Trauma is an unpredictable and sneaky thing. Most of us have those experiences in our personal backstories that have left us softer in some places, harder in others. Maybe we get a little twitchy when a particular name or song evokes a painful memory. In the current parlance, we get triggered.
That kind of trauma, though, that wound you can take a good long look at and assess just how much damage it’s done to you, that’s one thing. It’s something you can reckon with, maybe show it to someone else who can sit you down and help you staunch the bleeding. Dress that wound. Get you back up on your feet again. You’re wobbly, stumbling around, and you fall on your face now and then, but you’re moving forward again.
But what about the damage you don’t see? What do you do with a splinter that’s lodged in your psyche, causing you to do all kinds of uncharacteristic shit when you have zero fucking awareness of it being there?
One of the strangest times in my life (so far) was the month of February in 2002. Everything around me seemed to be flipping upside down like some cosmic force had the city I lived in trapped in some Under the Dome kind of bubble, throwing everyone’s life all topsy-turvy. At the time, my life was mundane and normal. I was in a long-term relationship. I got up every morning and went to work.
But that winter, I’d started doing weird shit. Going for long walks at night in the snow. Driving past my house after work instead of pulling into the driveway, aimlessly steering my car this way and that, unsure of where I was going. I listened to “Warning” by Incubus on repeat, obsessed with chorus. No, haunted by it.
Then came the not-so-special day at the beginning of February 2002 when out of nowhere, I heard myself telling my boyfriend of 9 years that I was moving out. No forethought. No softening the blow or planning out how to announce this news. Because I didn’t know I was going to say it. The words just flew out as though Scott Bakula had suddenly taken over my body and was now speaking for me, setting my life on a different course.
One week later, I was unpacking in my new apartment, living alone.
Continuing on, I went to work at the cubicle farm that employed me. Only, the weird shit had followed me there and was now infecting everyone around me. The coworker I often went to lunch with told me she’d decided to split with her boyfriend and was moving out.
Okay, fun coincidence.
Then the woman in the cubicle behind mine mentioned that she was getting a divorce. My supervisor said she was getting divorced, too. One of my friends told me he’d just moved out of his girlfriend’s house. A recently married friend started freaking out. Had they just made a terrible mistake? (They had.) Someone else divorced and immediately moved to another state. And then another one. And another. All around me, relationships and marriages were dissolving. Imploding. Vaporizing.
I noticed the strangeness of it, how so many people’s lives were changing like this all at the same time, but dismissed it as a bizarre coincidence. Odd timing. I made jokes about the cosmos wanting more single people and everyone being done shacking up for the long, cold winter.
Years later, after I’d settled into a new life with a new person, in a new country, I casually told my husband the story about the weird vortex of major life changes that I and so many were sucked into.
“That was just a few months after 9/11,” he said.
“Yeah, it was.” I stared at the wall for a moment, doing a quick time travel back to the vortex. I looked up at him again. “You think that had something to do with it?”
He snorted. “Well, duh.”
Retrospect, combined with the perspective of someone who viewed events from outside the U.S. provided a lot of clarity. What seemed like unexplainable multiple coincidences began to look more and more like a lot of people realizing that they weren’t living their best lives and making drastic changes in order to fix that shit.
I dunno… maybe it wasn’t a collective PTSD thing. Maybe it was a sane reaction to having spent the past few months watching death, chaos, and destruction on an endless loop. Maybe we were doing what was inevitable after being bludgeoned with the fragility of human life day after day.
Maybe. I’m no therapist. I’m just someone who thinks too much and writes it all down. What I do know is that I, along with everyone else who got sucked into that vortex, am better off these days. New relationships. New homes. New adventures that we wouldn’t have had we stayed put letting moss grow all over our brains.
Big things, they ripple out and shake up little things in ways we probably don’t think about or notice. Not until later.
I’ve been thinking about the vortex a lot lately. Not just because it’s 9/11 again and people are yelling at me to “Never Forget,” as though anyone alive then could forget even if they wanted to. It’s because here we are, trapped in the amber of this insanely chaotic, trauma-inducing moment and it’s got me wondering. Wondering about those ripples and what new vortexes are being stirred up. Wondering if Scott Bakula’s jumping around in people, prompting them to make impulsive decisions that turn their lives topsy-turvy and steer them toward their best lives.
I hope so.