Trauma Makes us Weird

But don’t worry. Trauma makes us different to relate to — not harder.

A friend shared a meme with me the other day that I related to in an uncomfortable way.

Yes, this post is inspired by a meme casually shared from one anxiety-prone person to another. This is not an academic post about the psychological bases of trauma, nor is it founded in research, study or science.

But a meme got me thinking about the things that make us weird. About trauma. How people who have endured trauma, complexity, and deep, bone-shaking sadness are at risk of being somewhat unrelatable, and how the brunt of the emotional work to fit within society rests on the shoulders of the person who has experienced trauma.

So hear me out.

The meme of mention. Text reads: “That which does not kill me only makes me weirder and harder to relate to.” I’m not sure where this meme originated from, but a quick google search links to this Twitter post from the Live Through This campaign in 2016.

I don’t think I’ll ever meet another person who gets — really gets — the full depth, the implications, the macabre reality of what I went through while my dad was dying of cancer. While I helped him die of cancer.

And, similarly, I’ll never, ever. Ever. Understand what sorts of trauma some of my friends, family, and loved ones have been through.

And that’s okay.

It’s not helpful or constructive to compare our personal trauma or broken-ness to what another person has experienced. My particular experience — and the experiences of people I know (and people I’ll never know) was so complicated, had so many twists and turns, was so unique to my life, that there’s simply no way for anyone else to really understand what I went through.

And I will never fully understand what my friends, peers, and fellow sufferers have gone through.

This is not to say that people who have experienced trauma become unrelatable — some sort of present-day hunchback relegated to an excommunicated life within the cathedral of our own minds.

Rather, I’ve come to believe that undergoing an emotionally extreme experience — whether it’s death or illness of a loved one, lost love, injury, tragedies of war and so on — increase the scope of our lived experience so dramatically that existing within the narrow confines of societal expectation can feel like living in a fake reality.

Trauma adds dimensions to our lives and our mindsets that people who haven’t experienced trauma don’t have.

When my dad was in his last days of his cancer battle, an aunt visited from out of state. I took her to the St. Paul farmer’s market, and found myself reveling in everyday beauty — like this flint corn.

Processing the emotional complexity of trauma, turning it into something that doesn’t weigh us down as we navigate the rest of our lives, is a hard, thankless, and mostly invisible job.

And to be honest, trauma makes many of us weird.

My personal trauma was deeper, more complicated, more complex than just losing my dad. I lost my dad when I was at an age that most people are still figuring out how to be people. I was a primary caregiver as well as a single woman in my 20s, recently relocated from Boston to the suburbs of Minneapolis, suddenly living in my childhood basement bedroom. I was a full-time student. I dated. I fucked up.

My trauma unfolded slowly, chapter by chapter, and colored the pages of my book of life that I was still writing.

And in the aftermath, after he died, as weeks, months, years passed (ten years this November), I had to package that trauma into shorter and shorter sentences to convey a concept to other people. To my friends. To my professors. To my therapist. Eventually I just boiled it down to “my dad died X years ago.”

Those words do nothing — nothing — to convey all the conversations, the steps, the realizations, the phone calls with debt collectors that transpired. The sleepless nights. The well-slept nights. The guilt.

How humbling it is, then, to hear the voices of others in my CliffsNotes version of trauma. As my story got shorter and shorter, I realized I was emulating the cadence and tone of others who have explained their trauma before me — who have done this hard, unforgiving work to translate complicated emotional experiences into a tidy verbal package.

We leave out the messy bits. Our voices are flat, our words composed like a short commercial jingle.

At first, we don’t know what to do with the sympathy. We gloss over it, like a hiccup or a tic or casual racism from an uncle.

Then, we hear it, but the sympathy feels hollow. We brush it aside. We come to anticipate the call-and-response, our explanation of trauma followed by a procedural statement. Like “You’re welcome” to a “thank you.” Like a “bless you” to a sneeze.

Sometimes, the sympathy hits very close to home.

On occasion, we find someone who does understand our trauma. Maybe they convey that understanding in words, maybe just in tone of voice. The first time it happens, we don’t exactly know what to do with this person’s understanding. Maybe it re-traumatizes us, or triggers unwanted memories.

Who would have expected sympathy — actual, heartfelt sympathy — to be uncomfortable?

A brilliant stalk of urban sumac spotted on a chilly fall day — a few days before my dad died.

Over time, with repetition, with processing and compassion and therapy, we learn how to live with — and accept —various forms of sympathy. From the superficial to the uncomfortably genuine.

Today, I’m married. I share my life, my intimate secrets, my everyday experiences with another person. And I’ve realized, with devastation, that he, too, will never understand. On occasion I’ve tried to describe these long-gone experiences to him, dredging up the weediest details in order to verbally paint the clearest picture, expounding on love and loss and partying in my childhood home, and my husband tries to understand. He really does.

But honestly, he will never fully, completely get it.

He will never thoroughly get, as viscerally as I experienced, being the primary caregiver to a dying father in my mid-20s. The day we brought the oxygen tank home. How I listened from my childhood bedroom for his footsteps, worried he needed something I’d failed to provide. Changing the radio station for him as he lay in bed, unable to do it himself.

But my husband loves who I am — precisely who I am. And I am who I am because of what I endured.

My dad died on November 1. When it was over, I walked around his house — my childhood house — taking in the scenery. It was unfairly serene. Like these fall leaves, frozen just underneath a thin layer of ice in a forgotten flower pot behind our house that day.

As time passes and we bring new people into our community and our circle, some of us may make the choice to share our history of trauma with them.

It’s not fair to expect these newcomers to understand — to really understand —the complexity of our background.

Some of these newcomers may relate to pieces of our experiences, having endured their own flavor of trauma during their lifetime. Some may have also forged a way forward through the macabre experience of pretending they’re not constantly suffering. Some of them may kind of get it.

But most won’t.

Hopefully, as we move forward, we will meet and keep people who cherish us, who hear our story but know they’ll never truly be able to understand it. Who know they can’t comprehend what it was like to go through what we experienced.

Hopefully, they will relate to our sadness, our trauma, through the lens of their own lived experience.

And they will love us exactly because of who we are.