Surviving Childhood Trauma: How Books Saved My Life

Have the Audacity to Live your Best Life

I have never been like everyone else. I always knew I was different.

As a child I was content to stretch out under the sun and read a good book. My mother would encourage me to go play with the other kids, but I was happy to be by myself, safe, immersing myself in someone else’s story.

I loved all the characters, the plot twists, the daydream of a better life always in the back of my mind. I chose to block everything else out and lose myself in space and time.

When you experience trauma as a child you find ways to cope with everything that you can’t comprehend, to file away the bits and pieces that scare you, and to extrapolate the emotions and feelings that strip you bare.

You try your hardest to hold it together so no one will see the truth; you cry when no one is looking, you stick to yourself because you are afraid someone will notice that you’re not quite like the others, you’re damaged, you’re flawed. Not worthy. Not loveable. You feel broken on the inside and all alone.

And then comes the eruption, the inevitable surge of bottled-up emotions that have been swirling around inside of you for years, never knowing how to deal with them, never understanding how to move past them. They fester, they grow, and they suck the care for life out of you. You are reckless, paving a path of destruction along your way.

People see what they want to see, and most of the time they don’t pay attention to what the underlying cause of the behavior is. They just say things like, “I don’t know what happened to her, she used to be such a good girl.” They chalk it up to typical teenager hormones and carry on their way.

Moving forward in life I experienced countless toxic relationships; always just accepting them, not seeing my own worth, not loving myself enough to know I deserved better.

And each and every time I experienced more trauma in my life I would come back to my books. They were my salvation; the place I could always go when I felt alone, the place where stories came to life and danced around in my mind, creating a vortex of imaginary friends and tales to tell.

I could lose myself and find myself all at the same time.

And after finally breaking free from chains that were holding me down, I began my journey down the road of self-help books. They taught me how to express my pain so I could finally be free from it, they brought me meditation practice, they got me to see my worth and showed me how to step into the truth of who I really am.

Not the person who tried to hide her pain. But the person who finally understood that the story was not the definition; and instead of seeing myself as the victim of life, I began seeing myself as the creator of a new story.

This is my story, and I am the author. And the amazing thing is that I have the power within to create a new chapter, and it can be anything I want it to be. In the story of our lives there are infinite possibilities just waiting to be written.

If I can do it, you can do it too.

With much love and many blessings,

Mandolin Brown