On the flip side of life, trauma is your honor

CRYSTALLINE CLARIFICATION HERE: this piece is not about whitewashing trauma. It is also not about justifying it either, even if there is a bit of “silver lining” present in my account. Creating physical or psychological trauma for others is wrong. Breaking the basic laws of decency, and the law of the land, in my opinion, is also wrong. Harming children is dead wrong.

Bear with me on this statement. I’m going to talk about how trauma shaped me into becoming a better person than I may have been if I hadn’t experienced it. And in my case– and many others too– trauma may even give us superpowers¹.

To get the history out of the way: I was groomed by a few men in my home town and raped by one. I told my best friend, she looked like she’d seen a ghost, and we never spoke of it again. Two years later, I told my mother. She was doing her best as a single mom and near crazy with rage. She tossed dog poop into the mans car via a stick from the side of the road. She told me she had to do something because I refused to take him to court. I wasn’t consoled or delighted, but I knew…

she was protective in her own way. Like a lone wolf looking out for a pack of the same

And because of that incident, I learned how to reinvent my sense of self at 14 years old, and completely cordoned off a part of my human experience as “not counting toward my character.” I also refused to consider myself a victim, and instead choose horse-blinder-styled denial as a cornerstone of my new personhood and controlling the optics of my life.

And it worked. I carried on.

Of course, as a 14 year old, calling reality not real is ridiculous, but this mental jujitsu built a capacity for re-working reality when life felt overwhelming. This decision also literally blinded me to that man’s presence in my very small town. I never saw him again, except one time I blacked out and apparently went hysterical when he showed up where I worked. I still don’t know what happened except that an older waitress spirited me out of the room and talked me with a comforting calm. Thank you Miss Virginia.

So when I wonder how anyone can do heroic and loving things despite living in hellish, or war-torn areas, I think they too must have powerful coping mechanisms. How can hurt people make decisions (and do things) to help others even while suffering personal challenges themselves?

Well, this may be why: coping mechanism + character = amazing graces.

Trauma initiated an interesting sort of magic in my life as well, spiriting me away from suffering in other moments when sh!tty people tried to take from me more than I was willing to give. As a kid, I could turn denial “on” and rise above a situation, into a birds eye view of nearly any situation.

Traumatic experience has also taught me that I am worth protecting. Who did the protecting, I can only chock up to Nature with a capital N. As my brain did a spectacular bit of disassociation from my body, I stared at leaves, trees, and the sky behind, then I floated up into the scene. And what I saw was beautiful. This taught me that ones’ eyes can be trained on something very different than actual circumstance. And I count myself fortunate to always see beauty in Nature, even when it is storming or dark.

When doing matters most

And I’m fortunate that after I get triggered,² I tend to express myself via art and writing. Visual art when words can’t do justice. Writing when I wish to share with others that which may help them find new, happier ways forward after a trauma too. There is always a way.

Art has been my friend; and my desire to illuminate and protect Nature all at once has created a body of work that kept me creating something beautiful despite wanting to stay in bed for months on end, and tell the world to f off.

The creative practice of symbol-making continues to heal me and I hope signals something to others as well [sign up t0 receive notice of art drops].

So my new prescription after natural disasters, harsh realities, assholes, and accidents, is that we are 100% allowed to appreciate those aspects of Self that help us carry on.

In other words, denial and horse blinds are not failings, they are mechanisms that help us move forward. And maybe if you become conscious of these built in safeguards, they can be used for good, and you can rise above hurt and find a new way forward.

And, as long as our coping mechanisms do no harm, we can absolutely cultivate them, practice them, and even escape into them at times. This is called being human. And sometimes humans need a break from the world’s agenda.

When one side of the seesaw of life dips us into hell, the other side we weight more heavily to protect against another fall.

Yet, we all know the person who fell off the monkey bars, may never get on them again from fear. A person who was hurt by another, may break off communication, especially if it triggers¹ an earlier survival issue. That’s a trauma response. These responses may not be rational or proportional to the moment at hand, but they are survival instincts, so they can also carry the energy of birth, death and everything in between. (Not to be dramatic, but why else do people use the term “ghosting”)?

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Nature as consistent cure.

As a teen, when my mom felt I was too feral for her to handle, she’d drop me off a half-mile from home with tent and a flashlight and tell me she’d pick me up in the morning. “If you want to live in the wilderness… live in the wilderness” was her annoyance with rational affect.

She thought I’d be scared and come back home, crying. Instead I loved being alone, and built an identity around independence instead. I loved the sounds of the owls and watching the dark branches rustling through the triangle shaped mesh in my pup tent. The moon and stars were immensely bright, the breeze spoke to me.

Her “grow the F up” discipline was wonderfully innovative, and because of that I always could count on Nature when people did me wrong, or when I did wrong.

So back to that re-creation of self at 14. Because I had not agreed to my ‘deflowering’ I decided it simply did not count. I reclaimed Virginity, even though the practical matter of what had happened to my body was the opposite.

Cinema, Stories and Wrapping with Royalty.

Exactly 15 years later after that teenage reworking of self, I saw the movie Elizabeth with Cate Blanchett, and knew I wasn’t the only person who could own her difficult history and still rise. Elizabeth Tudor was a king’s child relegated into bastardry, exiled and protected all at once. Her formidable mother who lost her life to a confused king, because her body did not produce exactly what he wanted when he wanted it.

In the fictionalized movie account, Elizabeth Tudor took the throne after killing a whole bunch of courtly schemers, and married England to became a “Virgin Queen.” She did this in full view of the public, even though she had lovers and was not an actual virgin. No one was fooled.

This movie is another example of art and story (in the form of an outstanding film), being a mechanism of understanding and healing. For me, this movie also let me know the facility for choosing reinvention despite reality had been around for a long, long time.

And it is wielded best in the hearts and deeds of nearly every woman.

Elizabeth I reigned during the English Renaissance (1558–1603), which was a period often called England’s “Golden Age.” During this time the Arts lit up the culture and laid the foundation for the Age of Enlightenment.

Not bad for a ‘bastard,’ non-virgin, virgin Queen.

Anyone who has made it “through” trauma, illegitimacy, and darkness, has gifts that they can utilize in their life to support a better day. Whether perfect or not, with pedigree or fallen birth. It’s a natural fact: we get to call our lives as we wish to and can bend reality and the rules to suit our aims if they are true.

“Nature abhors a vacuum”
– Aristotle

FOOTNOTES & SUB-SUBTEXT

1. I throw this word “superpower” in here because the business-types love this jargon, later maybe I’ll tell you about being a “visionary” too. ↩︎
2. I honestly can’t stand this word “triggered” as a way to reflect the touching upon an associative experience, because so violent, but everyone seems to know what it means, so I’ll acquiesce to using it for now. ↩︎