2-18-05

Today, there was talk of trauma.
It was talk with miscommunication.
What we say is "Trauma" where what they heard was "trauma."
There's something hereditary about trauma in my family. Father to oldest son, youngest son, oldest son, youngest, trauma only comes to us sideways. We never live with the angry alcoholic. We do not lose our young wives to disease, accident, and alleymen. We are not depressive. Not suicidal. Never crazy. We don't live that way. Part of it lies in our reason, always reasonable. Sometimes misinformed or wrong, but reasonable. And yet, we inherit that trauma one degree away from us. It isn't our daughter, but the daughter of friend who blows her brains out in the basement of the house. It isn't us, not our family, but our good friends who go mad, the friends who were brighter than us, the genius ones. We're not molested, abused, raped, beaten and beaten and beaten. We're never caught in the fire. Instead, we clean up. We scrub the brains out of the carpet, off the wall. We try to talk pills back into bottles. We pack their things into boxes.
We're inheritors to the front-row and the stagehand's mop for a bloody show of good people with bad lives. We don't have trauma.
We do still get hurt.
That was where the merry-go-round broke down, really. You say "Traumoughtoh" I say "Traumaito". Let's call the whole thing off.
Our break-ups are just as awkward and messy, even if we don't get stalkers or treatments of bad blood. We get casts after falling off a bridge or the back of a truck. We've got all the normal baggage, we just don't have the scars. It may explain our secondary-character nature. It may not.
I've never been much into vulnerability. Some people can take pride in their exposure to the world without filters, precious stones, and all the angsty imagery of "masks" "walls" and "life in the prison of myself". Really feel, they say. All the things they preach about in stories where the villains are passionless logic. I haven't been comfortable with vulnerability since I realized it existed, though that was really only a few years ago. I knew physical vulnerability, sure. Didn't like it. The other vulnerability. When I was young, I was. Was for a long time. Empathy and day-dreaming. Yeah, I was that kid. Not quite there, but always concerned? That was me. Fascinating, right? The past weaknesses of others? Sure. Completely. We're all totally enthralled in your personalized drama, sir. It was enough that ate away at my insides, physically sick with worry. It's better now. For a while, just distant. Gone. Elsewhere. Then it reversed some. Nowadays, I do tend to understand the why's and wherefores of other people's red skin and trembling spine, but it goes through so many layers that the real sincerity looks real gone and even I can't always quite seem to fake it well enough for it to be real enough. Haven't cried in years and when I did, that once, it was five tears and a couple of minutes odd breathing. The most now is really just a sad look, lack of animation. Not being quite my charming, motion-loving, inanely chattering self.
So she sits there, curled up, and looks down through those eyes from somewhere inside her in the 3D Full FX world of whatever it is she's thinking and feeling and sees this bumbling little 2D cartoon of a man who can't quite seem to realize that he is too new, too out-of-the-loop, too something, and in no position to help. Keeps making mistakes and trying his best and stays compeletely clueless.
This isn't a woe-is-me. This isn't a How Sad Story. No balloons, cake, clown 'cause it ain't no Pity Party neither.
It's an apology.
Not that I can't help. That I can't relate. That etcetera etcetera etcetera.
None of that. I'm aware enough of and cool enough with my peripherality to the situation that I know I'm not any real sort of weight or necessary component that isn't doing what needs doing. I'm a two-weeker. Hell, we know we ain't raised to any sort of importance yet. That would be weird.
It isn't supposed to be melodrama, either.
It's just, damn, do I get so totally uninteresting and persistent when it gets into my mind to try to help. Sometimes, it's plain rude.
It may not even be a "good guy" sort of impulse. It might be a control thing, wanting to be involved, something like that. Maybe it's part of how I don't always quite remember that some things really just don't get shared. Might be a good guy thing, though. It's just that once someone actually becomes a someone in my mind, it's just a weird compulsion to try to help. There's a lot of hard-wired MAN THE PROTECTOR deeply engraved in the helixes here. Hell, it took me years to stop subconsciously considering women to be victims. Gimme a break. Hearts in the right place. Sometimes it's a bit hard to stop trying, that's all.
Oy, we're a funny people.
We're not actually violent, self-absorbed, arrogant, know-it-all, oblivious, gold-leaf-not-solid-gold, look-how-clever-we-is, clueless men.
We just get a bit confused and come off that way sometimes. Some people draw up into themselves sometimes, but that's the type of place where we live all the time. We're coming at it from a different direction so sometimes we're not the best when asked to speekai ze englais. So maybe it is a stereotype of men sort of thing, I'm telling you, it ain't for the same reasons. Trust you me.
We've spent years trying to be as blunt as possible whenever we can. Straightforward, you know? Still working on the timing. Sometimes we forget that it's best, really, just to keep your mouth shut.

Man, I hate working without context, though.
Damnit.

----

Originally, this wasn't going to go anywhere but the drafts file.
Writing as a form of thinking.

Then, today, the case is supported.

After she got done with work, a friend of mine and I were going to meet up, talk. When I called her to tell her I'd be a little late because of road work, her mom picks up the phone. After telling me that her daughter has overdosed on pills and the doctors are pumping her stomach, she starts crying and crying and I'm left not knowing what to say even though I know there's nothing I ought to. The sister takes the phone from the mother and tells me the details in that voice that's so far away the phone call shouldn't have been able to reach her. She didn't go to work. Her roommate came back, found her sprawled on the floor between the kitchen and the living room. Bottle of pills. 911. Stomach pump. Phone call.

I don't normally bring this sort of thing up. It happens every couple of months to one friend or another. I've gotten something close to used to it. Still, there's such a distance. They go to places inside themselves that I can't go to.

Her mother is going to court against her step-father the same week her case against her dad comes to trial, so she doesn't have much support from her. Her two-year, abusive, dead-beat boyfriend whom she was deeply, passionately in love with left her for someone he'd been cheating on her with for about a year, took the car. That was about two weeks ago. The college she applied to turned her down because her father, who disagreed with her choice, lied heavily to them. The case against her dad? Years of abuse of one sort or another. Obsessive, abusive, protective. It was supposed to go to trial in a couple of weeks. I just found out that he's also apparently in the hospital. He got drunk and wrapped his car around lightpost today and might be in a coma.

I can't get my head around it.
It's too much.

And I think, maybe I have had trauma. Maybe there's something that happened to me that, if anyone heard it, would say, "Fuck. That's traumatic."
Then I look at things like this and realize that my sense of trauma is so out of proportion that I have no idea what it normally looks like. I mean, seriously, what's the worst I have going on? A preoccupied girlfriend who leaves in a couple weeks? I'll get over it. Hell, I got $5 out of it. Worst that happens is she's out of interest and gone, but then I've a friend in Chicago. It's disappointing, but it's nothing like this.

You know how half of empathy is just trying to feel what other people feel? Trying to act appropriate to that?

I have no idea. I can't relate. I feel thick-fingered and awkward. I try my best, but I've never been in a situation like that. I've been sad, but not like that. Even then, I'm almost never sad. Happy or neutral or other. I'm an upbeat person, s'truth. Occasionally irritated. But I'm happy. Worst I've felt recently is uninteresting. And I know that sometimes there's nothing you can say, you just try to be there, let your sentiment project. Do you know how fake that feels? Fucking cerebral. The feelings going through make sense, regardless of the ones I see in others.

I can't really understand feeling things out. I try, but I don't really understand. If you know that it wasn't your fault, why do you still blame yourself? I wouldn't. People just do. Lately, it's been more pronounced. I don't know anybody's language. It feels like a Swiss biologist talking to a Tibetan freedom fighter. Even if we figure out the words, what's interesting isn't the same and I'd bet money someone's going to be offended.

I'm not beating myself up over it. It's just frustrating.

Like I said, this isn't self-pity.

This is an apology.

It all feels like melodrama. It probably is. Always tried to keep melodrama away from the personal side. I don't know.

It's all greek to me.