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The Art of Healing Childhood Trauma: Lessons From SNL’s Darrell Hammond
I’ve accomplished a lot in my life. But deep inside, I feared I was merely impersonating a normal woman. Here’s how the greatest impersonator in SNL history helped me accept myself — trauma and all.
Rainy June, Stamford, Connecticut: The electrical feeling in my left foot jars me awake, my leg inadvertently kicking to relieve the sensation. It’s not painful, exactly, just intensely uncomfortable. A convulsion in my nerve endings. I sit up, massaging my foot. What time is it? Outside my hotel, the sky is rainy and lifeless. The spasms come every 20 seconds or so. Half a foot-rubbing hour later, I check the clock. It’s too early for sunrise. The false dawn I saw was the security lighting from an office building.
This was supposed to be my morning to sleep in. No deadlines loom, my final destination is a few hours away by car, and most relevent for me, last night I fell asleep quickly — within half an hour. Tonight I catch up on sleep, was my last, delicious thought before falling asleep. I’d felt calmer than I had in weeks.
But it isn’t really deadlines that so often keep me awake. It isn’t even the Restless Leg Syndrome. That only began after…
