Due to the isolating nature of my experiences, my therapist recommended I open up and connect, so I am writing. This could be potentially triggering.
The Now
Dreamcatcher and this current mental health journey have become strangely tied together. This hasn’t been intentional, it just happened.
Healing from trauma is a complicated process that I actively work on, but god I cannot say I understand it all the time. Right now, I feel like I am being pushed forward by random circumstances that have all somehow come together at the right time, in the right way, and I cannot explain it. I have made jokes before that some of these recent coincidences have felt like secret messages in a bowl of alphabet soup. I do not have any faith or set of belief systems, so when comes to something so circumstantial and based on pure chance, I don’t know what else to make of it.
So, that is what this is. Today I was hit by an emotional truck by some random Dreamcatcher event that has uniquely lined up to perfectly help me deal with a specific set of complex and lingering trauma.
The Past
For as long as I have had memories, I was forced to compete in pageants.
I can easily estimate that from age 2 to 17, I competed in hundreds of them across the United States. Child Courtney was a show pony of a kid in these high-level, higher-stakes, national competitions. Thousands of dollars, cars, status, and your sense of identity is what was on the line for most. Sometimes safety was on the line for me…
I would define the experience as pain, confusion, and sadness.
Pageants are not my whole story and it is not my whole trauma, but it is the first part I am healing and relevant right now as my mental health journey and this kpop group collide in strange ways. The hard part is, I don’t have many opportunities to speak about this. There is no community of people for support, the public knows little about it, Toddlers & Tiaras doesn’t compare.. and the common misconceptions about the abuse and trauma it brings make it impossible to talk about. It is something I exist with inside, alone. To save time, I will not go into specifics of all of this other than how it relates to this morning, what I am working on, and what is being solved. This is trauma between mothers and daughters; this is women creating a vicious cycle for girls who will grow up to become the same women.
It took me years to even tell my wife the stories because of the time I spent in silence building everything up. She still learns new things about my story while I work on myself and open up about some of the symptoms and source trauma related to this time and era of me.
Today, Dreamcatcher has helped me open it up in the most unexpected way.
Because of this, I want to talk about it. I want people to know this happened and that I am working hard to heal this part of my mental health puzzle.
Nashville
During that period of my childhood and teens, every year I would travel to Nashville on the first weekend of September and compete in this huge national pageant at the Opryland Resort. Right across the way from the Opry House and was originally built as a hotel to support the historic venue. This pageant is one of the hundreds, but it sticks in my mind as “the” pageant.
Why is this one competition and this place so significant to me? It was the one you trained the most for, it was the hardest one, the biggest event, and it had the most money on the line. Oh and Justin Timberlake himself competed at THIS pageant, which was something the organizers never failed to remind people of (Yes, rarely young boys would compete in pageants too, usually if their parents are desperate enough for show business). It was the maximum Southern ideal of what it meant to be a “woman”, with kids ages 3 months to 18 years old training to fit that standard.
The resort where it was held is a symbol for a lot of things to me but mainly it is the conflict between loving some of the individual parts of the hardest moments of my life. That resort was somewhere I loved to be. It is stunning; the resort is nine acres and complete with gorgeous aesthetics, shopping, restaurants, waterfalls, boat rides, and everything. I felt strangely attached to it as this beautiful place but whose walls contained some of the complicated trauma I experienced.
Truthfully, those times in my childhood have left a lot of scars for me to deal with. I have struggled to stay in any hotel because sometimes it feels like I am reliving those experiences or stuck in that time. Certain environments or the smallest thing could cause unmanageable reactions and symptoms, like a damp bathroom or the feeling of my hair being touched a certain way.
I’ve always just gritted my teeth through it and survived but more than ever I am ready to move on and feel better. I haven’t been back to Nashville or the resort in 12 years but it stayed on my mind as somewhere I wanted to return to when ready, to turn that symbol of bad memories and pain into something positive. I have even told my wife about it, showed her pictures, and said if we ever end up in that area, I would love to stay there with her to make new memories there as who I am now and try to heal from the bad.
But, what reason would I ever go back to Nashville?
This morning I woke up to the announcement Dreamcatcher will be playing at the Opry House, the second weekend of September. Of all places to go, in all months of the year, across the street from this place AND one weekend after this yearly trauma would happen.
What kind of alphabet soup message is this?
The Hard Parts
I almost didn’t hear BonVoyage.
December to May was when everything caught up to me and I deteriorated fast like living walking decomposition. The slip into such dangerous territory was too fast for me to even understand what was happening. I lost control of my brain and thought nothing other than “do not wake up” until it escalated into planning actions. In the last months of this period, my symptoms wouldn’t even let me leave the house or feel safe to be in a room by myself. This was not my first situation like this, but it was the first time I felt like I was uncontrollably hurdling toward it so fast after years of “being okay”. My foot was slammed on the break, I was grasping at the cliff to pull myself up, but my brain would not let me take action to stop it. Prior to this, I thought my mental health problems were caused by my environment and I didn’t see myself as anything other than too sensitive or inherently defaulted to be sad/upset. Since I was in a safer environment, I couldn’t rationalize why these feelings were coming back and coming back worse.
What I didn’t know was that the symptoms of PTSD were taking over my life and I had no tools to stop it, identify it, or understand why. 20 years of it building up untreated, ignored, unaddressed, finally taking its biggest toll.
But I didn’t know that and it didn’t make sense because I thought I was technically safe, I was under the impression I was “mentally healthy” (lol) I was in love, I was in control, I was finally “me.” If I am becoming empty now when everything is “better and good”, how could I ever be okay? In that state, I accepted that it was my time and I unfortunately only made it to 2023. They say when it rains it pours.. and when I thought I was at my lowest, something worse happened. This is the intentional gap in the story reserved for when I am ready to talk about it.
In the aftermath of the gap in this story, a nurse asked me if I had any conditions they needed to know about. I told her that I think I might have PTSD, and to this day I don’t know why I told her that. I wasn’t diagnosed yet, I hadn’t looked into it at all. I can only explain it as this: at the moment when I thought I would never recover, something clicked. After years of seeing these disturbances to my health as a part of who I am and always will be, it was accepting something is happening to me, but this doesn’t have to be me. So, I can give up, or I can fight for myself and try.
So with the smallest amount of me that I had left, I fought.
When I got home, I found a therapist immediately and promised I wouldn’t give up on me, that this pain left over from all the years of trauma doesn’t define me. Honestly, getting through next week felt like the hardest thing I have ever done and I am lucky I didn’t do it alone. A big part of this recovery is learning that I need to let people help me, I need to talk, I need to rely on others. In that time (and still to this day) my wife took care of me and was fundamentally the reason I got through it. I cannot talk about that yet. As someone who cries from happiness when I talk about her on the good days, I am not capable of explaining what the support meant to me on the worst days.
Lastly (and how it relates to this story) in the aftermath of everything, thank fucking god for Dreamcatcher and the album release timing. In the hardest days and at the beginning of this new journey to heal, it was BonVoyage playing in the background.
The Little Things
Dreamcatcher gave me things to do: I had to do a group order, I had to vote, I had to stream. I had things to watch and look forward to. I needed those small little distractions to get through it. The role Dreamcatcher’s content and music played in this part of my journey reminds me of this:
When you have lost a loved one and it feels like you cannot move or think or exist in anything but that deep loss… your neighbor rings the doorbell and drops off dinner for you. It is a small connection, one positive moment through the bad, and one less thing for you to deal with. It doesn’t solve the pain but is a little thing that makes such an impactful difference.
That is what Dreamcatcher was in those first weeks: a metaphorical care package being dropped off at the doorstep of my heart day after day. The little bright spark and a positive reminder. It was a vital tool to ground me from floating back away.
BonVoyage itself became a love letter to myself. I clung to the song to help me in the hard days, hours, minutes. I interpreted it as a message to let go of the part of me (the painful one) that I still loved but needed to get away from until those parts were healed. It will be more than my favorite title track, for me BonVoyage feels like being alive and represents this journey toward healing.
Myself, my wife, therapy, Dreamcatcher… I think all of these things came together and helped me save my life. During a fancall this last comeback, I told Siyeon that Dreamcatcher’s music helped me more than she could know. I meant that. I mean it more than anything else now.
And so, I continued down this path to get myself better. When my therapist asked, “What do you know about PTSD?” I thought about what I told the nurse that one night and how it started this whole process of healing myself.
I was diagnosed, and things started to make sense. My symptoms are getting progressively more in control, I am celebrating personal victories as I get better. It took time, but I was able to go back out again, I was able to be alone without being afraid of myself, I am able to SLEEP, and the flashbacks and intrusive thoughts started to calm down. I also have the tools to control them rather than let them control me. This whole time I thought I was sensitive and incapable of living a normal life, I now see how hard I have been fighting and how it has equipped me to get better.
I still have a long road ahead but I am proud of where I am. It has been two months of consistent fighting and things have gotten much better.
The Now: Part 2
So here I am, struggling with thinking whether some of these connections are random chance or have a bigger meaning. In terms of my mental health, I am working on something called exposure therapy which means facing some of the tougher memories or causes of trauma in order to give them less power or a different meaning.
And you’re telling me today Dreamcatcher announces a show at a venue right across the street from the perfect place to do that? For an album that recently played a huge role in getting me to this place, where I am ready for that? I talked to my therapist about going back to Nashville today and the strange timing of the concert vs my trauma processing. Even she was shocked at the coincidence and the weird timing of it all. She said if I am ready, I should go and believes this will be very valuable for me.
So the hotel is booked.
How can I not see it as a weird symbolism for moving on? Going back to that place one weekend after that same national pageant will happen (yes, it still happens to this day) but not be there for that reason. I am in the after stage of my life, confronting the hard parts and replacing the memories with something positive AND relevant to my current journey getting here.
Instead of being a hurt kid, I am the adult who I always wanted to be and who never gave up on myself. I will be with my wife that I never thought I’d have, alive as myself which I never thought I’d be, and I will create happy memories with my friends. I will go listen to Dreamcatcher sing the songs that helped me get to this point and will cry the whole time. From happiness.
All of this is for Child Courtney who used to hurt so badly. My dearest, best, closest companion, I am doing this for you because you survived it all. Someday you will come back to that place, you will stand as your authentic self on the damn same grand staircase they used to place you for those fucking pictures, and take a new photo of yourself.
You are no longer suffering,
You are yourself. You are safe, married, happy, and healing.
and you spend too much money on Dreamcatcher.