I feel like I use the word “trauma” too much. That I talk about my trauma too much. That I too often describe events and situations I’ve been in as traumatizing. (Even though they were, indeed, by definition, traumatizing.)
Part of it is that I feel like pop culture has too eagerly and too greedily seized on this word and watered down its meaning. We joke that it’s traumatizing if our favorite cafe is out of those delicious cookies they bake fresh every morning. That we were traumatized by Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes’ Met Gala outfits. That it was traumatizing when our Pilates teacher told us we had “weak hip flexors” in front of the entire class. (OK, it was really mean of her, though.)
But part of it is that I don’t want to be lumped in as one of those people.
And then I ask myself: One of what people? People who have also been traumatized by trauma? People who have gone through something traumatic like you did, whose experience makes you feel less alone—finally, because you felt so isolated in your pain, shame, and grief for so long—whose story, whether shared in private or publicly to the whole world, has helped you heal? People who label assault or abuse as exactly what it is: trauma?
Trauma “others” you and keeps you in deep silence for so long; it drapes over you like a blackout curtain and muffles every sound and every feeling. It halts every breath you want to take but can’t.
So talking about trauma doesn’t make me one of those people; it just makes me a person. A person who is trying to exhale. A person who talks about something that makes a lot of us uncomfortable. Because it forces us to reckon with societal, cultural, gender, and sexual norms. Because it asks us to recognize our own fears, flaws, shortcomings, mistakes, mortality, and vulnerability. Because it pleads with us not to be OK with “that’s just the way it is.” Because it’s speaking truth to power, speaking loudly, exposing darkness, laying bare what we we were afraid was there the whole time.
And the more I talk, the more I exhale, the more I draw out the poison, the more I realize just how many people have been there, too.
I’m still getting used to talking about trauma. I’m still getting used to calling it what it is. I’m still unpacking what it means to talk about it outside of therapy or a trusted circle. But I’m working to let go of the notion that it makes me anything other. Talking about trauma—calling it what it is—is one of the biggest ways I’ve begun to feel like myself again.
So, yeah, T-R-A-U-M-A. I’m gonna keep spelling it out; I’m gonna keep saying it.