The depictions of trauma are ascension stories and they make a lot of money. Vested capital controls the narrative of trauma and, in an oblique way, the narrative is an affirmation of trauma or an endorsement of it by its commodification. Trauma is treated as an asset or a virtue, one that is a mark of wisdom or as the material from which higher, previously unobtainable understandings of being are forged. Even in those that dismiss trauma, like many garbage right-wing ‘pundits’/’thought leaders’ (eww) and their aims to gaslight or, somehow, ‘rationally’ (lol) ‘disprove’ (lmao) a given person’s trauma with the seeming intent to minimize the effects of the violence that is the natural and desired outcome of their ghoulish agendas, their dismissal in turn supports the narrative that difficult passing through tremendous harm is also the passing through a sort of salvation. To pedestal trauma is to enable, in a way, its propagation. I think one would be hard pressed to find someone within the public sphere who wholly supports inflicting trauma (at least at surface face – there’s a litany of dogwhistles and policy for that), but one would be equally pressed to find it not regarded as an ablution to a deeper ‘Truth’. There is a possible seed of truth there – being forced to wrestle with the outside world in such a way could lead to perhaps a wider understanding of the world, but that is still the domain of a survivor and the definition of a survivor is a smaller circle within. What bubbles to the top in a rigidly controlled media climate is still yet an even smaller circle – gatekept by profit in a paradoxical way, as poverty is a huge impetus of trauma, poverty itself a version of systemic trauma. We are handed down from power a fetish of suffering – bootstraps for souls.
One positive outcome of our newly, complexly connected world is a greater ability to be informed of trauma and pain outside of individual experience and outside of a curated power structure – often gaining access to examples of how this power structure itself has crafted trauma, but this ‘insight’ is still within the clockwork of fetish, within the filter of ascension via pain. But also now with this exposure, that filter is slowly breaking, revealing how pointless pain is. The consolation prize of ‘becoming better through suffering’ is a false one. Most often, trauma inflicted is destroying and one does not recoup – and too, in a hellishly bleak manner, forms victims into mechanisms of trauma’s buildout. A victim is destroyed by trauma or is informed by it and turned abuser, which is a similar destruction.
Do not take this as an invalidation of suffering – your pain is valid, your experiences mean something and your journey is formative. But know the profitable narrative of trauma does it a disservice and ultimately works toward absolving abuse with wisdom as a booby prize to a wounded person. How easy is it to ignore horror if horror is presented as a key ingredient to growth? And then, how easy is it to perceive stability and comfort as the results of overcoming great horror – like somehow well-being is earned and a silent retcon of personal hardship must take place to justify it if met with someone suffering? To see a sufferer and to then make yourself into a sufferer as well, not as an ally but instead a judge sitting to sentence – this is a coy two-faced empathy, weaponized to escape moral injury by damning an assumed weakness. Is there a lurking arms race of value via suffering churning in the background, dehumanizing yet deifying?
Rising from an obliterating force as a keyholder to a deeper universal truth is myth. You are changed, forever, and there is context and timelines to try and frame trauma – but it is a senseless space, there is no value to trauma. The passage is not through but rather of weathering knotted guts until some enormous corpse rots enough to allow some picture of an outside only possibly reached by crawling just above crashing carrion. Trauma is, in a way, a forced reaction that paradoxically bars further reaction, leaving someone locked away into fragmented segments of time. It is a suspended state. At once, it cannot be left behind and it cannot be carried forward – a zeroed expanse, a senseless vacuum; one can live within it forever, within the sickly simulacrum of it, even as a reiteration of it unto new hosts. Our sole defense is often instinctive erasure of past personal cataclysm – and so with this, like a room distorting plainly in sight, those histories spring later, removed of context and we are freshly wounded. There are snares laid previous in hidden corners set to consume forward progress. It feels you relive trauma, but instead it is new-- under different lights, as if contaminated worse in each reflection. It is telling the we often think of trauma being something buried, as if a corpse or an artifact of prior existence. We also bury toxic waste. It is all of these things.
There is life before and life within – both of these construct a life after irrevocably different. There are blinkers that, no matter how much peripheral vision is restored, are still felt and seen ephemeral – like an image burned into a LCD, ghost traces across every new circumstance. The possibilities for pain have no limits on reserve and so maybe for healing as well. This kind of healing, though, is not regenerative – a restructuring or a removal to circumvent further illness? Yes, maybe, but not regenerative – nothing is the same.
I am lost on what to say, I’ve struggled to write this cleanly, which is almost fitting. It is apparent that I too am still inside of trauma’s giant corpse. That traps still lay yet ahead – and even if not, it seems a sure sign of trauma’s tampering that I expect the pitfalls to reveal before another hellish drop in the future. I think what is most important to take away from this is that trauma is not itself valuable and there are larger forces than any one of us that inflict trauma on a grand scale on countless people and it makes us bow to and become its machinery. Trauma is a tool for them and another tool is to convince us it is worth something. It is beautiful that we can somehow survive this thresher cycle but it is bullshit that we have to. Many do not and it does not have to be that way. I’ll end with a personal story (tw for abuse):
Almost two years ago, my father had disappeared to live in a van leased in my grandmother’s name. Lyn and I, through a series of grisly maneuvers, had gained custody of my then sixteen year old brother and that seemed to be the last grounding my father had to anchor him, so he took to the van. He left behind a trailer rented in my grandmother’s name with several months of back pay owed. This trailer was my teenage home, a single wide with a shoddy addition built into the back side. I had not been inside it in almost ten years but it seemed to stay inside me. It was irremovable from my internal landscapes and my most personal of enclosed logics. It is haunted, although I do not believe in hauntings.
My brother had yet to collect his personal effects from the trailer. The landlords emailed me to let me know soon they would be emptying the trailer out. Out of interest to make my brother comfortable and against Lyn’s judgments, we drove out to the trailer. I imagined there was something like closure there for myself.
Ten miles into cornfields, roads that wound seemingly removed from any other system of roads, roaring thick pockets of woods too dark to make out – we drove somewhere both dense and sparse. How remote this place is, where I lived. Of course I knew these turns, where each vein led to, it is something coded – and not worth a translation to another. A habit is a mental callus, I know this way in the dark and I would trade its callus for access to a more tender skin. I thought perhaps that could await me where these roads led.
A big hill plunged down to the mouth of the driveway, the only marker a mailbox. That was the first unfamiliar thing, the mailbox. My father had build a new one of wood, the varnish too thick, looking gummy and wet even in the night. The driveway was a half mile long, dirt and flanked into a tunnel by wild growth. It stabbed deeper into a nowhere, rising into a steep hill – my father would build speed quickly to crest it and I did the same. The foliage enclosure had overgrown the boundaries I remembered, oak and maple trees hung thin young branches of severe angles down as if they were willows, low enough to touch car roofs, there were inky spaces where the trunks were sure to be.
The landlord had a very small horse farm and the trailer sat in a corner of the sole grazing field, sectioned off with spiny metal posts strung with single lines of electrified wire. When we were younger, after minutes of fear-facing, we would make a fist around the wire, at first surprised that nothing happened then jerking our hands away when the jolt came. The shocks came in bursts on a delay timer and sounded with a small popping click; a bike leaned against it would have it click over and over for hours until the circuit was broken.
My dad had taken to collecting tacky yard decorations since last I’d been – gnomes, angels, fake pulley wells with shot sized buckets, dry docked water wheels, plastic roman columns, kitsch elves holding signs with affirming messages, bird baths. It had a nightmarish effect. Miniature runs of fencing cordoned off different parts of the yard into arbitrary areas with dimensions too small and ersatz. A maze you could walk over, more runes of a bizarre ritual than borders. The decorations crowded everything, too many placed into interrupted tableaus – some knocked over or abandoned before completion. Drastic landscaping had been done, shelves of flower beds full of trash, smashed up shrubs, saplings that barely cleared my head, liana plants sprawling unchecked and braided together in various stages of lushness and barrenness. The whole yard looked sick. Our car headlights threw complex shadows up the trailer’s siding.
A cab-less flatbed was piled with car parts and wreckage, bike frames and garbage bags. Two gutted cars sat a little distance away, one was the subaru I learned how to drive in and the other I did not recognize. Four disassembled window a/c units served as landmarks for me to follow as I made my way to the back door. The front was closed tight by a flat head screwdriver hammered through a deadbolt’s housing into the door’s frame. As I passed by the end of the trailer I saw the window to the room my middle brother and I had shared. I couldn’t see inside. It was a shallow, wide bay window with all three panes smashed out, slashed white trash bags breathing back and forth, heavily taped to one side of each jamb.
The backyard held the garden that my step mother and I built – my father claiming back injury, I worked it under threat for many years and have always hated it. It was full of broken furniture and obscure machinery now. Before the back door was a washing machine and dryer, ripped apart and overturned. I stepped carefully around coolers left open and full of captured green-black rain water. I pushed a dishwasher aside and the unlocked door opened enough to catch the wind and slam back over rusted hinges.
It was a tomb. I put on a dust filter mask and heard only my breathing. The power and water had been shut off three months earlier – I could only see a foot in front of me with a cellphone’s light, my glasses fogging as I breathed. I couldn’t quite believe what was happening. I crawled across trash piled to knee height. Toolboxes, smashed open stereos and dvd players and televisions. Grime streaked my clothes, my hands getting tar-y and black. Broken weed whackers, rolls of frayed and exposed extension cords, pieces of chairs, far flung couch stuffing. I crawled and felt consumed. Mirrors hung and leaned on the walls, shelf-less bookshelves, buckets and bottles and flattened cans, shattered votive candles, many lanterns. The room seemed to change and shift as I progressed, every movement of the cellphone like another die rolled and new shadows made. I smelled gasoline and mold and that’s all. When I got to the end of the attached room, where the trailer proper began, I just stood listening to stillness and my own huffing. The threshold was blocked by a stack of open cardboard boxes that nested in a lilt. They had my brothers and I’s old school papers in them. My dad had looked through them and left them.
To the right was the door to my father’s room and to the left was the rest of the trailer. I went to the kitchen/living room. They were divided the way most trailers are, with linoleum abruptly giving way to thin office building carpet. The floors were scuffed and parts heavily scorched, the carpet wadded in weird ways with asphalt-like stains. My father had added to the room; before there was just a counter separating the living room and kitchen and a counter beside the sink. Now there was an L-shape of hanging cabinets in the center of the kitchen suffocating the space, dozens of pots and pans dangling from it. One counter top was clear except for tea candles, torn apart flashlight and more lanterns – the other counters were piled with a wall of dirty dishes that touched the cabinet bottoms. A space next to the sink where a dishwasher once stood was packed tight with bloated garbage bags, hook ups for potable water jutted out. I lit the candles. A tote full of photo albums was tipped over on the floor, plastic picture sheets everywhere, single photos crushed up and scattered. The living room wall had two floor length mirrors on it. I used to play guitar in front of them, my electric squire unplugged and plinky. One of the mirrors was shattered now. There was the couch we had always had, the cushions missing. The last day my little brother and I lived together we had slept on that couch. He was six and I was sixteen. He fell asleep in my arms and I laid him on one end and I slept on the other, we shared a Wal-Mart plush blanket with a Dallas Cowboys logo and lots of skulls on it. I woke up to him crying, his mother screaming at him that she was sorry, her face unrecognizable with blood and swelling. My dad screamed shit from his room. She had her legs folded under her on the floor, saying sorry and sorry over and over again. I held him and he sobbed – my face hard, I hated her and I hated my father. I had felt like laughing. My father came in and smashed her head into the floor by the hair, rubbing her face into the carpet like a cigarette butt. He grabbed her by the legs and threw her outside. He locked the door and told me not to let her in, he broke the wall mounted phone so I couldn’t call anyone, then he went back to his room. I put my brother in his bed with headphones on and a Sufjan Stevens album and told him to turn it up really load. When I went outside to ride my bike into town, my step mother was flailing in a white dress, sitting in the snow as it turned red.
My little brother had finally managed to get into the trailer. He walked back to his room and got some things, he grabbed some things from the floor. He was completely unfazed. The state of things was not shocking to him. When he went back to the car with his stuff, I cried standing in my old home. How long had he lived in here? How long had he lived in this? Why didn’t anyone care?
Drying my face on the inside of my flannel shirt, I made my way back to our old rooms. The hallway wall had the hole I punched in it once and many new ones. More lanterns on the floor, all empty. A dresser was overturned with a mattress on top in the hall, I passed my little brother’s room. The door was in two pieces. Three beds were stacked in a tower with mismatched pillows and covers full of cigarette holes. A broken computer monitor sat on milk crates. The floor could not be seen over dirty clothes and gas station food wrappers. There was a bag of weed so molded that at first I did not know what it was. There were ten empty red gas cans and more exhausted lanterns.
I moved on and briefly looked over my middle brother and I’s old room. Our bunk bed was there, in pieces. Our dresser was there, as well as the spots where I carved ‘slayer’ and ‘modest mouse’ and ‘acab’ into the wood. So was the plywood footlocker I built, it too covered in band names I had sharpie-ed on – it was built crooked because it was a project my father and I worked on; I was blamed for the crookedness, though I neither measured or cut the wood. I didn’t open the locker. There were other things that were new, like the window glass covering the floor, the boxes full of speaker wire and coaxial cable. Again, more spent lanterns and gas cans.
The last room to go through was my father’s room. I was at the door awhile. I don’t know what I expected. My memory of him is in the room. Always. Sitting in darkness with the glow of a computer monitor and a cigarette cherry. Me in the doorway, receiving orders and dirty dishes and upsetting conversation – this dumb fucking man, sitting on slow internet, friendless, talking down to me. It is impossible to separate him and the room in my mind.
Inside was the resting place of a dead person. I have never been in a scarier place-- a permeable borderland between life and a blank abyss. Though I knew he was alive out in the world somewhere, I knew that this was where he died, and despite years and years of hate and anticipation, I was not happy. I felt soulless and cold. Black trash bags on the windows, the walls covered in mirrors and newspapers, the bed covered in boxes and papers and magazines. Used needles everywhere, thousands of them, blood dried in the plastic wells. Pill bottles emptied among garbage and clothes on the floor. Glass shards and vomit and piss, everything caked with muddy dust and mold. The bathroom in back had a wall of black mold growing from the toilet bowl and taking over the wall, dipping into the tub full of stagnant water. All the light fixtures ripped down and hanging. More and more lanterns. A thousand more needles. Under the bed Lyn and I found an old box from a school fund raiser pizza sale – it was twenty years old, I know because we never participated in any school fund raiser. What we found was my father’s life. Journals, intricately kept for years then stopped then continued. Sketch books full of drawings, getting better and better before ending, everything dated. There were old letters to my mother, to his mother, to my step mother, never sent. Apologies. Promises. Never sent. All of his medical paperwork – we sat piecing together his life via his rehab intake forms and his police reports. He was so sorry. He had tried to change and failed, over and over again, and he knew it. Years and years and years. And then, abruptly they stop. The story stops. Lyn and I looked at the spread out papers saying nothing. We boxed them up and put them in the car – now they sit in my basement in a sealed container and I don’t know if I will ever go through them again. Before we left, Lyn and I found a locked fireproof safe buried in the closet. Lyn looked through the desk and found a pill bottle with a small key and a flash drive in it. I threw the safe on top of the mess on the bed. Such insane anticipation built up between us. What could be in there? I put the key in and opened it. There was nothing inside. The files on the flash drive were too corrupted to recall.