My Heart in a Snapshot

In EMDR, the first thing Camille, my trauma therapist, told me to do was imagine a safe place. Mine looked like a cottage in the woods somewhere where I bake with my friends. One of things you will lose in trauma is safety at a core and fundamental level. Over the years, I'd taken for granted that feeling of safety, being able to navigate the world and everyday life with only mild fear, related to blackness and womanhood, but being able to wander solo through the world as if I was living in a Carly Rae Jepsen music video. But with PTSD had entrenched very single moment of the day in debilitating and irrational levels of fear, in every space or place, even with my closes friends. You leave early even when you're having a good time because you're afraid something will happen. You feel the urge to rush home, because being by yourself feels safest. No one can hurt you. When you're in situations where you can be attacked, put down, disrespected, discarded etc at the drop of a hat, you are never out of harm's way. When you are around someone who is unsafe for too long, your nervous system will echo that fear, as a constant, for years after. But despite it, there is, thankfully reprieve.

When I had a horrific panic episode at a Julia Jacklin concert this summer, my therapist called me to tell me to imagine that safe place again. I thought of the cabin and the friends. That night my brother came up from South Slope to come get me. One of these friends pictured above also came to get me and drove home with me. And that night, they gave me safety. They saved me. That night was but one of many many reminders this year that friendship is a safe place. I've been lucky to feel that 100x over this year. And this picture is a reminder of it. These are just a few of the many people who have sat with me listening to the horror stories and helping to ease me through the panic. Whether it's a cottagecore weekend in CT cabin in the woods, an Upper East side walkup, a Hells Kitchen bar, or a coffee shop in Brooklyn , I know with these people, I am safe.