Trauma is a weird thing

News today that the carnage that caused me to leave my last institution appears to have found yet another victim, someone I’d call an acquaintance rather than a friend, but still, someone whose office was on my hallway for a long time and who I saw every other day for several years. She’s not the first casualty since my departure nor, one suspects, will she be the last.

***

My mother took a picture of me toward the middle of graduate school. She showed it to me the last time I was home. I’d just ended my relationship with the physicist — the last year of it was brutal and emotionally scarring — and was headed to Germany in two weeks. In the photo, I’m sitting outside, eating a piece of cantaloupe and I have a sort of simultaneously flirtatious and delighted look in my eyes as I look at the melon. On the back, she wrote the date, and “Servetus smiles for the first time in a year.” (She didn’t ever like that boyfriend much.) Today I was holding my office hours at the campus S***b**** and was chatting with a student and had a really good feeling, and I realized when I said goodbye to him that I had a big smile on my face, a smile that felt like that one. I thought of that picture then, and thought, “I’m smiling again. I’m capable of smiling with my whole face, with eyes, and everything else in me.” כֹּ֣ל הַ֭נְּשָׁמָה תְּהַלֵּ֥ל יָ֗הּ. It’s that kind of feeling. I’ve been having it off and on for a few weeks now.

I feel a little guilty when I smile like that, and sad that I haven’t done it for so long, but mostly I feel happy. That I can smile. That they didn’t kill that off, at least. What a relief. Servetus is still here. The more often I have that feeling, the more often I think that what I’m living through now could actually be real.

***

And yet — my physical visceral reaction when I hear the news also feels just as real.

Watching the continued train wreck from a distance might be interesting in the morbid way that disaster footage on the Weather Channel is, if it were buildings in the path of the juggernaut and not the careers of people I know well and care about. Presumably many of them — if they haven’t been so soured on everything by their time on the train as I was — will go on to other, equally good, even better things elsewhere. We are all are highly qualified people with significant achievements to our names.

Though I’m sympathetic, it would be presumptuous of me to assume that they have the same reaction to what’s happening as I did. And anyway, I think it’s not about them. It’s about me. When I see this same thing happening again, it’s like it’s happening to me all over again. I feel nauseated. I feel like the space right behind the root of my nose is going to explode. My major muscle groups seize up and I experience the simultaneous need to run away and the inability to move. My heart pounds and my face flushes. My jaw clenches even as my gorge rises.

I care about them. And yet I can’t. The father of a friend there died — a friend who stayed, and thinks what is happening is just — and I can’t bring myself even to call. I’d like to say I’m letting this train crash except that it feels like the trains are crashing without my initiative, as I continue to watch, bizarrely fascinated. Fascinated or paralyzed? I can’t say. The people at that institution are my friends. And they are also my destroyers. I have to know and don’t want to. I want to look away and can’t. And try as I might to keep my face empty and my eyes dead when I talk about this, as I did for an hour with Pesky this afternoon, my body betrays me. It doesn’t want this — it doesn’t want even the memory of it. Pesky notices and says, “Hey, it’s ok. You don’t have to talk about this. You are not required to relive it all the time.” Except I do. My body won’t stop reliving it. There’s been other evidence of this problem recently, most significantly odd, pointless crying, but this afternoon it becomes patently clear. This is not a full-fledged panic attack of the type I had when I was stuck back there. It’s not so bad as that. But it’s still extremely disturbing.

This is Servetus, post-trauma. Smiling and crying. Courageous and afraid. Coming and going.

***

Coming and going: but not immobile. I do dare disturb the universe. At least I can rock my own world.

My response this afternoon: at all costs, when this happens, I have to prevent my senses from closing down. I think that was part of what was happening during the bad time — I had shut down certain sensory receptors for a long time because the input was so painful, and then I couldn’t ever manage to get them open again. The only way to keep working there was to force myself to deny what I was actually experiencing, but that meant I to stop really experiencing most things except in the most superficial way. Somehow watching Richard Armitage reminded me how to feel. Or even just TO feel.

The solution, for now the right response to remembered pain, is not to suppress the pain. It has to be to intentionally overwhelm the receptors with positive inputs. The most cheerful, percussive music I can find, at the highest volume, to drown out the bad thoughts. As many clips of Richard Armitage as possible watched back-to-back until my muscles relax. An espresso drink steaming up, pressed right under my noise until my breathing is regular and “coffee!” is all my brain can think. Something really sweet or really sour in my mouth that keeps me swallowing and animates those pleasure centers. Shaking my head to the music till I’m good and dizzy.

It’s remembered pain, not pain per se, and certainly not feeling itself, that’s bad. I can’t let myself shut off. If I’m going to keep writing, I have to keep feeling.

~ by Servetus on October 29, 2011.