Trauma Awakenings.

Last night, I slept in a jail cell.  Not because I was arrested, but because right now I’m traveling through Canada, on the “up” route (as I call it), creeping my way North from my home in Detroit – which sits oh so conveniently on the Canadian border.  I embarked without much plan, and through a (not-so) random sequence of events, have found myself in an old jail converted into a hostel in Canada’s capital city of Ottawa.  The jail was built over 150 years ago, shut down in 1972, and repurposed into a hostel just one year later. 

I didn’t sleep a freakin’ wink in that cell, and although I was sharing it with 3 other young women, no one spoke a word.  I found my way to the front desk at 5am, intention’ing to weasel my way out of a second night, to be informed of the fact that they have actual rooms too – big ones with windows, and not just tiny, dark, lifeless cells (which they assign out first for authenticity’s sake). And to my great fortune, tonight, I’ve been upgraded.  And although it was a rough night as far as sleeping goes, my one night in a cell did transformative things for me.    

I left for Canada the day after my birthday.  And it’s all becoming quite significant, as I was searching, asking, and seeking the higher purpose of a journey that I knew I needed to take.  

I cried myself to sleep the night before I turned 27, and awoke to so much pain and sadness in my heart, that I continued to weep with out much control for the next several hours into my morning.  As the reason for my sadness felt connected to more recent events, the extent of my sadness indicated otherwise.  I went to my studio to paint, where the tears continued to flow and my heart continued to ache. 

And then Mandy called to wish me a happy birthday. 

Mandy and I met in a Mysticism class in college.  In our early conversings, we discovered that we were signed up for the same study abroad program for the upcoming summer, and spent a month hopping around Greece together, letting each other in on our deepest fears and confused dreams of being fresh in our adulthood.  I was attracted to Mandy because she understood pain.  She had an intimate connection with suffering that you don’t see very often in white, middle-class, college-aged people, and there was something to her depth and her stories that I found interesting and comforting for reasons I didn’t really understand at the time.  Up unto that point, my own connection with suffering was more than the average person of my immediate peer group understood, and it was about to become much more immense as my mom’s sudden death hit just a few months after the Greece trip.  Mandy arrived just in time.    

When she called the other morning and heard distress in my voice, she didn’t coddle it, didn’t hide from it, didn’t try and make it go away.  She knew it too well as her own to do any of those things.  Instead, we talked in great depth about the ways

in which we are constantly confronted with the fundamental traumas of our past.  My personal experience with trauma is rooted in loss and emotional neglect.  Mandy’s recurrent trauma is violence.  Mandy doesn’t know so much about loss, and I don’t have much of a grip on violence, but we both share an understanding of the range of feelings and emotions that accompanies suffering.  We have an all too familiar relationship with grief, and it’s devastating, almost paralyzing, effects.  We also have a heightened sensitivity to joy and a deep appreciation for times of peace.  We get the way that life ebbs and flows, waxes and wanes, transitions and transforms, and we get that when our traumas come back to pay us a visit, it’s because we still have work to do, and that if we do the work, our happiness will prevail.  

And so that birthday morning, Mandy and I discussed in great length the ways in which our traumas continue to reappear for the sole purpose of becoming resolved.  When Mandy was 11, she was strangled and left on the floor, and in the time surrounding that incident, she was physically  and verbally abused.  When she was a little older, she was beaten up by some random ass crazy lady on the street.  In order to cope with her feelings of powerlessness, she started taking classes in martial arts, most recently Jiu Jistu.  She now lives in Washington DC, a city with a lot of economic inequality, crime being a result, and one night a couple of weeks ago pulled out her phone to make a call half a block from her house when a young man attempted to rob her at gunpoint.  Mandy looked him directly in the eye, and screamed and yelled from her very depths, and while doing so, recognized something that she understood quite well in her perpetrators eyes. She saw his fear. And just like that, he turned around and bolted for his own damn life.  Mandy still has her i-phone, and more importantly, she has her power.  At 25, she has quite literally had a face-off with the violent trauma that is generations deep.  Mandy is taking responsibility to resolve that shit.  Because really, no one else is gonna do it for her.      

Because my trauma has to do with loss and neglect, I’ve been subconsciously working on resolving mine by moving and traveling to places where I don’t know a single soul.  When I do this, I’m confronted with my deepest fear – loneliness and isolation.  And as it goes, I will find myself in many moments of fear, sometimes brief, sometimes extended, yet it’s always a mere matter of time before I’m connected with just the people I need, and who also seem to need me too.  The fluctuation of experiencing hints of my deepest fear and finding emotional safety is something that I encounter often, but it becomes more condensed while journey’ing, which gives me the opportunity to examine and work through that process with a greater sense of courage and awareness.

As I laid awake in that rickety bunk bed, trying not to toss and turn too much, as my cell-mates seemed not to have a problem slumbering as detainee impersonators, I was inundated by thoughts of true isolation.  What it would be like to be forever disconnected from the people you love, people in general, and the outside world all together.  And suddenly I felt that the grief I feel so deeply and so often is not just my own.  It’s a collective sadness for the social conditions that keep us separated and scared of love and connection.  I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the abundance of love I do have in my life (which was so beautifully verified in the evening of my birthday, much praise to those who came out), and how my greatest fear has turned loving relationships into my greatest priority and because of that, I’m okay.  And I will always be okay, because I don’t see that changing any time soon. 

And so I journey these weeks to work on reconciliation.  A resolve that probably won’t be achieved in my travels, but a resolve that is now much more intentional than it has ever been, and with that comes a certain surrender with immense healing power.  And because of the collective consciousness that we all in some way or another energetically share, my healing is your healing, and your healing is mine.  And identifying and owning our traumas is a really big step toward healing ourselves and each other.