Trauma series chapter 2 - What I wish I'd known
This chapter is what I wish I'd known on the first day of my trauma. I'm not a therapist nor have I studied any related field. I studied computer science, economics, and associated mathematics. I worked as a soldier deployed with the UN Peacekeeping Forces in Lebanon, and as a software engineer before this experience.
This is different, if not opposite, from what my friends and loved ones told me. Maybe it won't help everyone. Maybe it will help no one except myself. But maybe it will help one more person. And that's enough.
Going through trauma that walked into my life overnight was challenging. It makes me wonder how all the other people before me made it through.
(1) It's NOT going to be alright.
"Everything will be alright" is one of the phrases people told me the most. I think it came from good intentions and was not even sugarcoated.
- My friends and family who cared about me were trying to give me empathy and comfort.
- I lost my life savings and was almost killed. But I'm alive and not in debt.
Unfortunately the human mind doesn't work like that. We can think of logic, but we cannot control what we feel, just with logic. If I live another ten years and I somehow monetise what I went through, have a happy marriage with loving kids, wildly succeed in my career, and win every Sunday league football game, of course, I'm going to look back and say "shit, everything did become alright, if not better." But there's a long way to go until that point.
As War Daddy, played by Brad Pitt in Fury says,
"I started this war killing Germans in Africa. Then France. Then Belgium. Now I'm killing Germans in Germany. It will end, soon. But before it does, a lot more people gotta die."
World War II did end. And one day what I'm feeling now will go away. But it won't be this evening, not tomorrow, maybe not even next month. My mood will swing between "I want to blow my head away" to "I want to blow their heads away," to "I feel like absolute shit, but I don't feel like killing anyone" and so on until I can say "Life isn't too bad after all." But that's a long way to go. So before I feel fine, I'm going to keep feeling like shit for a very long time.
The human mind can heal and recover in numerous magical ways. Not surprisingly, it can also break in a million different ways. If you are going through trauma, it means that your brain and mind are completely wrecked in all the ways you knew it could be and all the ways you didn't know it could be.
Imagine how much harder it is to go to the gym or do your usual tasks when you have a simple flu. I'm not even sure exactly how a flu affects the brain, but I know that people are not as productive. We recover from a flu many times over our lives. Repetition usually gives you more knowledge of the process, which diminishes anxiety.
So if you are going through trauma for the first time, you have very little knowledge of why you are reacting in certain ways. Little kids cry when they bleed for the first time, not because it necessarily hurts more for them, but because they don't know when the pain will stop. And when I went through my incident, I was thrown back to that little kid. I didn't know when all this would stop.
I was extremely unproductive at work that requires good focus. Stress levels shoot up and don't come back to baseline while you go through trauma (from The Body Keeps The Score). This disrupts your sleep, focus, anxiety, mood, and more. I lost almost 10kg over a month, so obviously I could lift less. But also, I couldn't plank as long or get the same record for a 3k run. Not even close. It was frustrating. There are things I expected to be affected by after all that happened, but there were so many things I didn't expect to be affected as well.
It's really frustrating to find yourself incapable of doing things that you were able to do just weeks ago. Some of my friends told me that I still didn't lose a limb. Yeah, I fucking know. But that's not how the mind works. If the simple trick "I still have a home and a bed" or "I am still healthy" could rescue people from sadness, the world would not be spending 15 billion USD per year on anti-depressants. Logic helps you be more grateful and think through a solution to move forward, but it doesn't fix a lot of other things that make you struggle.
So, maybe one day I will be alright. But before that, it's going to fucking suck for a while. Maybe I'm on my first combat in Africa. Maybe I'm all the way into Germany. But the war is still going on. And until it's over, there is no easy day.
(2) It's my right to end life
We often choose to persevere through suffering in our lives. We gym, study hard, grind ourselves for the reward after. But when you don't know when or if the suffering will ever end, there's not much reason to keep going through it. Tough times are only meaningful when you are tough enough to get to the other side. So if the tough times is never-ending, you don't have reason to keep going.
I know this sounds sick, but on the days I felt really bad, I came up with a plan to end life. So just as I did when looking to learn more about how CPUs work, I googled and studied relevant literature. There is a surprising amount to read on in this field, from the first documented human suicide case to the different success rates per method of suicide. If I was going to fail at overcoming this thing, I couldn't fail at wrapping up my own life. You will be surprised by how low the success rate of suicide by cutting is, and how there are so many different ways you can end up alive, or somewhere between dead and alive. I studied and devised my own plan based on efficiency, amount of physical damage, and pain, in that order. Contemplating this carefully gave me peace. After all, if I decide to go, nobody can stop me. Just like it is fully my responsibility to recover from trauma, no matter how much support I have from family, friends, shrinks, exes, and more, if I decide to end life, nobody can save me. The right to walk out of this world is a right granted the moment you walk in. You can't choose how long you can live, but you can choose when to die.
Knowing that I have the full right and capabilities to kill myself gave me peace. That means every day that I live, I am choosing to live. Every day before I go to sleep, I can tell myself, "I didn't kill myself today. Not because I don't know how, or I don't have the right to do so, or I did not want to, but because I decided not to." Just as a toxic relationship or a job you hate, living life feels worse if you are doing it not by choice. I needed to find a way believe "I am living by choice." It gives you hope and a bit of bang that you survived another day after all this horrible things you had to deal with.
When I told my friends that I don't want to live my life because I hate every bit of it, they told me not to say such a thing. It is such a taboo in this world to mention not wanting to live, and most of the time we are not well trained of what to tell when someone mentions this. I remember only one friend, my best friend, Cristhian, didn't say that. I was telling him that if I take a couple of shots of whiskey and have a Glock in my hand, I'd paint the wall red. And that's why I don't drink nor buy a handgun. Two roadblocks are not ideal, but enough for the moment to prevent me from killing myself. He listened and simply said, let's keep it that way. It was a calming conversation. Because, you see, not wanting to live is a state. It's just like falling in love with someone. And you don't choose the person you love. There are some things you can do to take your mind off, but you don't really have full control over it. Yet you don't just propose to someone because you love them, and not everyone who doesn't want to live goes on to kill themselves. I was doing my best to live on. I didn't take a single sip of alcohol and made sure I didn't buy anything close to a handgun. So I'm trying my best. We don't get to choose how much we love life at this very moment, but we can choose to punch our way through the darkest times.
So if you feel like you don't want to live, that's fine. If you want to end it, you really can. But there is a silver lining. Just like Pandora's box, in all the negative things that trauma brings into your life, you can still find hope.
Before I left Korea to come back to London, my mom sat me down and told me the following:
"Son, I'm not sure what you are feeling now. I haven't gone through what you went through. But I want you to get better, not for you, but for me. I'm not too sure you will do it for yourself, but I know you will do it for me. I never say this often enough, but you are the biggest gift and hope that I have received in life. I want you to do well with life and be happy."
And that was enough. She didn't change the fact that I still hated my life at this moment. But she gave me the power to choose to live another day.
So, it's going to be not alright for a long time. Not because you did something bad nor you deserve it, but it simply happens to be. Don't overthink it. The god of trauma gifted you one, and you have to live it. And if you decide not to, you already have the right to quit.
Maybe living your life is not something you want at the moment, but that doesn't mean it's not something worth it. Think about how many times in your daily life you had the urge to do trivial things such as eat a chocolate bar or act mean to your partner, and you didn't. And later you looked back and felt good that you didn't. Wanting to eat a chocolate bar when you're trying to lose weight, or having the urge to act mean to someone you love is part of being human. You don't blame yourself for having felt these things. Rather, you feel proud when you keep that to yourself and be the better person.
Similarly, not wanting to live your day when you are going through something horrible is a part of being human. It's okay to want to quit, especially when you are going through something bad. But there is value in living on. You feel a bang out of living another day, even when life has not been nice to you. The will to live a good life isn't mutually exclusive from the will to end life. Just as you feel nice looking at your six packs after tolerating that chocolate bar, and feel relief looking into the eyes of the woman you love that you didn't say mean things to her just because you were frustrated for a second, one day you will feel that it was a good decision that you didn't quit. In all the moments you wanted to quit, you punched your way through day by day, making steps towards living a good life. One day, looking at a gorgeous sunset with the people you love, you will realise you've lived a good life, and smile.
“...things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life