2024-05-26 | 10:50:08 AM
It’s a rainy morning today. My thoughts come jumbled, as per usual, but the weather prods me on to think about and feel my emotions deeper than I usually do. The rain trickling on the glass door reminds me of the moments when I would observe the mundanities of life, thinking they are exactly what made life beautiful. One morning I found myself in my condominium’s elevator, supposedly going back up to my unit from the local grocery. A lady walks in, possibly a mother, holding a baby on a baby carrier. The baby was small, and one peculiar thing he had was his head. As I glanced on his parietal lobe, I can’t help but notice it moved, like the surface of the baby’s skull moved up and down to a beat — perhaps it was a synchronized with his heart; I immediately thought about how delicate this being was, and that we all needed to care for it, as much as possible, and shield it from the world we live in.
Although I didn’t know the scientific/medical reason for the beating motion in the baby’s skull, it’s almost as if its very existence made me want to care for the baby. Some of it could be my human instinct to care for an offspring, but most of it, I suppose, is because I know just how cruel the world could be.
Last night I was recounting stories from my childhood to my girlfriend. Just this morning I thought it’s unbelievably cruel for a child to go through what I had gone through. And so I want to give myself compassion for all the times that I veer away from what people may describe as “the usual.” In a way, the peculiarities of my childhood had multiplied across multiple dimensions of my being — my adulthood is sick from the cancerous trauma I’d experienced in my younger years.
I hope we could see trauma the way we see other sicknesses — that the effects of it aren’t so much wanted as it is repulsed by the one who’s sick. It’s almost uncontrollable for someone afflicted by the flu to cough, it’s inevitable that a person with diarrhea would go on to pass his bowel multiple times a day, oten at the cost of a lot of his energy and bodily resources. The same way, I would argue, could be told about someone who’s suffering from bouts of his trauma. There are times he would explode, break down, cry, scream, shout, but none of those are wanted by him, as they are symptoms of his ‘sickness.‘
I know very little about the literature of trauma to even harp about how I think it should be viewed, but I remain perpetually curious about how we might live in a society where we become increasingly more accommodating, empathetic, and understanding of people who continually suffer from the effects of events that they’ve had little control over.
Trauma is not my fault:
My trauma isn’t my fault, but the consequences of the trauma I carried were all things I had to deal with on my own. Which hurt like a bitch, because I know for a fact I shouldn’t be doing all these extra work (emotional, spiritual, physical, what have you), hadn’t it been for the things that were done to me in my past.
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