We’re going to talk about trauma.
I experience a ptsd response every so often and I don’t know why; it’s unclear what triggers it. Sometimes it’s progress. Sometimes it’s failure. Sometimes it’s nothing that I can identify.
The wave will come back and swamp me, plunge me back down to the bottom of the ocean. To the abyssal plateau.
Down there it feels dark and distant – entombed in the past. Usually the best thing to do is nothing. Just keep breathing. Practice acceptance, practice perspective, choose kind ways because the anxiety is terrible.
It’s hard not to snap at people, or sound pessimistic. So I wear the mask of myself for a little bit, knowing it will pass.
Then little by little… through dimples of sunlight in the morning… on bike rides… by making someone a cup of tea… I swim back to the surface. First to the mesopelagic, then to the epipelagic, and then (do you feel it?) breaking through once more! Back to this reality.
Surfacing is always followed by this nova of empathy, that rush of creativity, and a reaffirming of life. I don’t know why.
I don’t why we have to dive, back down, at random intervals – but I’m beginning to accept that it is part of it (the healing).
Years ago I went to counselling for my trauma, and it was so intense I couldn’t do anything else. I now see that once a week was too much, I could never make it back to the surface in time.
For reasons unknown my body, my brain, know that I have to dive anyway. But I do get to surface with the sun on my face, and a heart full of treasure.
In this way you never stop understanding how it feels for people to be anxious. How it feels to be ill, desperate, or alone. Isolated and under immense pressure, shivering in the darkness. That is quite a gift, if you think about it.
Being Human is a deep thing.
To plumb the depths of human experience sometimes means to dive into the Kermadec trench.
19 March 2025, in the sunlight.
