H(a)unted By The Past

This was a drawing I did a few weeks into sessions with Dr. Sizer. I will get into the original interpretation, but first I wanted to explain it’s most prominent meaning to me now: It’s sort of a different manifestation of a drawing I also did that fall called “A Splash of Self”. I remember that fall–and often when I dissociate–feeling like I was existing in a different frequency than everyone else, perhaps another calendar year. I wanted to get back to 2020 where life was, actually, not that bad. But it felt like the past was haunting me.

This idea actually bears quite a bit of relevance for me now, as I find myself scared of different periods of my life even though I know logically, the past can’t crawl up out of the ground to hunt (or haunt) me. Yet still, I find myself getting anxious over things that have already come to pass, like high school or periods of time in my life where I was especially suicidal (ex. March of this past year). Originally, this was about a feeling you may have heard me refer to as “the blue sky feeling”. It’s this weird shade of homesickness mixed with isolation and guilt that’s followed me my whole life. It would kind of pop up unexplainably with really weird ‘triggers’, like when the sky was blue, hearing the sound of an airplane overhead or being in a large group of family members.

When I first ‘remembered’ my trauma, that’s when I started to connect that feeling with whatever had happened to me as a child. The feeling felt so old, so out of place, straight from the past. It would come in and just taint the whole sky. I actually don’t feel this feeling as much anymore. I’ll get emotions that sort of mimic the experience–dissociation, depression, hopelessness–but the feeling itself is very specific, like a name-brand flavor of ice cream: you can tell the difference in what you’re tasting when it hits your tongue.