The Library With the Lights Off

CW: dissociation/depersonalization, discussion of trauma survival mechanisms

For a long time, I thought I was empty. When I tried to explain it, the words came out crooked. I told people I felt like a friendly ghost. What I meant was: the library lights were off.

I wasn’t absent; I was archived. There were rooms in me lined with stories I couldn’t check out. My nervous system had thrown the breaker, not for spite, but for survival.

People talk about dissociation like it’s weather, fog rolling in from a cursed sea. My dissociation had foundation and scaffolding. Survival logic, built into a sturdy frame.

I didn’t forget because I was confused.

There was a kind of cosmic order in the forgetting.

There had to be. The universe doesn’t apologize for its scale. Sometimes reality itself is simply too much. I learned that protecting myself meant not knowing, for as long as it took to keep carrying forward.

Sometimes, survival doesn’t look like “showing up.” Sometimes, it’s the miracle of delay - my brain held back until I had the capacity to receive it.

My body never really stopped recording. It just filed to deep storage, until my system felt safe to retrieve. I learned that dissociation is not the loss of self. It is the absolute refusal to be destroyed by what can’t yet be faced.

It is reorganization: survival re-shelving memory, sensation, even logic - tucking them into shadowed alcoves, not out of erasure but out of radical hope that one day, the structure will hold.

This is not cowardice. This is how a mind learns to meet something unnameable and survive the introduction.

I held the architecture steady, and the lights start flickering back on. Not all at once, not in every room. But I started to see the stacks. I remembered:

I was never blank.
I was never gone.
I was just unlit.