What does trauma look like?
Did they expect me to be dirty, unkempt, openly weeping or bleeding?
Did they expect me to look like a tubercular opera heroine, with circles around my eyes as dark as my thin gown, coughing sputum into a handkerchief?
Appearances can be defensive armor, can be attractive lies, can be coping devices, can be con games.
I am reminded of a scene in Nadine Burke Harris’ The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity (Mariner Books 2021). Attending a dinner with rich wives of Silicon Valley executives to raise money to address Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and their lifelong impact on health, Burke Harris finds that the privileged women prepared to donate to her cause have plenty of trauma in their own lives; their trauma is just different from that suffered by the poor. ACEs are equal opportunity: everyone suffers, it’s no use comparing, we all suffer in different ways.
Looking back on experiences that retraumatized me, I ask myself, Should I have done something differently? Should I come with a warning sticker or a skull and crossbones tattooed on my forehead? If people don’t treat me with common decency or with common sense, and as a result, hurt me, what should I do to preempt damage?
Provide a brief synopsis of my life so people, if they don’t don kid gloves, at least leave aside the brickbats when they approach me? Should I force people with mistaken assumptions to read my writing? Simultaneous enlightenment and punishment?
Complexity frustrates many. Confronting it, many people in power reduce the people who depend on them to types or caricatures or summaries that skim the surface like a seabird who doesn’t catch any fish.
Diving is arduous but adventurous; there is always the risk of drowning while seeking riches in the depths.
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