what lies beneath the surface?

the forgotten mermaids in ursula's cave

Image: Amine Kübranur Çakıroğlu / Pexels

what if so much of what shapes our lives stays trapped beneath the surface?

it all begins with the beliefs we formed before we had language, the patterns we adapted in order to survive, and the stories we continue to tell ourselves, mostly without our awareness.

maybe that’s why i’ve been pondering this quote by joseph campbell:

the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

because we must have courage to enter the cave,

but staying there takes even more.

the other night, my teen daughter and i had one of the most profound conversations.

we were talking about trauma, when she brought up the little mermaid.

not to talk about ariel, though that was the first song i learned to sing from beginning to end, as i would belt it out from the top of my lungs:

wish i could be, part of that world….

but she was talking about ursula’s cave.

she looked at me and said something like,

nana and our family are like those mermaids. when someone doesn’t heal from their own wounds, they become fragmented from their true selves in a way that allows other forces to almost gain hold of them. they’re like the mermaids pinned to the bottom of ursula’s cave.

i knew exactly what she meant.

i’ve become estranged from my family. because they didn’t stand with us when we unearthed some deeply uncomfortable memories.

i had hoped they would, but instead there was a lot of masking.

saying one thing, but doing another.

and my older children saw right through it.

my one daughter even confronted her grandmother about the gap between what she said and what she did.

i guess all of this has made me wonder what happens when people don't want to see what's been there all along.

isn’t so much of our world built this way?

how many families have stories that everyone knows but no one names?

how many institutions survive because enough people look the other way?

how many wars have been fought because ordinary people convinced themselves they couldn’t see what was right in front of them?

injustices continue because telling ourselves a story is easier than telling ourselves the truth.

or maybe we don’t want to rupture certain relationships, so we make allowances.

we see it, but then we explain it away.

we tell ourselves it’s complicated, or we tell ourselves they meant well.

then we call it forgiveness.

but aren’t there some things that first need to be acknowledged?

when does forgiveness become a way of avoiding the truth?

when words and actions become misaligned, i think we begin telling ourselves stories.

stories that allow us to keep living with ourselves.

stories that allow us to believe we’re still the person we want to be.

maybe there is a rupture between the part of us that feels...

and the part of us that justifies.

and then i have to ask myself the same questions.

because that’s what i’ve been doing for years now.

when my husband finn first died, i once had a strong vision rise up through my tears.

i remember lying on the porch sobbing one day, when i saw myself carrying my own body off a battlefield.

i was covered in armor, and the battlefield around me was littered with fallen soldiers.

i was literally carrying my own corpse.

at the time, i thought it was about grief. but looking back, it feels more like foreshadowing.

because not long after finn died, memories began to surface.

first mine came, then my daughter’s.

and i realized the woman wearing that armor could never make the journey i was about to take, because that armor had protected me for decades.

it had helped me survive, but it couldn’t help me heal.

that version of had to die with finn.

in order to slow down and come back to my body, i started spending day after day, month after month, sitting alone on my land while the kids were in school, often for many hours at a time.

as i’ve mentioned elsewhere, i even started hand rolling american spirit tobacco because i needed something that made me slow down long enough to feel.

when the memories first surfaced, i initially couldn’t feel much of anything.

i would feel brief waves of the emotions, followed by long stretches of numbness.

and although i had spent so much of my life believing i felt too much, instead, i realized how much of me had actually gone quite numb, just to get through it all.

doctors call it dissociation.

i call it becoming separated from parts of ourselves in order to survive.

and when so many of us spend a lifetime surviving, beginning to feel it all is something else entirely.

in my case, i had to intentionally create the time and the space to feel.

in other words, i had to enter the cave, in order to face the unimaginable.

maybe that’s why i kept thinking about ursula’s cave, after my daughter’s and my conversation.

because it’s a chilling picture of what trauma can do to us.

all those mermaids, who were once vibrant and alive… still there, but unable to swim.

are all the rooted mermaids still who they always had been, or had they, over time, become something else entirely?

because trauma doesn’t shape everyone in the same way.

some people become softer, and they become deeply empathic because they know what pain feels like.

they spend their lives trying to make sure no one else has to experience what they did.

they often become hypervigilant as well, your classic people-pleasers or perfectionists.

some become controllers, while some withdraw from the world.

others lose the ability to trust.

and many turn to substances to numb the pain they can’t explain.

but some...

they seem to lose touch with parts of their own humanity.

they become cruel instead.

like the dog that learns to bite in order to protect itself.

but unlike the dog, we have the capacity to become aware of the patterns that shaped us.

and in order not to stay trapped in them, we have to uncover what created them in the first place.

that’s often fucking uncomfortable work, to put it mildly...

what many people don’t understand about healing, is that we also have to grieve the versions of ourselves that must die…so the person we’re meant to become can finally live.

looking back, i was carrying a version of me that only knew how to battle.

she had carried me this far, but she couldn’t take me any farther.

to understand why...

i had to sink beneath the surface.

---

i’m a writer, speaker, and musician exploring trauma, neuroscience, and spirituality. i write about what it means to remember who we are beneath our survival.

if this resonated, i'd love for you to join me here, and leave your thoughts.