Reliving the Past: Giving the Clown a Chair

Trigger warning for this one - I talk about my experience with an eating disorder and there's a brief mention of sexual assault.

So, in order to get the clown a chair, I needed to understand why it refused to sit down in the first place.

Why was it so restless?

Why did it constantly feel the need to keep me on edge and plague me with negativity, doubt and worse-case scenarios?

To truly understand, I needed to take a journey into the past.

I had conversations with my therapist about childhood. I told her what I’ve already put into words in previous posts—that it was drama-free and happy.

Then we chatted about the moments where things felt like they changed or went wrong. Over a period of sessions that spanned weeks, I recounted each event. We spoke about the period of my life when I developed an eating disorder then went to university, but left after two weeks and moved back in with my parents only to feel like I was massively disappointing everyone around me. Then I went back to a different university, was sexually assaulted after a party one evening then got into a toxic relationship that ended out of nowhere and left me feeling worthless. Then I suffered the sudden, tragic loss of a pal, and, after university had finished, faced the uncertainty of finding a career path while the world was in the middle of a global pandemic.

Every time I spoke about the past, the sensations crept in before I could stop them. My body reacted on autopilot — the muscles in my jaw clenched, my stomach twisted, and my fingers curled into fists. I was physically in the room, but mentally, I was right back in those moments, feeling every ounce of discomfort I'd suppressed at the time.

After I laid my soul bare, she asked me to really think about how I felt at the time. This encouraged me to go back to those moments, open up and name my emotions. It took a while to tap into specificities because I'd been suppressing them for so long. But then, I started to say things like 'Actually, I was devastated' and, 'I've never felt so worthless' which encouraged more emotions to flow out and with them, tears.

That ominous box of tissues on that little white table was finally put to good use.

We discussed that when I had suppressed those emotions at the time, they didn't actually go anywhere. The energy they carried was just stored up inside me. Bubbling away beneath the surface, unresolved but desperately needing my attention. And it got to the point where it couldn't be contained anymore. So it spilled out. Manifesting as insecurity, anxiety, self-doubt and constant worry.

And, I came to realise that it wasn’t just the emotional toll that these unresolved experiences took on me—it was the way they shifted my view of the world. It was as if, in the process of suppressing the emotions, I also suppressed my ability to trust - myself, others and the world around me. It explained why I wasn't putting myself out there romantically or, trying new things. It's why I only found comfort in experiences I shared with people I'd known for years, why I snuffed men at bars who tried to connect with me, only to whine hours later that I was sick of being single. It's why I went back to men who didn't treat me well.

They couldn't hurt me if I knew they were going to.

With each unresolved emotion, I had unknowingly built walls—around my heart, around my expectations, around my relationships. Each wall was put up by my subconscious, seemingly to protect me, but all they ever did was cage me in.

Now that I'd spoken about it all and got it all out there, I half-expected my therapist to pull a magic wand from her tote bag and zap my anxiety into oblivion. No such luck.

I needed to confront the pain from the past. We were doing that in our sessions but she offered me some more advice too. We'd spoken about the fact that I loved writing so she suggested that I start journalling.

I took her up on it because, well, any excuse to buy a new notebook tbh.

But, instead of writing one entry and forgetting about it, I actually did end up incorporating it into my daily routine. I used the mornings as my stream-of-consciousness time, writing without thinking about what was going on the page.

But I also used it after those intense therapy sessions where I revisited the past and laid my soul bare. 50 minutes didn't always feel like enough to get it all out.

So I'd write down what we discussed, how it made me feel and follow the path those thoughts took me down. I drew lines between experiences and the actions I took afterwards, desperate to understand why certain events caused me to act in certain ways. Like a dot to dot of the past. When I was alone in an environment that felt completely safe, I allowed those traumatising experiences to come to the surface again. I'd write letters to my past self, offering her the support I never gave her at the time. I'd write long journal entries and meditate on my thoughts. Most importantly, however, I would express forgiveness. I apologised for putting myself through things and letting them go unresolved for so long.

Writing helped me process. Through my pen, I found the words I hadn’t been able to speak yet.

None of this was by any means easy. With each revelation from the past, I was sharing a secret with myself, one that carried a dark truth I hadn't been able to see at the time. I cried buckets and buckets of tears sometimes when I realised what I'd been through, how painful it had been for me at the time and how much strength it took to act like nothing had fazed me.

Crying was cathartic, but never quite enough.

But one day, everything I had suppressed erupted in a way I never saw coming.