I’ve been thinking about something Aella said about the trauma narrative. Actually she said a lot of thoughtful, interesting things in that post:
- how people reacting with horror to her childhood experiences were actively increasing her trauma and suffering
- how there are cultures that practice mutilation, and how, if the entire culture thinks of it as no big deal, then a person growing up in that culture will probably not be too bothered by it
- “I felt huge amounts of pain, but I thought this amount of pain was normal”
- “I did not view myself as having been traumatized”
- how she gradually internalized a sort of victim mindset as a consequence of talking to people and being in contexts where her experiences were considered traumatic
There’s a lot of stuff going on here, a lot of interesting questions raised. I’m very grateful to Aella for writing that post and for opening up the conversation into a space that suspends judgement. I think most of us are generally too quick to judge, too quick to assume, to quick to fit things into some narrative or another.
I suppose I’d like to spend some time thinking aloud about my own experiences. I had experiences of my own in childhood, both from family and from peers, that I would describe as mildly traumatic. I can quite clearly remember a time in my life where I didn’t really think about what I was going through.
Well – maybe it’s not as clear as I’d like to imagine it is. It would be more accurate to say… once some time had passed and I had some space to look back on it, I realize that I had experiences at home and at school and with friends that must have shaped me in ways that I couldn’t possibly have appreciated at the time. I don’t think I was completely clueless as to what was going on, but I didn’t quite have a framework for making sense of it. Maybe we’re always too busy living our lives in the moment to know in that moment what it all means. It takes time to observe the patterns and consequences, before you can properly trace them back to experiences that shaped you.
Could I get more specific? Well, it’s only fairly recently that I properly realized how much my literal experience as a person living in my body – my tall, skinny, brown, dark-skinned body – in a short, fair-skinned country – must have influenced me, my way of being, my way of seeing. It just never occurred to me to sit down and really consider it until I started having some in-depth conversations with other people with similar and contrary experiences. I have an unusual, unique name. Literally, I believe I’m the only Visakan Veerasamy in the world. If you Google “Visakan Veerasamy”, there’s zero confusion about whether or not you’ve got the right guy.
Are these things traumatic? No, of course not. They’re just… unusual. Different. Unique. And they have made me an unusual, different, unique person. And funnily enough, the conversation around “what makes you different”… something about it strikes me as “off”. I paused here to do a twitter thread about it.
What is it that I want to say here with all of this? I guess I feel like the topics of trauma, suffering, victimhood, etc are all things that aren’t very well understood, and when we talk about them we tend to talk about them in rather simplistic terms. The reality is complex.
I don’t want to go through my life feeling like a victim. And I think as the years have gone by, I’ve gotten better and better at feeling like I’m more in control than I used to be. There’s a great graph from WaitButWhy about the relationship between perceived self-knowledge and actual self-knowledge:
I think this is true in my own experience. I used to think a little too highly of myself, and that inflated sense of self-esteem was a relatively fragile one. It was a sort of coping mechanism, maybe. I want to say “it didn’t occur to me to examine myself closely” – but I don’t think that’s true. I think I have always been quite a self-examining sort of fellow. And yet… there have been a series of ‘awakenings’ – moments of realizations, where I’ve had to revise my concept of self. Some of these experiences were extremely painful and depressing. But the experiences themselves were net good for me in the long run. They’re like… “market corrections”, if you like.
There are all these new things for me to think about these days. I never thought about caste when I was growing up as an Tamil Singaporean, but I’ve been learning about it in recent years and it is some really disturbing, horrifying stuff. Turns out that I’m a literal blasphemy to some people, which is apparently something punishable by death. That’s quite a distressing thought. And yet… I don’t want to be someone who lives in fear or anxiety or anger. I want to find a way to rise above all of that. To live in lightness.
Do I have some sort of “thesis” or “concluding belief”? I believe that Aella was right when she suggested that, if everybody around you is equally traumatized and doesn’t think it’s a big deal, then in a sense it’s not a big deal – at least in a day-to-day functioning level. At some point she said “people reacting with horror to her stories were actively increasing her suffering” – which is something I’m not so sure about. I mean, I believe that’s what it feels like to her, but still, I wonder. What is suffering, exactly? I find myself thinking now about one of the most annoying phrases people use in arguments, usually in family or close relationships: “You made me do this. You made me like this.”
Is it ever really true? I… don’t really think so. I think there’s something in between. You behave a certain way that I then respond to in a certain way. There’s this whole intermediate step that people leave out – there are a bunch of assumptions I have about what you mean by what you do or say, and what that implies for me.
It’s complicated, of course. I wrote a thread a while ago – what if you’re the asshole? There are no easy answers. But if we want to get better at navigating all of this, we have to be more mindful, thoughtful, willing to listen, willing to consider, willing to reconsider.