Another post snippet, but this time this was a little more premeditated. I'd been thinking about the term trauma for a little bit last night, and somehow it came up as if it'd been waiting for the thought to flower. As if it needed a little prompting to come out.
I don't know if I'm right, but lately I've been feeling like...maybe we've made the term a little overheavy. Maybe it would help us put our lives together better if we thought of things a little differently. Maybe...maybe it's just food for thought.
Let me tell you something pretty
ridiculous. Like fantastically ridiculous. When I was young, not
super young, but maybe like 8 or 10 or so...we were going to go on a
family visit to see our cousins up north. I was so excited. I don't
know why, I just really was excited to go see them. There's six of us
in our family (or was before my dad passed away) four of us kids and
two parents, I'm the youngest (and the most spoiled).
Anyway,
for days, maybe even a week we'd been preparing for this journey -
just really four hours drive, not long by North American standards
but enough with a brood in the car. The day comes when we were to go,
I'm all packed and ready, just waiting for things to get going. Time
starts to pass. I know my dad prefers to go early to make the drive
easier but it's not nearly midday yet, so I'm okay, if anything I'm
getting more excited. It starts to get later. Midday starts to come
and I feel a little anxious, though I don't know why. It's cold
outside, sure, but I don't know why we haven't gone yet. The day is
almost gone, it feels like.
A while drifts by. My siblings
have been doing things, sometimes playing together in the background
as I start out the front room window, sometimes upstairs keeping
themselves occupied. I'm not that interested. To me it's not half as
fun as what things will be like when we get there. It'll be so
exciting, so much fun. My kid brain doesn't know why but I'm always
like this, always excited to be around more people, even though my
family is big and great and more than enough, I just...love it.
The
time starts to pass more slowly. I realise something is not quite
right. Perhaps something is wrong. Are we...maybe not...? I watch
through the window at the car, my breath fogging the window pane. And
slowly, like the stir of molasses, I start to see it. Something
white, fluttery, light, falling from the sky.
It's snow.
Surely that doesn't mean-- But it
does, it fantastically does. Those few small flakes, barely a
spattering, have shuttered all the expectations I had. Maybe we can
wait, maybe it’ll get better, I think. I even try to convince my
dad, almost pleading for him to take us.
But he calls it.
We decide not to go. He telephones my uncle, his brother, and tells
him.
I watch out the window, looking at the flakes that
have already started to dissipate, and something inside me quietly
dies.
My siblings have tried to console me, briefly. They
know I'm a little upset but what kind of person would be more than
that? Why would it mean so much more? They don't know why I was so
excited, it's just me. I don't know why I was so excited.
And
slowly, I decide, somewhere in that child's brain, that they're
right. That makes sense. Why should I be so upset at not being able
to go. Even if my child brain doesn't understand why the decision was
made, why a few flakes here meant ice and danger on the roads out of
the city, I still trust my parents, I still know they made the
decision for a good reason.
And slowly, I learn a lesson
further than I was meant to. I decide I should not get so excited for
these things. Moreover, I probably shouldn't get excited for them at
all. I mean they're never as good as I expect them to be - well
except those few times that were - but still, those must be the
outliers, right? And after all, if it means feeling like this, then
what's the point?
I mean...if I have to feel like this,
why should I be excited at all?
Today, I'm something of a
writer. Something, because I haven't actually finished anything. I've
tried a few, some are on the shelves for later, some have been left
at the wayside, but I do have one. One that I've been sitting on,
near completion, for more than four years. It's not amazing. It's
fun, and has heart, and that's me. It's fine, and I have better
things to write, but I still love it.
But more than all of
that, I want to finish it. I want to throw it out into the world and
know I finally did something in my life. Maybe not amazing or grand,
but *something*. Just this one thing that I know I can do.
But
you know, for the life of me, I can't get excited about that. I'm so
close to the end that I can taste it, but the energy it needs to
write it? Won't manifest as excitement, because in my brain I've
learned the lesson all those years ago, thirty years of this planet,
that it will turn to ashes in my hands. The excitement of having the
power to change my life at my fingertips, in my hands, my shot as it
were, is contained so tightly by this rigorous structure of held
feelings that I don't even know how to let it fly any more. I don't
know how to not be afraid, how to not let go, how to set my soul
free.
I don't know how to live. In the way that I most
believe in, most endure for, most look forward to.
Why
have I gone on about all this? It's simply for this reason, trauma isn't
always trauma. Sometimes it's just life. Sometimes it's just learning
the wrong thing, or the right thing wrongly, or missing it
completely. Sometimes it's not being spanked by your parents, or not
let out late, or not having your own room, sometimes it's just
snowflakes...landing on a windowsill.
Sometimes it's just
how you feel.
