what trauma does to memory
This post has been brought over from my Medium page, where it existed first. From April 2026 onward, all of my writing will be published here first and syndicated elsewhere.
I canāt remember my childhood. Not the way people usually do.
There are hundreds of photos of me hugging my kitten, grinning with missing teeth in front of birthday cakes, beaming as I hold up my first fish.
VHS tapes show me running through my grandmotherās garden, clutching baby dolls. But when I try to conjure those moments, they flicker out before I can grasp them.
I have almost nothing before age eleven. Even after that, the memories come in fractured flashes.
Some of it, I think, was stolen.
When I was five or six, my grandmother moved away. Sheād been my primary caretaker while my mother worked, and losing her felt like losing home itself.
Thatās when my motherās boyfriend arrived. He was nice at first. He took us fishing and taught me to shoot. For a while, my mother looked happier than sheād been in years.
But that happiness didnāt last.
He changed when the sun went down. His words slurred, his steps stumbled, his anger flared hot and stinging.
Fists through walls. My motherās tears.
The man whoād been my friend became the monster who lived in my home.
I remember trembling as I handed over report cards with teacherās notes, knowing what came next. Spankings became shoves, then slaps, then throws against walls.
My childhood bed had drawers on the side and an open space underneath. What started as a fort became my refuge. A place to hide with my little boombox while the yelling and crashing filled the house.
There are moments Iāll never forget.
His hands around her neck, her face turning red then purple. Weekend visits from police officers who came so often they felt like family friends.
The breathalyzer in his car that my mother and I would blow into so he could drive us places.
My mother slept all the time. I wondered if she still loved me. Now I understand she was buried under her own pain, depressed and just as trapped as I was.
When Iāve tried to speak of those years, she denies them. My siblings were too young to remember. So Iāve carried them alone, wondering if Iām insane or if any of it really happened.
These broken shards that live only in my body.
My mother insists there were happy times. Trips to the zoo. Days at the movies. Maybe there were. But I donāt remember them.
Trauma is selective. It edits, erases, distorts. It preserves what we needed to survive and buries what we couldnāt bear to carry consciously. My childhood is a patchwork of missing pieces, and for years I thought that made me broken.
But I know that the absence of memory doesnāt mean the absence of truth.
Our bodies remember what our minds canāt handle. The hypervigilance, the startle response, the way certain tones of voice make your chest tighten are evidence. Proof.
I flip through old photos sometimes, staring at the girl in the pictures. Her smile looks real. She seems safe. And I wonder, where was I, really? Why canāt I remember being her?
Maybe I was there, doing what children do. Finding joy in the cracks, building forts under beds, loving a kitten with everything I had.
Maybe my survival cost splitting myself into the girl in the photos and the girl hiding underneath the bed. Both real, both me.
If youāre reading this and your childhood feels like a puzzle with missing pieces, youāre not alone.
Youāre not damaged or making it up. Your body kept you safe the only way it knew how.
The work now is in learning to trust yourself again. Itās in believing that your truth is valid even without witnesses, even without perfect recall.
That little girl under the bed with her boombox kept me alive. And now itās my turn to keep her safe.