Help Emma Heal!!

hi! If u don't know me I'm Emma!

It can be so hard to ask for help for so many reasons; feeling like you don't deserve it, not being able to fully acknowledge your pain, trauma, struggle, etc. I'm in a place in my life where I really need help and have needed it for a while. It's unfortunate that I felt like I couldn't ask for help until now, but I am doing it!

Before I get into it I want to take a moment to acknowledge my privilege being white and coming from a lower middle class family in nyc, and therefore being able to receive the care that I have in the past. It was helpful to an extent but was never enough to get me to a place where I could fully heal my body. I will never understand and can't imagine what it's like to be less privileged than I have been.

In short, this is part of my story:

Tw: sexual abuse, chronic disease

I've had chronic Lyme disease for most of my life. Most days my physical and mental abilities are greatly limited from migraines to joint pain to nerve pain that makes me feel like my body is on fire to pain every time I eat or drink to hives all over my body etc. I experience around 50 symptoms over a weekly basis 24/7. It's exhausting and disabling and I don't want or deserve to feel this way anymore.

In 2020 I found a great group of people. Working with The Heal Hive, I finally got a taste of what it's like to be pain free. Through bee venom therapy I went into remission!

Because of the circumstances in my life and my body starting to feel comfortable for the first time it gave me the safety I needed to start recovering my childhood trauma. I wasn't prepared to process what my mind was forcing me to.

Over the past two years I've had to recover sexual and physical trauma on a weekly to sometimes daily basis. I'm a survivor of child pornography, sex trafficking and chronic sexual/physical abuse. Trying to process that is not something anyone is ready for. Outside of not having a choice in processing it's something that I needed and still need to do to truly heal my body.

Having complex ptsd has been pretty debilitating for me. I had to stop bee venom therapy, I couldn't put as much time into my healing and slowly my physical health started to decline. Then about a year ago I got bit by a tick again and all my Lyme symptoms came back but worse.

On top of all of this, last week I found black mold in my ac/heating units and I got told it's likely that I have endometriosis which I would eventually need surgery for.

Even though I have cut off the family member who abused me, my family and I still have to be tied to them because none of us can afford to take care of my cost of living, doctors appointments, treatments, etc. They still don't make enough money to truly help me but even if they did I don't want to have to rely on my abuser to heal.

Here are some of the things I need to pay for but can't: Medicaid unfortunately won't cover the doctors I need to see.

The sauna I fundraised for and used for my Lyme treatment was stolen out of my car a year ago.

Words can't describe how overwhelmed I've been for the past two years. Sometimes It feels like I'm so unlucky seeing my problems on paper like this. I can't imagine that all of this could happen to one person but it's been my life. And I'm realizing it's ok to feel bad and sad for myself and ask for help.

I also feel so lucky and so grateful to have so many special people around me, to feel like I have the ability to heal, and that I can still make music with all my pain. There are so many things I enjoy about living and could enjoy them so much more if my life was a little easier.

Community is so important and I'm always amazed at what people can do together to uplift the people around us when the effort is there. We're capable of doing so much good for others but we're in a society that focuses so much on individual success and power. We're taught to be prideful and suffer alone. Or we're queer or a poc or a woman and we're taught that what we're feeling isn't real. Often we're all let down and it is so sad.

At the end of the day everyone deserves to heal and more often than not we can't do it completely alone.

My full story is really personal to me. I don't feel fully ready to talk about my childhood abuse at such a public or even private level and I hope you can respect that. There's so much power in asking for help and sharing what you've been through even if it's only some of it or none of it at all. I hope this will inspire you to ask for help when you need it as well. And maybe make someone feel less alone with what they're struggling with.

Thank you so much for reading this. I appreciate it so much. It's crazy to me if you've even gotten this far. Don't feel like you have to donate but if you want to any amount is helpful no matter how small or even just sharing with others!

thank you <3

emma