Surviving Trauma

I can feel it. I think we are on the cusp of a moment.

I don't know if the moment is premature, and if we will regret our decisions to have this moment, or if we are right, and it is like a bear instinct, knowing when spring has arrived and that it is safe to come out, to crawl out of the hole we have been in , the hole we dug so deep into the ground.

After two years of a pandemic, and after two years of panicking, testing, distancing, masking, imposed isolation,  self-quarantining, intubating, and burying our dead, are we thinking maybe this is behind us? 

Maybe we have survived.

*****

I know this feeling so well. I know what happens when you have been through the thick of trauma, the honey-like, swamp-like, quicksand sticky drowning feeling of trauma, and then...

The immediate threat that has kept you curled up in a fetal position, crying every night, with your stomach in knots, afraid that you are going to be beaten down by that thing... you feel it subsiding. You stay tight in your defense position way longer than you need to. Of course you do. You want to be sure. You've spent a long time with your knees to your chest, making yourself as small as you can be, trying to be the smallest target possible. 

You know you can't ever be sure the threat is fully gone but you know you need to be sure it is, but you know you can't ever be sure but you need to try to be sure, you really need to try to be sure. Is it gone? Is it really, really gone?

And once it has been quiet long enough for you to hear your own voice without it getting caught up in your throat, once your larynx has had enough time to relax without needing to retighten itself again and again and again, you begin to unfold yourself.

And after you unfold yourself - your arms from in front of your chest, and you knees from your ribs, and your forehead from your hands - after you unfold yourself successfully, and only if there is still no threat, no need to snap back from a star into a ball - you begin to walk again. Slowly.

I know this moment. 

I know the perennial clench of going through trauma, and I know the fear of the slow release that follows. 

Once you unfold yourself, and you've stood up, and you've walked, maybe even just to the kitchen sink to feel the warm water on your hands, you want to try again. You want to walk until you can run, and once you can run you want to generate a fierce wind with the fastness of your body. You want to run back to the exact location where you were before the blow of trauma knocked you over and put you into lockdown, and you want to find that you and be the you that you were before fear took over and paralyzed you in your place.

But you can't be, can you?

We can't be, can we?

Even when we release, even when we stand up, and walk, and then try to run or skip or dance, it has become our deep instinct to curl, to clench, to ball up, to protect ourselves. We are ready, all the time, because we know the pain that we have felt, and we want to be prepared for when it comes again.

When you've been through it, that sudden, devastating moment that caught you so off guard in its pain, you know, you know, you know, you know there's a good chance it will come again, and you always, always need to be ready for the hurt.

It is not a return to before. It is a cautious step, a cautious run, a cautious dance. 

But at least you did survive.

At least we did survive. Right?