1. D is for... Delayed, Drunk & Denied

{ Dedication }

For the courageous Epstein survivors, whose superhuman courage I was witnessing unfold as I wrote this story. I know all too well the quiver and tremble in their voices, the deep breath that needs to be taken before speaking your truth. Each time I sat down to write this story, I would cautiously dip my toe in the powerful uncharted current within me and then cease to resist it, embracing convergence with the undeniable cascade that is the survivor movement.

I am a victim of childhood trauma. I am a survivor.

I start at this childhood place and space, even though this journey I’m about to recount is from a recent timeframe in my middle adulthood.

Why? Because my kidney failure wasn’t an occurrence unto its own nor solely physical. 

From the "Vanishing Ice" collection by the wonderful Rachel Znerold

Trauma treatment and therapy as I’ve come to understand here in the United States,  are generally based on the scientific principle of neuroplasticity–the brain’s ability to reorganize and rewire itself by forming new neural connections and adapting them in response to experiences, injuries, new skills and habits, and other learning mechanisms. 

For the years immediately following the aftermath of my traumatic event, I had the privilege of access to professional cognitive behavioral therapy. This was thanks to the unconditional support of my parents, who as Korean immigrants of their generation should have by all conventional cultural measures sought to sweep it under the rug, but they didn’t. (Though out of respect to their wishes, I am not going to tell the full story in detail of the traumatic event itself, in these stories. I also kindly ask that you respect my family’s privacy and not inquire after them, and bring up painful memories). 

I was also very fortunate to engage in trauma-informed arts therapy throughout my teenage years. So between clinical and creative therapies, I learned the tools necessary for harnessing  the potential of my neuroplasticity for trauma recovery.

And to anyone observing me at that time, on the surface, it appeared to have been working.

I was a top tier student at a top tier private school in New York City, as one of the few minority girls, the only Korean in fact, and I was on full financial aid. I was thriving in music, playing classical piano (like every good Asian kid), singing in the high school choir and a cappella group, and began writing songs as birthday gifts to friends, singing and playing guitar (even recording them on an A/B cassette tape deck). I also painted, I drew, I shaped clay on a pottery wheel, I developed film photographs in a chemical fume laden dark room. 

I played varsity sports, and even was an all-star lacrosse goalie. I trained myself to be a long-distance runner, running  near marathon lengths on my own (working up to running four times around New York City’s Central Park Full Loop in one go).  I was yearbook co-editor in chief and won an inaugural journalism award as layout editor and article contributor for my school newspaper. I worked summers as a Metropolitan Museum intern, at a farm stand at the Union Square farmer’s market, and taught GED courses to people older than me, who were seeking to get ahead in life. I was voted most likely to succeed by my beloved senior classmates. (I’m exhausted just recounting all that I did in my daily adolescent life).

As a result of all this hard work, I got into Harvard – a seemingly impossible feat given that my immigrant family had little money or connections (but also  never underestimate the power of a fierce Korean mother’s dreams and ambitions). Plus, I achieved this while simultaneously doing the even harder work of learning to cope with and manage my trauma.

I was highly accomplished, and relentlessly overachieving by the time I was 19. So everything was fixed and I was thriving, right? No. Not even close. 

Dealing with an extreme childhood trauma is a lifelong fight, an ongoing journey. You have to keep your therapeutic tools sharpened, keep doing the work. Like a duck on water, looking at ease floating smoothly through life, but all the while its little duck feet paddling fervently under the surface to keep moving. Once you stop paddling though, you become vulnerable to the demons and predators you worked so hard to defend against.

But even when you’re managing your trauma effectively, there’s still another silent, unseen battle raging within you. 

Trauma impacts physical health, as the body's stress response system can activate any of a multitude of physical health problems – chronic diseases, autoimmune disorders, or chronic pain. Childhood trauma, in particular, often results in  lifelong health challenges due to its formative effect on brain structure, impacting the nervous system. 

So while everything looked just fine on the surface, I wasn’t aware of what was going on internally, inside my body

When my doctors first diagnosed me with stage 4 chronic kidney disease in 2021, followed by full kidney failure in 2022, the immediate priority was to keep me alive and focus on treating the symptoms.

Only as recently as this previous year, a specialist started to look beyond the symptoms and searched  for the root causes. It was discovered that I have a rare autoimmune virus and condition. It’s uncertain when this ”took seed”, but my spidey senses suspect it may have originated at the time of my trauma, and lay innocuously dormant, untriggered for decades. At some point though, this Loch Ness was disturbed and began its steady, ominous ascent to the surface and reared its ugly head–bringing my life crashing down in an avalanche of a health crisis many years later. 

So I searched deep and am still discovering  further to find out what caused and then triggered this.

As I put the pieces of my personal archaeological dig together, I started to reconstruct the full picture. My trauma is a core part of igniting my harrowing health journey. I learned how to listen holistically and integratively to my body. During my kidney journey, I heard the voices of my inner child, the repressed memories that were suppressed by my own mind in an attempt to protect me from self-harm.  

But suppression doesn’t protect. It just  allows these unlocked memories to fester, breed more toxicity, until they breach the mind’s strongholds and ultimately physically metastasize.

DELAYED

“I’m just not that guy,” he said. 

These words still echo in my head today. 

It is 2018, or maybe it’s 2017. I can’t remember exactly. All I am sure of is these were the exact words uttered to me by my now ex. We were in the second house that we lived in together in Los Angeles, and was sometime in the evening after sundown. This mix and match of hazy and clear recall of details speaks to my state of mind at the time.

This was also after a series of escalating episodes during the previous year - me, literally kicking and screaming, slamming doors and throwing things, breaking down in sudden hyperventilating panic attacks. 

I had been in a fully delayed trauma response, experiencing PTSD flashbacks. Also, memories repressed by dissociative amnesia were surfacing, manifesting in a fury of physical and emotional torrents. I was catapulted back into survival mode. And when it comes to “fight or flight” in survival, I fight. 

To this day, I still don’t know what triggered it. Could have been Trump being elected into office in 2016 for his first term, when on election night I stayed up late and went to bed sobbing, knowing things were going to get very grim with a person in charge who stood against every pillar of my identity and being. (Little did I know how unbelievably more horrendous this would be in his second term that we are surviving now as I write this). Could have been the Me Too movement that emerged in 2017, which while powerful and empowering for many, was a complex mix of emotions for me personally. 

Then there was a particularly explosive event where I screamed “Rape!” out loud while running in the neighborhood streets. This must have been the last outburst that finally busted the lid off the PTSD pressure cooker that I was imprisoned in. My body and brain snapped out of it somehow, let me come up for air to take a breath, and began grounding me back to reality. When I returned to real life, I realized what had been happening and decided it was time to tell him. 

Afterall, the horrible secret had already slipped out.

“I’m just not that guy,” he declared.

These words still echo in my head today. 

DRUNK

There’s a difference between living and functioning.

I thought with all my achievements in my teenage years, that I had my trauma handled, that it was resolved. So, I loosened the therapeutic reins, and let down my guard by the time I began my freshman year at Harvard in 1999.

This is when the drinking began.

I think - and hope - most of us know the story, the story of self-medication and substance abuse, especially for those suffering from PTSD or other mental health illnesses or conditions. There is no doubt, backed by medical and scientific data and research, that mental health issues and substance abuse are heavily linked.

I am no exception.

I wasn’t an alcoholic, which is clinically defined as when the body is chemically dependent on alcohol and cannot be physically controlled. But for sure, my drinking was problematic.

I entered my collegiate life thinking I had won and conquered my trauma. I just wanted to finally act the part of a young freshman, with her whole life ahead of her, nothing but possibility and a bright future. I could finally join the normal social ranks of my peers, and just be the kid that I couldn’t be before then, due to the laborious, serious work of trauma recovery. 

But, I was exhausted and burnt out, from all those years of living what felt like a double life.

I nearly flunked out of Harvard in my first year. Ironically, one of my near failing grades was in my introductory Psychology course. I had lost myself to the culture of partying, drinking and just wanting release from it all.

The drinking would continue throughout my young adulthood, and through to the end of my thirties. I’m sure people around me were concerned, but all I remember was that it was often encouraged or excused by a simple wave-of-the-hand rationalization. “Oh, she’s a college kid. College kids just wanna party!” Or, in my twenties when I was a platinum bleach blonde  aspiring rock musician and singer-songwriter, my drinking was an accepted and welcome “aesthetic” to my brand. 

I also deceived myself into false self-rationalization. I was still achieving things, by all conventional standards, while also still drinking. I actually did pull it together in college, even graduated cum laude. I began my early career in the nonprofit sector, where I am excelling today. I ran my own music business and enterprise all on my own, landing publishing and licensing deals, and even courted by major labels. I was in artist management for one music icon, and ran operations for a global foundation of another. 

But all this wasn’t really living, much less thriving. I was high-functioning. I was executing things that fit neatly as credentials on a resume. I was going through the motions to mask what was really going on internally. 

I know I must have so many drunken stories that could fill their own standalone volume.  I garnered nicknames like “Level 5 Isul” and “Kim Jong-Shrill”. I was far too intoxicated, blacked out too many times, and there are so many drunk nights that I couldn’t have possibly kept a thorough inventory even if I was conscious. But, like repressed trauma memories, I don’t remember a lot of them, though my body and mind can recall the feelings of guilt and shame that resulted from them.

I acknowledge and recognize that this was, and is, a problem. This is  a coping mechanism. This is self-medication in lieu of the hard work of therapy. I apologize to those I hurt during all those years. I have no excuse. I take full responsibility. I’ve made and continue to make  life changes to amend this.

Though the drinking did not directly contribute to my kidney failure physically, as medical testing proved (I know, this seems counterintuitive), it exacerbated my already compromised mental health and frayed nervous system, which as I postulated earlier likely was one of the root causes or triggers that snowballed into devastating health impacts.

DENIED 

Back to the scene set earlier, that transpired when I had decided to tell my trauma story–my truth–to my ex.

I sat there,  sobbing on the couch trying to speak the unspeakable. My ex stayed standing or maybe sitting, but either way keeping a seemingly vast distance, physically and emotionally, from where I was. Once I was done speaking, I vaguely remember a few short exchanges, though the exact words escape me. Again, this mix of clear and fuzzy memory is a trauma impacted  brain doing its mysterious work.

But I do know these two things:

First, he said, “I’m just not that guy.” This was a reactionary response to my plea for emotional support, understanding, and love in my most painful and exposed vulnerability.

And…

He insinuated that I was making this up. He didn’t believe me.

Again, I don’t remember the exact words, but I know - unequivocally - that was the content of what he said, because I vividly remember the physical feeling. First, my heart dropping to my stomach, followed by a deafening ringing in my ears, and then my jaw clenching. 

If my years of trauma coping therapy had kicked in at that moment, I would have immediately recognized that these were physical signals alerting me to a PTSD triggering. Decades before, I had worked hard with a therapist to identify and codify that trifecta of physical responses. 

And now here I was, in a PTSD echo chamber. While trying to work through a triggered trauma response, I was met in response with another trigger. 

The complex and subversive thing about this situation was that my ex hadn’t physically hurt or abused me or done anything remotely resembling the trauma I had suffered and survived. But, the denial of my story was a re-traumatization. And that threw me right back into the self-doubt and self-devaluation that had plagued me throughout my life. 

I returned to being that little girl, violently robbed of my power, my self-worth, my agency. I felt unsafe, unprotected and unloved in that moment.

There would be more moments to come of reckless words he would say, or actions of denial he would take, retraumatizing me and thrusting me back into the dark. But, this story is not going to be a vitriolic laundry list of grievances. Just know that I would continue to feel this way - sometimes consciously, most times subconsciously - to  the point that these feelings of unworthiness would become an existential threat. 

When I eventually crash landed at that juncture of life or death, I finally learned that he didn’t make me feel this way. It was my responsibility to decide how I would let these words, these actions or inactions, make me feel. I had the power and agency all along.

The words “I’m just not that guy”, at first, were a denial of the love and support I needed in that moment. But now, with all the perspective gained and awareness acquired from my journey, they now represent someone else’s denial of themselves, not of me. A declarative statement of self, that freezes time, sets in stone, erects a wall. It’s a desperate cling to false self-identity, and a scapegoat to avoid the hard work facing the unknown parts of yourself. This only blocks you from envisioning the bigger possibilities, and expanding the scale of your karmic balance.

And I’m just not that gal.

***

It would take several more years, and a life-or-death health crisis, to see this light.

In June of 2020, I did actually begin to take my first baby steps towards this revelation. We were in the throes of the COVID pandemic and lockdown. The tumult of the long historical pattern of racist and anti-Black violence was finally coming to the public forefront en masse. There was a rise and spike in anti-Asian hate and violence because of the administration placing blame on China and anyone who “looked the same”--who looked like me–for this tragedy that claimed millions of lives.

My PTSD triggers sounded the alarm, but this time I decided  to face it with clarity, as emotionally painful and psychologically risky I knew it would be. I lifted the haze, dropped my crutch to get back on my own two mental feet. I self-medicated with introspection. I got sober.

And timely so, because little did I know that not long after, my physical health decline was about to begin. I would need a clear mind to amp up my self-defense, already fighting trauma, to fight overtime against another offensive. 

***

{ Declaration }

This is a plea to those who deny, gaslight or don’t believe the truth of a trauma victim, or even worse - blame and shame them: 

The one you claim you love who has experienced an extreme trauma is already fighting a daily battle, a lifelong war. Your denial or blame just adds to the onslaught of offensives they have to defend against. Your denial might drive them away from safety and to dangerous spaces, or people. It may trigger physical health illness and disease that will ravage their bodies. Or even worse–cause self-harm. 

Be brave by being vulnerable and open and honest to what you don’t know. Seek professional help and therapeutic practices to process your own traumas, because no one is without them, mild or extreme. This way, at the very least you can learn to empathize. LISTEN and LEARN and BELIEVE and SUPPORT and LOVE. Period. You can’t fix it for them. But you can be a guard rail, give them safe space and passage for them to find their way on their own, which is how it should be. And if you can’t do this, then stop your damage and step away. A survivor will survive especially without the devastation of your denial, which is their retraumatization.

And to those who are struggling with a partner or family or friends who are denying you your truth, and victim shaming or blaming you:

I hear you and see you. I don’t judge you for not seeing it, or not wanting to see it. I empathize with you for staying even though you know it’s putting you back in harm’s way. I was right there with you, hoping with all your already beaten and bruised heart that they will change for you, out of what others and societal conventions call “love.” I understand if it takes you one day, one year, or one decade or (god forbid) one lifetime to arrive at your self-revelation and self-preservation.  I don’t blame you. It’s not your fault.

The only way towards your people, your tribe, your true loves, your health is to decide that it starts with you. You have to decide to love yourself first. I hope that it won’t have to come to an extreme health crisis, like in my case, to recognize and harness the power of you. But if it does take a life or death situation to get you there, then I hope my story and my journey ahead will show you that there is a bright horizon of hope and vast possibility–if you choose yourself.

I don’t bring this to you like it’s easy peasy. It will feel impossible. May you realize that you can always shift your paradigm, change your mind, neuroplasticity. Remember that you can change the spelling of “impossible” to “I-M possible”. I am possible. You are possible.

***