Transcript of I Was Wounded… and Slightly Feral New

Welcome to Notes from the Edge, where we have the conversations we should have been having all along. We talk about the things that we're not talking about. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey, writer, trauma educator, executive advisor, and author of the upcoming memoir Notes from a Certified Madwoman. Welcome to the edge.

Welcome back to Midnight Menopausal Meanderings. It is exactly midnight, and apparently this is when my brain likes to hold staff meetings, because tonight I've been editing the manuscript for Notes from a Certified Madwoman. And somewhere between the comments, the revisions, the memories, and the emotional excavation, I realized something.

I don't think I was ever crazy.

I think I was wounded. And if we are being completely honest, slightly feral. There is a difference. Now, before anyone misunderstands me, let me be very clear. I have lived with addiction, experienced psychosis, and been institutionalized in psychiatric wards.

I received more diagnoses than I can reasonably list without sounding like a pharmaceutical commercial, and those experiences were real. The suffering was real. Mental illness is real. Therapy saves lives. Medication does too.

Psychiatry does. Recovery absolutely does save lives. This is not an argument against any of those things. It is an argument for adding something to the conversation, expanding it, because for years I was asked one question: What 'What is wrong with you?' Nobody bothered to ask what happened to me.

Those are very, very different questions. As I've been editing this manuscript tonight, I keep noticing that every diagnosis explained what I was experiencing. Very few people helped me understand why my body had learned those responses. Why did I panic inside love? Why did betrayal feel physically unbearable?

Why could I read a room before anyone spoke? Why did I overperform, overfunction until I had a full mental collapse? And why did I confuse my hypervigilance with my intuition? I became so good at surviving that people called me strong while I was quietly falling apart and not able to say a word about it. And those are not excuses, but they certainly are context, and context changes everything.

One of the things I write about in the book is how many behaviors we later call personality that may have started as adaptation. Things like people-pleasing, perfectionism, overachieving, caretaking, emotional numbing, control, rage, constant scanning, constant fixing, preparing for the next bad thing to happen.

Some of those were not who we were. They were how we adapted to survive. So it doesn't remove accountability. Look, I drank, I hurt people, I exploded, I made choices I had to take responsibility for and did, and gave the best apology, which is changed behavior. Trauma explains behavior, it does not excuse harm.

But explanation matters because shame without understanding keeps people trapped, and we lose some of them.

And this is where I need to say something else clearly. Even in this book, I left some details out, not because they were untrue or unimportant, because I'm still protecting a false version of my story, if I'm being quite honest. I left some things out because telling the whole truth would create consequences with other people that I will not absorb. Family members. I'm talking about— there are truths that can cost you peace, and sometimes it's not worth it to reopen the door you worked so very hard to close.

There are truths that other people will punish you for telling, especially when their comfort has always depended on your silence. So no, this book does not contain every detail, but it does contain enough. To tell the emotional truth and examine the patterns and show what happens when context is removed from a person's life completely and only the symptoms remain. So this book was never about explaining myself. I'm not standing in front of a courtroom trying to convince everybody that I was good, innocent, right, misunderstood, or blameless.

That is not the work I'm doing. But it does explore what happens when we forget about The wise. What happens when we reduce a human being to a diagnosis without asking what shaped the body underneath it? What happens when we label a woman angry without asking how long she had been swallowing pain? Or when we call someone unstable without asking what instability surrounded them?

Or when we call someone codependent without asking what they learned love would cost them?

That is the question underneath all of this. Not how do I defend myself, but what becomes visible when the why returns? Because context does not erase responsibility, but it does make responsibility more honest. It allows us to say, yes, this happened. Yes, I reacted.

Yes, I caused harm too. Both truths can exist at the same time. And yes, there were reasons that I became this way. All those things matter.

That is the problem with such a clean narrative. They are emotionally satisfying, but usually incomplete. People want one diagnosis, one villain, one explanation, one moment where everything went wrong, but human beings rarely collapse for one reason. Trauma overlaps with biology, biology overlaps with hormones, hormones overlap with sleep, sleep overlaps with emotional regulation, addiction overlaps with attachment. Attachment overlaps with abandonment, and grief overlaps with rage.

And by the time the body and the mind break down, everyone is looking for one label to contain what was actually years of accumulation, sometimes decades, sometimes an entire lifetime.

That is what editing this book and revisiting all of this is teaching me, that for most of my life, I believe healing meant becoming someone new. Now I think healing is finding out who I am underneath all the survival that was making the decisions, and that is a very different journey. And maybe menopause is part of why I'm seeing this so clearly now, because menopause has an annoying habit of stripping away any performance. Because I'm tired, I have stopped pretending, and my tolerance for bullshit has dropped to the floor.

I almost died earlier this year from complications due to my congenital blood disease, and my body is saying we're not carrying anything that's not ours anymore.

And maybe that is some great wisdom. Maybe it's biology, maybe it's both. So yes, I was wounded, dysregulated, traumatized, and mentally ill at times. I was also hormonally overwhelmed, addicted, grieving, surviving. Human beings are rarely just one thing.

That is the problem with one label, one diagnosis. They are useful. They can give us the beginning of a new language. They can point towards support, but they can also become so powerful that we stop looking underneath them.

What if the label is just the beginning of the conversation and beneath the anxiety is a body that never learned safety?

Or beneath the anger is years of swallowed truth. Or beneath the codependency is a person terrified that connection equals death or survival.

These are not universal answers.

They are invitations for us to always ask better questions, and better questions create more humane answers. And that is what this manuscript has become for me. Not a memoir about madness, a memoir about meaning. What happens when survival becomes identity and adaptation gets mistaken for our personality and symptoms are documented but the story beneath them disappears because nobody asks. They ask, what's wrong with you?

Not what happened, what adapted, what survived, what does not feel safe.

And I don't need every person in my life to agree with my memory. I don't need every family member to agree with my truth. I do not need to reveal every detail to prove that what I experienced mattered.

It's not a defense brief manuscript, it is an examination. It is me placing the story back inside its context and looking at the whole human being instead of the parts that became very inconvenient for others. Because survival is incredibly intelligent, but it was never supposed to become our identity. So tonight, at exactly midnight, while editing this book, I found myself smiling because the woman I spent years calling crazy deserved far more compassion than I ever gave her, and then anyone else ever gave her too. She was not weak.

She was not beyond repair. Our prognosis was not poor to none, as stated in my inpatient rehabilitation records. And I was not simply a collection or cluster of symptoms. I was carrying more than one person should have. And maybe I did become a little feral, because sometimes feral is what happens when a person has been cornered by life for too long.

And still refuses to disappear. See, I refused to disappear. And maybe that is true for some of you listening tonight. Maybe there are parts of you that make more sense when you place them back inside the full story. Maybe your intensity had a history, or your vigilance had a reason, or your anger was trying to tell the truth long before you had language for it.

The question is not whether you were too much. The question is, what were you carrying when everyone decided you were too much to understand?

So please, before you ask yourself what is wrong with you, ask what happened to you. Not to excuse yourself or avoid accountability, because that is some of the biggest part of the work. Not to rewrite the past into something more comfortable for you or others, but to return the missing context that nobody may have asked you. Maybe even yourself. Context does not erase the truth, it completes it.

I'm Lisa Lacey. This has been another Midnight Menopausal Meandering. And if you're awake with me tonight, maybe your body is not asking for another verdict. Maybe it's simply asking for you to finally understand it.

I'll see you at the edge when you find it.