“But you’re so good with people!”
Trauma gives you social superpowers… and forbids you from using them.
“I don’t know,” I say. “ It feels like therapy has only made me worse at making friends. I’m so conscious now of all the fucked-up things I used to do, and all the things I should never have let people do to me, and it just makes me want to hide from people until I’m whoever I’m supposed to be.”
“I don’t understand that.” My coworker isn’t really paying attention to my answer to the question she asked. I’d be angry, but it’s probably the only reason I answered her so honestly. She continues, “It always seems like you know exactly how to talk to people, you always know just what to say. You’re so good with people!”
I die a little inside. Just for a change of pace, I try to imagine what it must be like to live in that world, the one where “being good with people” is all it takes, the solution to a problem instead of the seed that grows a forest of problems.
That’s the way it is with a lot of the dubious superpowers I’ve gotten from CPTSD. Other people envy me for my supernatural lack of fear, my eidetic memory, my hypervigilance to social cues, my skill with words… while I fantasize about carving these things out of my head with a rusty spoon.
