What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

by Stephanie Foo

Thirty years on this earth, and I’ve been sad at least half that time.

Achievement was my constant. My comfort.

Always, always: I tried to be good. But when the dread was at its most terrible, no matter what I did, I was never good enough.

And, of course, the dread. Yes, it stayed, darkening my whole chest every day.

Maybe work was not salvation. Maybe it was a symptom.

But unfortunately, I do not have one foundational trauma. I have thousands. So my anxious freak-outs are not, as the books say, “temporal.” They don’t only occur when I see an angry face or someone pulls a driver out of their golf bag. My freak-outs are more or less constant, a fixed state of being. Ah. The dread.

So, first step of hacking my brain: sustaining it with enough oxygen and nutrients.

Finding a person to declare your craziest, most profound insecurities to is not exactly a picnic. But the bureaucratic idiocy of America’s healthcare system turns what should be a chore into torture.

You go back to the psychologist who doesn’t believe your diagnosis, figuring he’s your only real option. He diagnoses you as having a major depressive disorder. But even though you work with him for months, you don’t seem to be getting better. You start to think that’s your fault—that you’re beyond help. You’re just too broken to be fixed. When you eventually drop out, you feel like a failure.

I’ve always said there are forest people and desert people. Forest people are nurturing and fertile, but they have a tendency to hide behind their branches. I’m a desert person. Hard and acerbic and difficult to endure, but honest. You always know what you’re getting in the desert because there isn’t anywhere to hide. In that dry air, you can see a storm coming from ten miles away.

I learned two critical things that day. First: Just because the wound doesn’t hurt doesn’t mean it’s healed. If it looks good and it feels good, it should be all good, right? But over the years I’d smoothed perfect white layers of spackle over gaping structural holes. And the second thing I learned was: My parents didn’t love me.

No matter what I do, no matter where I try to find joy, I instead find my trauma. And it whispers to me: “You will always be this way. It’s never going to change. I will follow you. I will make you miserable forever. And then I will kill you.”

The literature says this is normal for traumatized people. Experts say it’s all part of the three P’s: We think our sadness is personal, pervasive, and permanent. Personal, in that we have caused all the problems we face. Pervasive, in that our entire life is defined by our failings. And permanent, in that the sadness will last forever.