Shake the Disease

At a certain point, your traumas can't be the only reason you are how you are. It's certainly true that the unresolved/unexamined ones can linger to the point where they really take the shine off family reunions. And I don't want to accidentally make the point/adopt the posture that "people should just be tougher" or "stop being such a little bitch." Those are American ways to put it, but we've valorized and weaponized the peculiarly British idea that "one just gets one with it." I'm certain there were plenty of people who totally lost their shit on a regular basis during the Blitz, but those aren't the ones who served the national mythology and they certainly aren't memorialized on a series of mass market novelty T-shirts. CAN THEY BE SAID TO EVEN HAVE LIVED?!

Everyone's got some kind of shit, to varying degrees. It's not necessarily that all life is awful,* but look at every other animal: hard-wired to be hyper-aware of threats to a) their lives, b) their ability to find food and c) their ability to procreate. We have that same mammalian limbic system with all the alarms set on a hair trigger in case something tells us we can't eat, bone or some combination of the two. When you're a kid (pre-boning age) it's more complicated because human babies are SO USELESS FOR SO GODDAMNED LONG, the "live" threat-response is pretty out of control. Everything seems like it can kill you, because it fucking can. Electricity, gravity, hot dogs, everything. And then we have the great benefit of language and technology, so we invented the public service announcement, the evening news and the ABC Afterschool Special to point out all the things that can fuck us up that we hadn't gotten around to thinking about yet.

It takes a while to get old enough to realize not every owner of every bike shop is going to try to kidnap you like that one did to Arnold and his friend Dudley on Diff'rent Strokes. The things that freaked you out will continue to freak you out, but as you age, you'll realize it's an autonomic response and put it in some kind of perspective, if you're lucky. That same language curse that makes us capable of existential dread is also available to get us through therapy, so it cuts both ways. I know dolphins are smart, but dolphins fucking wish. I shouldn't be so dismissive without looking into it though; dolphins might have better health insurance coverage than I do.

There's a balance to be struck with the people around you. Recognizing your own trauma can open up space for empathy and grace for those similarly afflicted (a demographic that includes basically all people). Some will jealousy guard the specialness of their wounds, but the best-case scenario is an extension of some patience when you recognize behavior comes from something other than the stimulus of the immediate circumstance. If the guy you're watching the game with is trying to pull the TV off the wall because his team is down by more points than he would like, it shouldn't be that hard to switch to "oh, this is probably some shit about his dad."

But there are limits to the patience and the empathy and the grace. There are those for whom their "broken-ness" defines them. For me, the limit has always been behavior: I can empathize, even sympathize, to a degree, but if it's my TV you're trying to pull off the wall, maybe we don't hang out anymore until you can get this triggerable animal fury on a shorter, sturdier leash? I'm not sure what the statute of limitations is exactly, and I'd be very resistant to trying to quantify a timeline for anyone's recovery, but there's a certain point where you're trauma is at least now 50% about what it is you're not doing about it.

This isn't about anyone really, except in all things when I think I'm making general points and approaching Universal Wisdom, I'm mostly just talking about me. I'm at the point where 50 is a very real, looming milestone in my life,** age-wise. Like I said, it comes down to behavior. It's not about just the darkness either, it's as much about the light. Your trauma-triggered impulses come out just as much in crying/rage/violence in outsize response to basically nothing as they do to resistance to/denial of the opportunities for expansion or development or even just exposure to an obvious, unalloyed good. There are always good reasons not to. They just don't have to be the most important ones, not forever.

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*That new Star Trek show has been pretty good so far.

**It would be cooler if I was talking about home runs or miles I ultra-marathoned or whatever, but as usual, it's just dumb feelings. Welcome to my blog.