreicher

Author:Amy Oestreicher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: overcoming obstacles, resilience, positive mind, womens memoir, selfhelp story, life adventure, medical miracle, survivor story, ptsd healing, creative flow
Publisher: Amy Oestreicher

Chapter 25

The Healing Storyteller

Just as words can make us feel sick, words can make us feel healthy. I couldn’t physically control the way my body was healing, but by reframing my journey from a descent into mind-numbing trauma to an “adventure in healing,” I could bring about changes in myself.

The more I read, the more I knew I needed to write—and tell. My alter ego became Tiger Lilly the warrior. My mission? There was a trauma vortex on the loose and my goal was to save the world by redirecting that vortex back into the normal river of life. Now, Tiger Lilly the warrior meant business.

Writing was essential to my healing, but I had spent so much time isolating myself, I knew I also needed to be out in the world living, proving to myself that my healing adventure was working. But how to balance those two competing drives?

I drew on symbols and animal guides to help me accept fear enough to face and move through it, fiercely and contemplatively. In all the stories I was reading and writing, obstacles were not the exception, but the norm. They were challenges for the hero to overcome, put in the hero’s path for a purpose. Every situation could encourage me to build inner strength and integrity if I was present with the world and its natural processes. Soon I was noticing miracles everywhere.

But no amount of miracles seemed to answer the unrelenting question: Would I ever know who I was?

Every adventure story has a heroic ending, and so would mine. In my cartoon, I decided to imagine Frank swimming around in the trauma vortex, searching for the break in the river, unwinding that deadly current by unleashing his powerful healing vortex, and ultimately flowing back into the river of life. Now healing was simple. All I had to do was draw him getting back to the river. The end.

Counteracting the trauma vortex took force. I had to take all of that restless energy out by using it for good, rather than taking it out on myself. The energy I was trying to “get rid of” through exercise and numbing out was the energy of anger I felt burning within me all along. But it had been too dangerous to let it out until now.

If I don't repress my emotions, they utterly consume me. Though compulsivity has its own set of problems and ultimately made me more of a mess, it's served to keep me from being a different sort of mess. But I’ve learned that life ought to be a beautiful, mad mess. That is why finger painting is fun.

It was all up to me. It always had been. The more anger I owned, the more I realized I did not deserve my guilt. Healthy anger was the key to the healing vortex. By integrating anger back into my life, I could make it less toxic and take away the power the trauma had over me.

It was time for Tiger Lilly to get serious about healing from trauma.

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