the wheels on the bus
This article may touch on topics uncomfortable for some readers.
As a young child, I was effervescent, creative, and joyful. I was naturally curious and had an intense desire to learn new things. I was also an old soul in a lot of ways, immersing myself in current news events and the latest retail store opening in our main business district instead of watching cartoons or playing sports. I also loved everything about music, from singing and playing the piano to attempting to write lyrics and compositions and dreaming that one day I would be an artist in my own right. In fact, there is some old home video footage of me at around eight years old proclaiming that I would one day work for Warner Bros. Records. Little did I know that I would spend the first six years of my career with that company. I guess that’s what you’d call Kismet.
In my early preteens, I experienced intense trauma for first time — and the music stopped. I was left with more questions than answers, as I didn’t have the tools to process what had happened to me and why I had to endure such a violation of my childhood. A person whom I thought was a mentor and a friend took advantage of me that in ways that changed the course of my life, desensitizing me to much of the world around me, and making me less reactive and unable to feel satisfaction in from the things I loved. The reality is that in many ways after this experience, life passed me by as a young boy — and I let it. I was only thirteen years old and left to navigate what had happened, scared to share what I had endured with anyone, and unsure how to adapt to what had become an unfortunate reality.
I did everything I could to bury this new reality as deeply as possible in an attempt to dismiss and avoid the pain. Eventually, the grief that came with this traumatic life experience settled in the recesses of my mind, and I began to feel as if I could just “move on” and “forget it”. And so I spent the next 25 years of my life either ignoring or denying my experience with sexual assault. I felt shame, blocked the memories, and did everything I could to avoid addressing what had happened to me.
Research has shown that victims of sexual assault often show signs of psychological and behavioral responses to their trauma -- sometimes outwardly, but many times inwardly. In my case, my behavioral responses turned inward. My anxiety and anger would come out of nowhere, and it was often misdirected. I did not know how to regulate or manage the anger that I was feeling — sometimes it was directed internally, while other times it was directed at random people or things. I consistently played narratives of othering and lack of belonging because I truly did feel different. Every time I encountered a difficult situation, I would relegate the experience to a dark corner of my mind. I was burned once ,and I never wanted to be burned again. I lost faith in people, didn’t trust those who said they cared for me, and, in many ways, ,isolated myself and wandered through life alone. Looking back on those years, my coping strategies of burying the pain, misdirecting anger, and letting anxiety control me did not do me any favors. I was traversing a wilderness that I did not deserve to be in. I was a kid who was robbed of his freedom.
Humans are resilient. We have rebounded from disasters, wars, violence, and betrayal. However, those experiences also “leave traces on our minds and emotions, on our capacity for joy and intimacy, and even on our biology and immune systems,” as Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk shares in his New York Times Bestseller, The Body Keeps the Score. Those who experience trauma (defined simply as an unbearable or intolerable event) attempt to simply push it out of their minds, act as if nothing happened, and move on. It takes tremendous energy to keep functioning while carrying the memory of trauma, along with the shame and the vulnerability that comes from it.
As someone who has faced my fair share of heartbreak and trauma, I know this to be true. These overwhelming experiences have affected every aspect of my life, and as I mentioned previously, my natural inclination is to avoid the pain, block the memories, and attempt to move forward. But the truth is that these experiences will always catch up with you. We cannot heal from our trauma by avoiding it, no matter how hard we try. It is incredibly important to understand how trauma manifests in people, how these experiences impact social conditions and behaviors, and how we must address unbearable experiences head on.
I like to think of life as one long trip as the driver of a big yellow school bus (or a glamorous motor coach — depends on the day). As we travel down the road of life, we try to avoid the sharp curves, the potholes and lunatic drivers, but we find that running into these things is inevitable. When bad things happen in our lives, they take a seat at the front of the bus (sometimes right at our feet). They may distract us from the road ahead, they might slow us down, and we may even need to pull over and stop driving for a bit to process what has happened.
Eventually, we restart the engine, pick up the pace, and move these “unruly passengers” to the back of the bus to make room for new ones. They quiet down and become less of a distraction, maybe to the point that we even forget about them, whether it be for a little while or a long while. As we continue our journey, each experience is dealt with in similar way, and a habit is formed. By moving each issue to the back of the bus, the pain is temporarily relieved, and we assume we can forget, forgive, and go on with our journey. The problem with this is that one day, when that no good, very bad, horrible day comes and you finally crash into the wall, all that stuff that you have thrown to the back of the bus over the years comes flying back up right to the front. The experiences you thought had been long since forgotten are now sitting at your feet, preventing you from even stepping on the gas in yet another attempt to keep the bus going.
I know this because I have experienced it firsthand.
Most of my adult life (until recently) has been spent reacting to hard things as I did in my teen years -- which was simply dealing with the pain as best I could, then throwing it to the back of the bus. Every once in a while when I hit a pothole or navigated some rough terrain, I would see those experiences in the rearview mirror. Once that bumpy patch was over, though, I would return to a sense of normalcy. But when the no good, very bad, horrible year arrived and wreaked havoc on my life, so much stuff came flying to the font of my bus all at once that I was trapped, and there was no way I could move forward without addressing all those experiences that I had attempted to bury and forget.
As I shared in my previous entry, we all have stories of trauma and loss from the last two years. My reality was marred by multiple experiences that altered the course of what I had believed my path to be, and on December 26, 2020 — when I had to put my rescue/service dog, Charlie, to rest. I realized that my bus had hit the final wall, and I was drowning in immense sorrow. (I now lovingly refer to this time as my “menty-b”.) Looking back on all that I had to navigate that year, I’m surprised that I didn’t veer off the road sooner. I attribute that to two sets of traits that I built over the many years I spent throwing baggage to the back of the bus. First, I built strength and resiliency after many years of painful experiences, and I felt like I knew how to navigate the world. Quite frankly, I had become hardened and numb. Secondly, I had become so good at throwing that shit to the back of bus and burying my experiences that I thought I knew the exact steps I needed to take when bad things happened. The reality was that I became incredibly adept at making my coping mechanisms work for me… until the brakes and steering of the bus caused me to crash, and crash hard.
When my bus slammed into the wall and became inoperable in late December 2020, I realized that despite being dealt a really shitty hand and suffering for many years, this was actually an opportunity for me to heal in a healthy way. This was a chance to be able organize all the stuff that I had thrown to the back of the bus that was now sitting at my feet and address it with the support of amazing therapists and counselors. I was able to clearly see what had happened to me over my 38 years of life, and how I could take those experiences and create a narrative.
Healing from trauma is wretched beast. If there was one clear path we could follow that led us all to the same place where love and acceptance and healing live, there wouldn’t be so much pain in this world. But healing from trauma is a long process, and it takes a hell of a lot of personal work -- work that we may not necessarily want to do, but we know we must do to get our bus back on the road. This work requires us to sit in the mess, really take time to understand it, and acknowledge not only what happened to us, but also what we could have done differently. That is not to say that we always had control over what happened to us, but we can control our reactions to it. No matter where you are on your journey, you will become infinitely stronger mentally, emotionally, and spiritually when you understand that what happened to you, happened for you.
When I first heard those words, I had perhaps the greatest “a ha” moment of my life. Once I understood this and began doing profound work in my own life, I was able to break free from the experiences that had weighed me down. It was the first time in my life that I realized I had the opportunity to use my experiences to help others.
The critical part of creating the narrative of our lived experiences is that once you have gone through the hard work of navigating and understanding your past, you are able to take each of those experiences and tell your story without slashing open old wounds and potentially re-traumatizing yourself. Everything you’ve been through is now organized in an arc with an ending that allows you to see the “why”. You can put those stories in a box and place them up on the shelves of the bus. You are then able to open those boxes as you encounter others who may be experiencing the same things on their journey.
It is important to note that once you have your lived experiences organized and on the shelf, the work is not complete. You now have a brilliant opportunity to grow. After all, if you always do what you’ve always done, you will always be where you’ve always been. The idea here is that as you can restart your journey post-trauma, knowing that not everything will be perfect. Instead, of burying all the pain and difficult experiences that you endured, you are now in a place where you can see them, touch them, and even thank them for making you the beautiful person you are -- for you have learned a new way to navigate life and create a new, healthy approach to living.