content warning: mentions of C-PTSD and sexual assault

“Where are you from?” I was asked by someone trying to earn some tips by taking photos when I got near the front of the line for the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign.

“Here,” I said, realizing how weird it was to say after an entire adulthood of ignoring my second hometown.

“You got visitors from out of town?” he asked, looking at a family standing behind me in line who I didn’t know.

“No,” I said. I knew my parents would tell me that only tourists would stand in line to see this sign, and that I’m not a tourist. “I used to live here, but it’s been a long time.”

I stood in front of the sign for a moment and took a photo of it on its own, feeling the heat of the desert sun on me and remembering how a 70º day could feel hotter than it actually was. It felt like home.

Home was what I needed on the day that marked 10 years since I had been raped. What do you exactly do with a trauma marker like that? It’s not the way you celebrate a sober marker — of which, I marked four and a half years sober from alcohol just a few days later — and celebrate your progress. You don’t necessarily want to remember exactly how miserable and awful you felt on a particular day, and you certainly don’t want to have the inevitable flashbacks that happen on the day.

I only told family and maybe two friends that I decided to go to Las Vegas. Part of having severe C-PTSD is that society makes you feel like you’re a burden when you’re struggling with it. That if you at all express how you’re feeling because of it, you are “trauma dumping” or whatever. It’s a strange line to walk when I don’t necessarily want to burden anyone with the way my mind is functioning, but sometimes expressing how I feel is stating the fact that I am struggling with trauma.

“She’s sitting on a secret / She didn’t ask for, no girl ever did,” The Killers sing on the song “Blowback.” That line ran through my mind as I drove through Las Vegas. There was a particularly fitting feeling listening to the band that screams “we consist of neon lights and the desert.” I just never realized how much I was also made up of neon and the desert until returning as an adult.

Driving around Las Vegas aimlessly through the day was different from walking around Toronto aimlessly at 3 a.m. I didn’t know what I had lost in Toronto, and my mind was stuck in a moment where I couldn’t handle any of the emotions I was feeling, not being able to make sense of it all. 10 years on, I was trying to remember who I was, staring at the desert and the sprawl and wondering why I had decided to attempt going to the Strip when there was so much construction on Tropicana Ave, only mildly regretting trying to see the Tropicana Hotel before it closed for good.

“It’s just a matter of time, she fights back / Breathing in the blowback.”

In years of many forms of trauma therapy, all I’ve learned is that you never really get rid of your trauma. There’s no “overcoming” anything. The idea of being “healed” from trauma is a myth — the idea of the ideal survivor is just what society wants you to be because they don’t want your burdens. Your traumas are always there, lurking. It’s tools and coping mechanisms that you need to manage the rest of your life. It’s support systems that know that this is just part of who you are these days, understanding that there are times where the traumas manifest in ways you never ask it to, but they remind you that you have what you need to get through it.

I used reconnecting to Las Vegas to get through a horrid trauma marker, trying to recapture a sense of myself I always felt like I couldn’t reach because I was clouded by the trauma itself.

For the first time, I got through the day with zero breakdowns. No flashbacks. No wanting to throw myself off the face of the Earth because I felt trapped by the trauma. I knew this wasn’t the norm — I felt the trauma manifest days later, on a smaller scale — but you take any win where you can when you can’t expect your trauma responses.

“Can you cast out a demon? / Can you wrangle the wind? / Will you stay when she’s breathing the blowback again?”

I looked at the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign and let the warmth of the sun embrace me. I was a local playing tourist to remind myself I could recapture a sense of self I thought I had lost, that I thought was taken away from me. I knew this was a feeling that wouldn’t last, that my traumas would manifest again, but in that moment, I took it as mine.