Writing in Trauma

Writing about trauma?

No, that’s not what I mean. Not at all.

Recognizing it or no, you are living with trauma. You have been for months.

 

Recognize it for what it is… life altering. We will not be the same.

 

Here’s an article about what a traumatic experience does to the brain: here

 

And, that’s a single traumatic experience. We are living in an ongoing traumatic experience that seemingly has no end.

 

I see it changing the people around me. They are struggling. They aren’t who they were though they struggle to be.

Same goes for me.

 

We navigate around each other on a knife’s edge some days. Other days are ok. Other days will offer near bi-polar highs for no reasonable reason… only to feel forlorn the next day.

 

I sat this week in my driveway, ten feet apart, with a student/friend and his girlfriend. We were talking about everything that’s happened since March. I brought up the idea of trauma, and she said, “I never really thought of it that way, but yeah, we are.”

 

We didn’t hug goodbye at the end of the night. We couldn’t.

 

We don’t know when we ever will again.

 

The long-term implications of what we are going through collectively (though not equally) are unknowns. In Art Spiegelman’s graphic biography MAUS, he watches while his father, a Holocaust survivor, collects bits of wire while they take a walk decades after the war in the "safety" of an American suburb. When he questions his father as to why he has to pick up every bit of garbage he finds, the father tells him that the little wire is strong and good for tying things together. “You never know what you may need.”

 

He was traumatized by his experiences, and they changed the trajectory of his life.

 

People who experienced the Great Depression often never got back to a normal because their brain no longer accepted normal… even when normal became seemingly better than the previous normal. They lived a Depression-era life long after the Depression was over.

 

Often, they lived it to their graves.

 

I imagine people wearing masks for many years to come. Some will forever after when in crowded settings. Some will never shake hands again. Some will always accept their change from a cashier with a bit of trepidation.

 

I notice things in myself. I’m suddenly averse to loud noises. Even a door closed loudly in the house can send my heart racing. I’m edgy. I’m very emotional and can get weepy over the smallest things.

I wept at the end of our vacation standing out on the deck, looking out over Sutton's Bay... haunted by the week's ghosts of laughter and abandon. For a week, we actually lived... kind of.

It was so hard to come back home. In the past, I always wanted to get back home. It used to be I was never much built for vacationing. Now I weep when vacations end.

 

I’m changed, and I know it. To what extent, I’m not sure. But I am forever changed. The idea of it frightens me.

 

I’ve learned to be forgiving. At least I’m trying to learn it. As together as we are if we are lucky enough to be quarantined with someone, we are also wholly alone. We are each tackling this in our own way.

 

I try to forgive. I say to myself, “This is what he needs to do; this is what she needs to do.”

 

I try to see all behavior first as coping before I see it as somehow personally related to me.

 

If someone I love wants to watch TikTok videos for three hours while in the same room with me without saying a word, I think, “This is what they need. They are coping.”

 

As the song says in Hamilton (something we’ve watched on repeat in this house as a coping mechanism)… “They are trying to do the unimaginable” … which is to go on living through horrendous, ongoing trauma.

 

Sometimes I think we watch Hamilton so often because there’s a comfort in knowing what comes next (they’ll sing this song, then this song, then this song… and they always will)… there’s no unpredictable as there is in the daily task of simply opening your eyes in the morning and looking at your Twitter newsfeed.

 

Usually to be gutted by something.

 

So, I do my best to forgive and forgive and forgive. “Finding my inner Jesus” as a friend of mine would say.

 

And, I forgive myself. Or I try to.

 

And, as writers, we must forgive ourselves in these times. Forgive the lack of ideas. Forgive the lack of motivation.

 

Recognize that we aren’t writers, but that we are writers living in trauma.

 

And some of us are even trying to write… trying to do the unimaginable.

 

There’s already an audacity to the practice of writing in normal circumstances. To say, I wrote something and you should read it and even pay to read it.

 

Audacity.

 

Trying to write now with the same goal is even more audacious.

 

Don’t compare yourself to others. Some are thriving. Churning out words. Creating.

Let them.

 

They aren’t better people than you or more driven or more dedicated. They have simply found a way to cope, to shut out the goddamn world for a while.

 

I hope you can find the same sometimes.

 

I hope I can.

If you find my blog posts illuminating, please consider purchasing a copy of my new book of short stories, The Neighborhood Division.

From the Publisher (preferred): here

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Book Trailer: here