The Call to Write about Trauma

One year ago, I thought I was ready to write about trauma.

I was wrong.

An anchor on top of a piano on top of a bulldozer dropped out of an 80 story apartment building last year. With the amount of events that happened, I had not had time to process them.  I was scared the crazy might pop out, or I’d crawl into a corner and hide as I’d started doing in our new (fixer upper) house last June and July.

I wrote some meaningful poems during that time.

I wrote some crappy, thirteen-year-old blow your nose in notebook paper poems.

If we’re to write, then we should write what’s real. We need to own our sense of purpose.  When we lose the purpose or the vision, then why are we writing?

My husband has said to me “I’m not the kind who wants to relive their trauma.”

For a long time, I stayed away from my grandmother because I didn’t need the lecture from the greatest generation about “how we pulled up our bootstraps and people didn’t talk about a, b, or c.”

Back in the day, some people didn’t talk about a, b, or c, and you ended up with addicts of different sorts forever searching for an answer that never came.

The reality about writing about trauma is that there are different kinds we need to know about: PTSD and secondary trauma.  It is not something where someone can hold your hand, and say, “Come this way with me.” Depending on my mood, I might say something you don’t want to hear.

I wrote in my Memorial Day post that there are so many people who are forgotten. The trauma in my experience is just one in an ocean of tears, alcohol, and Red Bulls. There are educators across this country who are beyond burnt out because no one wants to discuss the reality.  There are soldiers who come home from Afghanistan that some in American society expect to become instant Amazon Prime shoppers like them.

There are kids from neighborhoods that look like they’re abandoned cities.  It brings to life the Hunger Games’ discussion about the difference between the thoughts of people in the Capitol concerned about things like hair color versus being able to eat and having a good pair of shoes, so that you are not picked on at all.

Trauma come from many places. Like other neurological challenges, it is not an invention or made up.  It is still something some people want to sweep under the rug. Instead it ends up being like the big dark creature under a rug in the Dr. Seuss story.  It waits until adulthood to eat you up, unless you find the way to your solace.

County Road

See the people from city center drive by the county road.

They say that truck ain’t worth no more than a pawn shop ring

still in the glass after it was given up two years ago.  

They say its driver don’t have a decent job

even at the grocery store. They saw a bottle;

not the nightmares waiting in his dreams

like a thousand claws, tiger teeth, and snake fangs

underneath a Dr. Seuss tale with illustrations in

dark purple and blue no one ever mentions. 

No one had the time nor the courage to sit beside

the man in the truck on the county road after he left the job.

By Rebecca T. Dickinson