Can Story Turn Trauma Into Life?

TW: historical trauma, divergent speech, privileged ignorance and denial 

The purpose of my life seems to be: to intelligently design it. But the English I received to begin making anything of this world seemed to deal primarily with products, quantities, and social status, while what I experienced on a daily basis growing up very largely consisted of trauma, abuse, and loneliness. 

I’m not even talking about acute trauma, physical or sexual abuse, or physical abandonment or neglect by caregivers, although these experiences also seem to be so widespread as to constitute primary features of our society. 

I’m just talking about the interstices here: what the average person like myself experienced in between thinking of myself as a normal average happy-enough American kid, allowed to run free in the culture and raise myself however I liked, wondering why adults seem so unhappy and why no one follows the rules they tell everyone else to follow. Why people lie and change the subject and want me to stop crying. 

Naturally, regular people don't generally talk about what language doesn't or can't address, and I suspect that for many people, the absurdly extensive divorce of language from experience remains imperceptible. Indeed, I've found this disconnect to be so bewildering that up until last week, I simply didn't recognize it for what it was. 

I wonder if this linguistic problem is what primarily contributes to the mass production of trauma that seems to proceed automatically in our modern world, if we define trauma as any condition in which experience exceeds the ability or freedom to communicate it. (In such terms, even spiritual experiences can be traumatizing, which I believe they are when the community at large doesn't acknowledge the reality of such things.)

Ultimately, I felt I had no choice but to teach myself why I felt alienated, why so much seemed amiss in my world, why the whole world seemed fucked up. I have come to the place of recognizing that even if English had served people well in preindustrial times (I haven't even considered how one could start to evaluate this), the extremes of events in the recent history of the culture have left holes in the language’s ability to deal with reality. For example, there is still as yet no word for mass dislocation of people from country and community by capitalism’s successes such that the average person’s trust in society is broken, even though this is a daily process that has been happening for the past 500 years.

More to the point, there is also no word that I know of for the pervasive feeling of horror felt on a daily basis by the average person as a result of unconsciously inheriting, through epigenetics and palpable silences, the global scale of the mass traumas undergone in the modern era, from the holocausts of the extermination of indigenous Americans, to the prolonged terrorism of African slavery, to numerous ethnic and social cleansing genocides, to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the Cultural Revolution and the Gulag Archipelago and the Vietnam occupation and the prison-industrial complex and the school-to-prison pipeline and climate chaos driving mass exodus from new wastelands. “Historical trauma” comes close, but it doesn’t get at how present the effects of these unspeakable secrets are, how they live in me and habitually hijack the higher functions of my humanity.

I imagine that the terror of these truths must be world-shattering for anyone courageous enough to look, yet I believe that the only alternative to my internalizing this knowledge is a long, restless, tortured bewilderment, in which I continually question my sanity and feel enraged by every discontinuity or miscommunication that affronts me. And I think the world as I inherited it needed to be shattered in order for me to begin my work of redesigning it as it made most sense to me.

Knowing the historical reasons for my alienation does the great service of removing the mass of the burden of guilt from the people in the world today and placing it on the shoulders of generations past, of conferring on it the status of inheritance, of something we are all in together, like it or not, and it promises to stoke in me a hope that at least I am not alone in many of my despairs.

Problematically enough, I also know of no word for the channeling of society into predictable polarities of communication style and context such that words have opposite meanings in opposite contexts to the extent that language is effectively rendered meaningless, which is something that I believe is happening in the social-network-for-profit age.

Yet, can language be saved, if it was ever any good to begin with? If so, I believe that it requires that each person be called upon to speak their truth. Unless we speak our truth and probably unless we diversify our social media platforms to include alternate business models, degenerate digital platforms’ algorithms will continue to carve up our languages and weaponize them for profit and our language will continue to be shredded in the gears.

My invective to myself: diverge from the main narrative wherever possible, at least in my own mind.

It may be that each one of our stories is needed to mend the lacunae in the tattered cloth of our language; that each pioneering strand is needed to transform this world-worn garment into something that could someday clothe our truth.