Trauma and Time

And Thanksgiving--

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

I was talking to my students about how Thanksgiving is often called a Day of Mourning for American Indians because of the genocide and destruction of their way of life and land theft.

Mourning and Thanksgiving is also something I am feeling now—as we approach the Thanksgiving holiday.

I’ve written about it before, the weirdness and surreal, disoriented state of the passing of time when you are traumatized.

But it’s usually done from the start of 2020—the COVID year and the year my mom died, my brother died and I had my second miscarriage.

However, the other day, I was thinking about how it has been nine years since my dad completed suicide. October 29, 2015.

I had to do a little math to calculate how old I was then—32.

I stopped and took that in.

And I think it’s because of how many years I spent in a state of shock.

The thing about his death was not even the event itself—which was horrific enough, but it was the shock waves, the reverberating effects it sent through the family, the next few years—

up until the deaths of my brother and my mother.

I was thinking about the multiple ways that my mother’s major depression worsened.

I thought how many times she went in and out of the hospital and rehab centers—as we would see her perk up, only to return to her own ways of living and self-destructive habits like smoking, and end up right back there again.

I’m very thankful that I was able to still finish my doctoral program, to complete my dissertation and find a job.

But it wasn’t easy to constantly be concerned about her.

And, if I’m quite frank, it made it a lot less fun.

Some may think well, a doctoral program probably isn’t that much either, but I enjoyed it—

I wanted to be there. I am a nerd that way and I love to study and write and read. And it really felt like the experience was changed for me.

I spent so much time during that time period on auto-pilot and then, afterwards, in therapy, trying to understand my own repression of feelings—

And that’s what I came up with the other day—

How much more 30s—arguably a time when most people are starting careers and families and buying homes—

How much of that time was addressing family issues of trauma—

Then, my own residual wounds of maladaptive coping mechanisms of alcohol abuse and repressed feelings.

I have been thinking about my family in the recent days, as I hear my students complain about their family members. I never want to be the know-it-all person who says—appreciate the annoying grandma or pestering mom—they won’t always be around. But it is true.

But—it’s also not that simple.

I remember feeling a great sense of relief when they were all dead. Devastated. Grief-stricken. Heart-broken. In. mourning—yes, but also—

They suffered so and were unable to make better choices for themselves and it was hard to watch them dissolve into patterns of self-destructiveness for years.

My life may be a lot more lonely these days, but it is also much, much more calm.

And I am self-reliant and honest with myself that—

I’m all I’ve got and I’m determining my own path of cycle breaking.

It’s a solitary one but it’s also at least a self-directed and sovereign one—

For many years it was not/could not be that.

And as fucked up as it sounds, I am thankful for that this Thanksgiving.

Photo by Kaffeebart on Unsplash