I’d so hoped to be writing about the joy I felt last Saturday, when I grabbed my Biden sign, held it over my head and went shouting down the street, “They won, they won!” but that elation was short-lived.
The next days have been traumatic.
Two nights ago, I finally finished reading Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey. It’s a brilliant memoir that tells of how her stepfather shot and killed her mother 35 years ago, of how she tried to forget and separate herself from that horrific life event for all those years, but could not. It took writing the book to finally help her recover.
Although I highly recommend Memorial Drive, my intention in this post is not to tell you more about it, but of how it pushed me to see even more clearly how we are all bound in a collective trauma right now.
I know trauma. From my therapy practice, from the girls and women in my writing groups, from the many losses in my own long life.
I know the damage it does, the difficulty of recovering from it, the continuing struggle to learn how to carry it differently.
In her 1992 groundbreaking book, Trauma and Recovery, Judith Lewis Herman says this:
Psychological trauma is an affliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters. When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities. Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection and meaning.
“When the force is that of other human beings we speak of atrocities.” I dare to say, we are living in a communal atrocity right now. The “other human beings” are, quite simply, Trump and his Republican enablers.
Susan Glasser writes in this week’s The New Yorker:
At times, during this unnerving week in America’s capital, it has felt as though we were watching events unfold in Minsk or some other dictator stronghold where elections are not stolen the day votes are cast but in the weeks afterward, as the defeated President holes up in his palace, defying reality and increasingly urgent crowds in the streets. Here in Minsk-on-the-Potomac, Trump has been perpetrating the Big Lie, claiming the election was stolen from him and apparently persuading millions of Americans to go along with this evidence-free fantasy.
“When the force of that is nature, we speak of disasters.”
The COVID time in which we live now. The almost 250,000 deaths, the increasing cases and hospitalizations, many of which are caused by Trumpian fury at being told what to do—maskless super-spreader gatherings, resistance to wearing masks at all, insistence on living life as usual with bar nights and indoor restaurant meals, family gatherings for holidays, weddings, birthday parties---these stunning refusals to adhere to CDC guidelines are putting so many more lives at risk.
The nation is entering its third, and potentially most dreadful coronavirus surge.
The virus is spreading everywhere.
Just writing these words feels traumatizing.
My family and I follow the rules, though that stings too; we will not have Thanksgiving together this year, tradition now of 25 years at our home. Too dangerous. Christmas will not happen either and how that aches. Two of my grandchildren are having what should be fun, interactive and fulfilling years at college, one remotely and the other masked and mostly sequestered in a dorm room. Now that the weather has chilled there will be no more outdoor gatherings with our son and our friends for many long months. At 78 and 79, my husband and I are in the vulnerable group, so we go few places and pretty much stay home.
It will be a lonely winter.
And the trauma is ongoing. Every day there is a new insult, a new knife to our hope that Joe and Kamala can begin to take over the reins of government, get the daily briefings and meet with the transition teams, bring our country back to some balance, if not normalcy.
So what can we do? I wrote this to a friend the other day:
We cannot let this man take over our lives, our outrage at him fill our heads and push away goodness and health from our hearts. It’s crazy time, for sure, but we don’t have to be crazy too.
Easier said than done.
And getting harder every day.
After my son died, a friend who’d also lost a child offered me some important advice, though it was hard to take, in the very dark vortex of the trauma in which I was immersed and didn’t really want to leave. She told me of her experience: that sometimes allowing distraction from her shattering reality was the thing that most helped her get through the days.
Staying balanced was not even vaguely possible for me at that time, but a short walk was. Sitting outside in the sun was. Crying on the shoulder of a consoling friend was.
Small diversions, but they did offer temporary ease.
Acknowledging the truth of my situation, instead of denying or pushing it away was an important part of the healing that would come much later, as it will for us. Telling the story of how my son died, over and over, was a critical part of that healing as it has been for many trauma survivors and will be for many of us. I became a writer because of it.
But for now, I guess I’m sending you and myself the same messages I’ve been trying to convey with all of these blog posts—be aware, very aware, of what is happening to yourself and the country, stay informed, yes, but find and use those distractions and diversions. They will keep you from the edge of despair.
Try to limit intake of news, get outside into the natural world as much as possible, connect with friends, make soup, do yoga, play board games, donate to Ossoff and Warnock (Georgia senate run-off), rake leaves, get a puppy, buy a new sweater.
The healing can and must wait.
It’s permissible to feel all right about not spending every moment in outrage or regret, worry or panic about the future. More will be revealed as the days move on, but we cannot now know what those days will bring.
Be okay with that.
I’m trying.
Another possible distraction: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/author-talk-with-sharon-charde-tickets-115756612143
I’m doing a talk for the Torrington Library on Thursday about my book, I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent; I know many of you have listened to my other talks and interviews, and I so appreciate that, but I’d love to see some of you there---I could really use the support.
Thank you, dear friends.
Love,
Sharon