From April in the desert
“Trauma response.” What is that? I feel like so many catchphrases are thrown around these days. But there is a visceral thing that happens in my body. Terror contained in my fascia … also a hot word these days. But maybe these are buzzwords because we’re realizing they need to be talked about. I’m having these responses, I’m feeling sheer panic in my body when I try to make a plan, to make a decision. To nail anything down. To pin myself to a map coordinate or a calendar sequence.
I’m flitting around like some college graduate without a plan. Giving their mother a heart attack back home. But I can not do it differently right now. I can not. I can’t even bring myself to say can’t. It’s not clear enough. I can not just keep going. On the same path. In the same way. I can’t seem to make plans more than a week out. I thought that was a byproduct of my life falling apart and me being scared to admit I wanted to rebuild it in a foreign foreign country. Not even a Western foreign country.
But I think it’s deeper than that. I think it’s a revolt against being told who I am and what I’m allowed and who I can speak to and where I can go. And what my life should look like. It was locked. It was perfect. From the outside. And inside I was a hundred different layers of suffocated. By my own doing I suppose. From doing what I was conditioned to want. Listening to everything around me. How to Build a Life: The Right Way.
Little me never wanted any of that crap. Little me laughed at her peers that were so excited to grow up because even then I knew it was a trap, and I could never understand the allure of it. If we could be anything we wanted when we grew up, I was going to be a Native American and live in a teepee and ride horses on the plains and wear dresses made of deerskin and leave this crazy modern life behind. When I discovered that reality wasn’t what I read in my books, it was the first and biggest heartbreak of my life. I only knew I wanted what I thought they had, and it wasn’t reality. My heart still longs for that childhood dream. I think there are shattered pieces of my heart I still haven’t recovered, and I think I’ve been trying to reconcile that ever since…the realization that I was in fact trapped in this modern life. I couldn’t go off into the woods and write like Thoreau. I believe my mother still carries the scars of the memory of where she was standing when I told her it was my life’s longing to disappear into the woods. As though I was admitting to wanting to be an opium addict. Anyway, I thought my inability to commit to a plan was a reaction to not wanting to commit to a life that I didn’t want anymore. But maybe it’s been deeper than that.
Maybe all these feelings resurfacing and reverberating through my body are a good thing. Maybe my body just needed me to make enough space on the map, to throw away the calendar so there is air and space to reconnect with those childhood longings for what life could be. Maybe it’s a shedding. A shaking off. A release. And I can lean into it. I can thank my body for giving me a map through these fears lodged inside it. So maybe I can sit with it all and thank these “trauma responses,” these dreams and fears and heartbreaks held in my fascia, held by my body to keep me safe. I can use them now as signposts for How to Build a Life: My Way.
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