an eternal homecoming: life after excising trauma.

TW: Discussions of childhood trauma, suicidal ideation, and PTSD.

Trauma steals from you the scale of life outside of yourself. Being able to understand your size within the community, and within society and the world at large. Knowing you’re not alone, and you’re not the first to traverse the path. Being able to understand and appreciate the contributions of others from a non-distorted lens of pain, and distrust.

Trauma is ever-present, and it keeps you focused on yourself. In some part, your PTSD is running your brain, keping you alert to your own survival and doing whatever it takes to make you own that responsibility.

One of the most uncomfortable things in life (to me) is selfishness out of proportion. Trauma is the way your body hijacks you to become a tool for your survival, the most selfish and innate desire of it all.

It’s a primal possession — one you don’t have a choice of participating in.

Modern life can make us forget is that survival is eternally consuming. In a common day, you touch (and are touched) by many different people.

The items in your house were sewn, packaged, stocked, scanned, and put up by different hands. Nothing you’ve seen knows you alone.

For most reading this, you don’t go to hunt your food in the morning. You do not make your own clothes, nor build your own house. You are a recipient of the gifts and labor of people far from you, and who you have never met.

But when you’re faced with trauma, especially at an early age, you don’t get the luxury of being able to see past the veil of survival. You are just triggered, overwhelmed, anxious, hypervigiliant, or burned out.

Survival is consumption of everything, and consistent consumption demands overwhelming mental resources. Many things do not sink in, or make sense.

You maybe aren’t able to study as well, because you were looking into shelters last night. Who gives a fuck about college if you don’t know if you’ll survive to see the SAT?

There is a rather large chunk of my life for which I was asleep to the greater world, in service of staying alive in my own world.

I don’t remember most, or really anything that I learned in school. I don’t remember the details of friendships, or people I’ve met. I have a very hard time understanding the passage of time, and realizing the difference between 2 weeks ago and 7 years ago.

When people ask me about how I grew up — I can’t tell them. It’s a part of my life completely separate from me. It replays in nightmares almost every night, but EMDR therapy has created a wall between me and it.

My trauma has fundamentally, in service of keeping me alive, kept me from knowing how to live, and appreciating what it means to be alive.

When you’re suicidal and tidal waves of trauma engulf you — you don’t really imagine your life has much value. What can you remember from it? You’ve held onto nothing so far — what’s worth holding onto?

You are so wrapped up in moving forward, you have no ability to recognize what blooms around you in your place.

When I get overwhelmed, I go watch planes. If you ever plane spot at PDX, you may find yourself in my company. I sit on top of my car, and I wave to each plane that takes off and lands (except private jets, those get a different hand gesture).

I don’t think anyone will ever see me, but I would like to imagine that somewhere in someone’s life — they see a wave and they know they’re being watched over by someone who cares for them.

I find the scale of planes and airports themselves to be absolutely fascinating. Down from ticketing, to TSA, to boarding and planes themselves, I sit at airports as a modern testament to what we can do at scale. How machines, cold and metal as they are, become alive and vessels of the people within them.

I go watch planes to remember what it’s like to know life at scale. Something that was taken from me. When I was growing up, I didn’t give a shit about people flying in the planes above.

Being able to remove my triggers enough to live a normal life is a gift I was given by the person who developed EMDR therapy. My survival is not my accomplishment alone.

Now, as I age — I begin to uncover the scale of life. I begin to realize how incorrect I was about wanting to take my own life. Not because it would hurt others. Not because Astra would probably die. But because there is a beautiful world, with so many things to see. And I almost lost it.

Today, I listened to a podcast about cancer and learned about a mediport. For those who don’t know, it’s a catheter that goes into someone’s vein, and then has a port attachment so those undergoing chemotherapy don’t have to get poked all of the time.

I stood around in wonder for a bit after it ended. What a beautiful invention. What a sad world it would be if I wasn’t around to know about that invention. How many other beautiful creations would I have missed?