Introduction
In 2018, I experienced a mental breakdown in which the symptoms persisted and went untreated until late 2019. The cause of this breakdown was traumatic events from my childhood that were too painful to maintain in my conscious memory. These memories were stored deep in my subconscious, locked up in a part of my psyche that I was unable to access. That is, until 2018 when I first met the Boy who revealed to me years of my life that I had completely repressed, memories and experiences beginning when I was roughly 3 years old and lasting until I was about 8. He helped me understand the cause of my deep-seated fear of being alive, my own self-hatred, and helped me piece together the broken fragments of a childhood that should have never been.
This is the story of the journey the Boy and I took back in time to uncover and acknowledge the brutality of my childhood; of what I saw, felt, tasted, and experienced through various flashbacks, body memories, and panic attacks. It reveals my struggle to maintain some semblance of a normal life while reliving trauma from the past and my desperate attempts to retain my sanity as the ghosts of my past invaded deeper and further into my everyday life.
This story is a journey into the very underbelly of humanity and how a human being innately stores up, holds onto, and responds to trauma. It attests to the sacredness of life, the great power of life and death each person possesses, and the significant responsibility we all bear towards how we treat one another. It is an inside look into the long, painful process of acknowledging that while evil exists, beauty and love are out there somewhere as well, and victims of abuse deserve to lay claim to it.
Mine is a story of survival and liberation. It is a story of my refusal to lie drowning in a pool of my own self-loathing and my commitment to descend into the abyss of my past and claw my way back out to discover and embrace my humanity. It is ultimately a story of how I captured the ghosts of my past, exposed them to the Light of Truth, and watched them eviscerate into dust.
David Tanner Lauka
April 25, 2020