 Well, hello. Are you helping? When a shepherd needs attention, everything else needs to stop. Hello there and welcome, my beautiful, lovely, intelligent, talented, and delightful internet friends. Welcome back to my channel. Thank you so much for joining me here today for a very personal story. I wanted to share with you guys today an incredible thing that happened just a couple weeks ago. I wasn't sure if I was gonna make a video about this. I wanted to kind of sit on it until I was a place where I felt comfortable to do so and hey, it looks like that's today. If you've watched either one of my channels for any length of time, either Trauma Talk or Footless Show, you know that I am pretty open about a lot of things that I've experienced in my life. One of those things, one of those things that certainly had a large impact on me as a person was being sexually assaulted and being in a very abusive relationship for about 11 months. This experience and trauma fundamentally changed who I was. Like I'm not the same person I was before all that happened. I love who I am now. I fought hard to become who I am, but who I was at that time was was so broken and so damaged by everything that I went through. And a lot of the worst of what I'm talking about happened in a place called Pueblo, Colorado. Now, I want to give a disclaimer. If you happen to be from Pueblo, I apologize that I'm gonna do nothing but talk trash about your city for the next few minutes. Understand it is it's my issues. It's not you. But because there were so many very negative experiences associated with Pueblo, I grew such an aversion to this place that I couldn't go past a certain exit on I-25. For the record, this place is only about 40 minutes from where I live. So like it's not that far and I couldn't go further south than a certain exit because this place just signified terror and trauma and horror and everything bad and scary and like the stuff of nightmares and in so many ways Pueblo just held all of these triggers for me that would panic me and just send me into this crazy spiral. And I didn't like the fact that I was so uncomfortable with an entire area in my state. Like I didn't love that because I was like I'd like to get past them. I wanted to get to a place where if someone said Pueblo in conversation, I didn't feel like my chest was caving in on itself and my heart rate didn't speed up so much. And I didn't feel like I was like in fight-or-flight mode already. If someone just like mentioned this city that is not far from where I live and where I've lived for a decade. But in many ways as I went throughout my healing process as I got counseling, I figured out different ways to exist and survive and thrive and grow. This was like the ultimate boss when it came to trauma triggers. Like the one thing that I had no idea how I was ever gonna face because it was so terrifying to me. Now a couple years ago, I tried to face this fear because I thought you know what? I'm just gonna face it head-on and then it's gonna be fine. Turns out exposure therapy does not work very well for everything. And I didn't do a good job of preparing myself for this. I didn't really talk to my counselor about it. One day I just went down there with Brian. We went and got dinner and I thought everything was gonna be fine. In reality that triggered two or three days of being completely dissociated for myself. Like I was not here if you ever experienced disassociation, you know what I'm talking about. But like I was walking, I was talking, but I was my mind and my soul were not present in my skin. It was very weird and it took a while to come out of it because it was it was too much. It was too much all at once. I tried to like jump in the deep end and was kind of drowning, right? So after I realized all right, that was too much. I'm not gonna do that again. I tried to work up to it a little bit more. I talked more in therapy with it when I had the chance. Not too long ago, I made a video about going back down there again. This time I tried to plan it around very positive things. I brought two of my very best friends with me. We went down. The four of us had brunch. Everyone who was with me was someone I felt very safe around. You know, we had great conversation at brunch. Good food went for a short walk and then hightailed it out of there. For me personally, that was a huge step in the right direction. And honestly, things were okay until I got back to the spring. Some depression hit. But I was like, you know, this isn't the end of the world. I made it down there. I made it back. I'm still here. Okay. We're going in the right direction. But in my brain, this place was very much still a monster. A place that I was very scared of. It had power over me. And it makes a lot of sense that it had power over me because of the things I witnessed and personally experienced while I was there. And I honestly felt like I was at a place where I'm like, you know what? Pueblo and I are never gonna be besties, but I went down there with friends. I was okay. I think we're done with this. I think we're good. I didn't really have an intention of like going back there, especially on my own. I kind of thought that that would that would never happen. But a couple of weeks ago, October 30th is the nine year anniversary of the worst of everything that happened. Anniversaries have always been a little bit difficult for me the month of October. It's pretty difficult for me. And I've started trying to do things in that month and on that day, especially to intentionally change the way that I think about October or expand it. And this year, I decided to take the 30th off of work. I thought I'll go for a nice drive in the mountains with my doggos. It'll be great. But when I started driving, when I got in the car, I felt like, bear with me, this is a little out there. But I felt like my body was telling me I needed to drive down to Pueblo, which for the record is nothing I ever thought I would ever say because my body has always been like panic, red alert, don't go there, stop, turn back. And I thought, okay, I'm going to give this a try. And by give this a try, I mean I'm going to go past the exit that frightens me and just see how I feel like and turn back then. Okay, now I'm halfway there. How am I feeling? Let me check in with myself. There's no shame in turning back. But as I got closer and closer and closer to this darkness, to this monster, I felt alright. I felt present. I felt alright. I didn't feel like I was just going numb and waiting into something I couldn't handle. I felt like I was still there. I think that's the best way to say it. And I got down there and I drove around a little bit and then I drove away. It sounds like the most boring sentence in the world, like that in and of itself is not even a story. But for me, that was by far one of the biggest victories in the past decade of my life. This place had just been built up in my head as like hell itself. I know that sounds dramatic, but that's really what it felt like. Like just the epitome of everything horrible. But I was able to face it and I was able to face it with okay presence of mind. And you know, I made time for self-care afterwards. I drove around a little bit more with my dogs. We did go into the mountains. I got some coffee, went for a little bit of a walk outside and I was legitimately okay. And I cannot stress enough how much I was convinced that that would never be able to happen. Trauma is really messed up. Trauma really, really screws with your brain. It screws with your body. It changes who you are in some ways and how you interact with life and how you think about things. For me, the past 10 years have been this journey of trying to find my way out. Going through really traumatic things, especially at the hands of other people, especially at the hands of people who we are supposed to be able to trust, really changes you. Like it really changed me. It changed how I thought about myself and the world. It changed how I thought about faith and relationships. And the past decade has honestly been a struggle. I've gone through things that I think people from the outside would categorize as much more difficult. For instance, in the past two years, I lost my leg. This will never compare to trying to survive my brain after the trauma that I experienced during that period in my life, where I was going down to Pueblo, to that period of my life where really, really awful things were happening to me at the hands of someone I was supposed to be able to trust, at the hands of someone I loved and cared about. To be able to drive back there as the person that I am now, a person that I wasn't sure I wanted to exist for a very long time, to build myself into who I am now. I'm obviously a work in progress and always will be, but I am very proud of the choices I've been able to make to move towards something better, to move towards something brighter, something I wasn't sure existed. It felt absolutely incredible to go back there now as me, to go back there now as someone who has put a shit ton of time into unraveling so much of what I learned into decoding so many of the experiences that I had, to figuring out what beliefs I acquired about myself and the world that were very damaging to who I was, to be able to go back there nine years later and face the place that consistently made me want to take my own life for many years, to go back there alone and going down there with this almost presence of peace, knowing that I was going to be okay, knowing that I made it. In a way, I feel like a part of my mind has been living in Pueblo for almost a decade. Like it's had that part of me and I feel like I was able to go back there and say this isn't yours anymore, this is mine. One of the coolest things is it wasn't even that big of a deal. Like it's a big deal obviously, but it wasn't even something that I was hyperventilating about at the time. I just got up that day and started my car and was like this is where my car needs to go and I chose to listen to my body and listen to my mind and check in with myself as much as I could to make sure that I wasn't doing something really dumb. And that will remain for a very long time as one of the greatest victories of my little life. I also want to note that in this type of video I'd usually like to have footage of like me going and doing a thing because being with someone when they're doing something is way more interesting to watch on camera or on YouTube than just someone recounting a story. But for me this was something I knew that I needed to do just for me. I didn't take a single picture, didn't take a single video, I just went down there and I think trying to incorporate any other element would have taken me out of that moment, would have allowed me to disconnect a little bit more and that's not what I wanted to do. So there is no video evidence of this because for me that's exactly what I needed. It's really easy at least for me, maybe for you too. To get in a mindset where I am convinced I will never feel or think differently, feelings are pretty big, feelings can be pretty encompassing and pretty dark and there have been so many moments where I thought something was never gonna shift and when I get in that kind of a mindset trying to persevere, like trying to fight through something sounds real dumb because that's just gonna take energy and if it's always gonna feel this way I might as well just give up. To myself in those moments when I felt like that and to anyone listening who feels like that as convincing as those feelings are they are not true. The things that we have absolutely bought hook, line and sinker that are never gonna change, it's just how I feel or it's just how I think or it's just what happened and I'm never gonna get out of it, it's really not true. Though it can be impossible to see at the time there's a way out, there's a way through that. What I felt in those moments and what you might feel in this moment now is not going to last forever, it is not your fate forever. We as human beings are ridiculously resilient. We have the capacity to go through so much, many things that we shouldn't have to go through but we have the capacity to face tremendous things and come out the other side. You are much more capable of facing life than you feel like you are. I am much more capable of facing life and hard things than I think I am in many moments. If you've ever found yourself in or you are in that sort of a mental space right now, you're really not alone and you're not weird and I promise you it's not gonna feel this way forever. There is a way through this and you will find it if you just keep looking for it. You just keep going to sleep and waking up and trying to find it. I promise you it is there. Cakes would like you to know that there is a follow-up video to this video over on my other channel Trauma Talk where I talk more specifically about how I prepared to face sort of this like really big trigger and dealing with triggers. Specifically when we're talking about PTSD so check it out linked down below and up above. Being able to go back to Pueblo, Colorado on my own was by far one of the biggest victories for me and I will forever be grateful that I was able to do that. I'll forever be grateful for all the help that I've had along my journey of getting to that point. Appreciate your time in the listening time and choosing to listen to someone are some of the most valuable gifts we have so thank you for yours today. I really appreciate each and every one of you being here. You could be anywhere in the world doing anything and you chose to hang out with me and listen to me chat for a few minutes and that means the world to me. Thank you. I love you guys. I'm thinking about you and I will see you in the next video. Bye guys.