trauma

When you hear the word trauma, perhaps images of flashing lights, hospital rooms, tears, and police reports come to mind.  Emotions run thick, fear and anger and sadness.

What happens, then, when you experience trauma... and don't recognize it as such?

I am acutely aware of the people walking by around me who are hurting.  You can see it in their faces.  In hollow eyes, in gaunt cheeks, in stoic expressions.  But more often than not, there are people who carry the hurt deep within themselves.  It has not surfaced.  Tucked deep and away from sight.

Perhaps we have hidden the hurt intentionally.  To keep from exposure.  To keep from being found out.

But what if it has been hidden because we just never realized how much it actually hurt?  What if we gave it a different name, walked away from it, and it lingered... without our permission.  Settling deep.

It takes someone else to take a look.  To examine this thing you've mislabeled.  To give it a new name.

A new name, however, means a new kind of hurt.  The kind of hurt you avoided when you put it away in the first place.

A new name means fighting a battle you thought you'd successfully avoided.

And taking a long, hard look at something that's festered deep within yourself.  Acknowledging what has hurt you, something that is ugly.

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I may have experienced this misnamed trauma.

Let it settle deep with in me, like sediment.

Subconsciously I was aware of what it led to.  I saw the repercussions of the hurt, saw the effects of the defeat.

I made conscious decisions that today I can link directly back to a night on Clay Avenue.

The place, the night, I lost my hope.

Today I have a story far different than any I thought I'd ever have to tell.  And while I have been in control enough to have chosen differently, there is a deeper seed of hurt that is spurring me on.

But you feel the tinges of the pain and push it down.  Don't feel it.  Don't feel it.


I have effectively desensitized myself.  To avoid emotions at all cost.  Unfortunately, avoiding one emotion often means avoiding them all.  Somehow, pain and joy are connected.  In some way, anger and peace are intertwined.  To feel one,  you must have to feel them all.  What a paradox.

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In the misty glow of the streetlights, the keys hit the pavement.  Voices taper off as CLOSED signs illuminate.

My name is carried to my ears and I have just enough time to turn around.

I am small.  Never realized how small, until faced with something -- someone -- entirely bigger and stronger.

Not fear.  But pure anger.

The word unfair plays around in my mind, even though I've never truly believed in fairness.

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And then they take a look.  Months and months later.  They see the irreparable damage and seek its source.  Finding it, they removed the name.  And I am forced to take a closer look.

Tears pour.  Because I know it hurt more than I had ever acknowledged.  Because I'd tried to be tough, tried to be stronger than the things I couldn't control.

Disregarded, because the hurt I've experienced can't even hold a candle to those around me.  I'm knee deep in the hurt and pain of other's lives.  I know their stories by heart and have stood on the sidelines cheering them on as they face their pasts and their baggage head on.  I've been their ally, their confidante, a soldier in their army.  And I know how bad it can get.

And what's happened in my life, it's not been so hard.

It's this mentality making it so hard to deal with my own.  My own hurt, disappointment, pain.

I don't even like using those words... I don't like the attention they draw, the gravity of them.

But with just a few words I know it must be drawn out.  If there's ever a chance for the healing to begin.