Pieces of Writing I Have Found Helpful During This Weird Time
I read a lot. Reading provides me with both escape from the world, as well as, a way to understand it. I wanted to share a few pieces of writing I have found helpful in processing and moving through this weird fucking time of year. I hope they provide some comfort to you as well.
In The Dark by Zofia Reych
Are You Willing by Fannie Priest
Its Not All Trauma, by Jane Clapp
It’s not all trauma despite what the current zeitgeist proclaims.
We do not arrive in these bodies incarnated into blank slates, tabula rasa.
Not all of our pain has roots in trauma.
Not all pain is traumatic.
Not all of our relational struggles can be explained by what happened to us.
Not all of our shadow is created by trauma.
Not all of our complexes are created by traumatic events or traumatic relationships.
Not all hurt people hurt people.
Not all of our physical illnesses are caused by trauma. This is a harmful narrative.
Heading into the holidays, we might try to rationalize the way our families behave or treat each other based on their childhoods. We try to make sense of struggles by looking backward through a logical lens. However, we are not purely rational or logical creatures.
When we try to make sense of things through a rational lense of cause and effect, we negate the fact we are also nonrational creatures. We operate outside logic so much of the time.
When we work through the impact of trauma, we start to see that not all of our pain and struggles have their roots buried in trauma waiting to be excavated and cured.
We cannot be explained away that way.
We are far more than that. We are more of a mystery than we might like to think.
When the symptoms of traumatic stress abate, we might start to contact the most essential truth of the human experience.
We might find that our trauma history has been the bulk of our identity and when we move through our symptoms, there’s a big space left open for becoming.
It’s hard to live in this liminality of becoming, of not knowing where we are going when we have left that place we have been.
We might experience an existential crisis when we see our identity is more than our history.
We are all a mix of light and dark.
We aren’t nearly as good or bad as we might like to think.
We start to be able to hold ourselves in our complexity.
We see that the human experience is often fraught whether we have a trauma history or not.
We might piece together our histories yet we start to own our agency.
We own the ways we might have been victimized but we don’t live in a victim complex.
This is trauma work.
It’s not a cure.
The struggles involved in the human experience cannot be ‘cured’.
Over the holidays, I suggest people treat time with difficult family members like being cultural anthropologists. Watching and observing, not necessarily stepping right in. Taking a hawk-eye view of things. Truly seeing what is happening in the now and noticing the flow of energy both inside of us and around us.
When we sit back a bit and research and gather data, we start to see objective reality more and are less driven by subjective reality that might be influenced heavily by the collective or by narratives that no longer apply.
This is my parting message for 2023.
I look forward to more sharing and interacting next year.
With love,
Jane
Be as well as you can be,
In solidarity,
Jessi