Meeting My Child Self at the Trauma Play

CW: Car-pedestrian accident; incest.

A strangled moan escapes my lips, twice, maybe three times. Instantly, I am in a tight feedback loop of visual stimulation and swirling emotions. Later that night, I write words that will become this:

fear horror  grief grief grief  horror  mercy  for
husband  for driver  horror horror horror  don’t
think  don’t think  don’t think  shut down  shut
down   don’t shut down   hold on  feel feel feel
horror fear grief & fear & grief & horror &

Sitting outside the theater, while people gather and wait to hear sirens, I hunch over a round wooden table. Stare at the slats. Grip my hands and try not to become a part of the scene. For the first time in my adult life, I don’t wall off my feelings, don’t shut down to maintain control, don’t bury the pain.

And I am wrecked.

I moan in public and people turn around to look at me. I realize I’m centering myself, taking away from the actual tragedy with my public display of pain, horror, grief. I am unable to call 911, unable to be a witness, unable to be in community with the rest of the onlookers because I am ravaged by what I saw, by the implications—the imagining and empathizing with the probable husband, or at least companion, of the elderly rag doll flung over the white car

and carried across the intersection. All I can see is her dark legs in the air and the blur of the white sedan beneath her—not slowing down. And I realize: this is not Hollywood, not TV. Realize this may be the moment a real person was ripped from her life. I receive the man’s pain. Of witnessing the accident. Of seeing someone you love be taken from you. And I receive my pain: It could have been me any one of a thousand times I crossed a busy street. Or drove a car.

It wrecked me. I am still wrecked. But—after eight years of therapy—this time I didn’t bury my feelings: I felt them. At least, as much as I could in a public space. I wanted to let the feelings gush from my pores, spill over my eyelids, run down my cheeks—but I couldn’t. Still. I did feel them. I let them exist. And that is progress.

I didn’t want to see what I saw. I wish we had gone into the theater when the usher said the house was open and we could take our drinks inside. Or I wish we had stayed at the standup bar, facing the building, where all I could see was stucco and wood and decomposed granite. I wish I had been looking at the thick green hedge, pruned with an arched doorway, leading south into the neighborhood behind East Main Street. Or at the wooden slats of the table. At my plastic cup of gin and tonic. Wish I’d been looking anywhere but north. Toward the street. Toward the thick parallel stripes of the crosswalk. The roar of a car engine. And a dull, thick sound—like wet bread dough dropped on a marble countertop. The surreal sight of two legs in black pants cartwheeling impossibly over a car. Looking fake; looking staged. Looking like a professional stunt person at work and not like you or me or some random woman crossing the street. Interrupted. Anywhere but north. Any vision but that vision. Etched in my brain. Rising like acid reflux every time I close my eyes.

My thoughts keep flicking back to this tender spot, like a chipped tooth or a scab I can’t leave alone. The man looking west. Standing in the crosswalk.

How he starts to run. How I imagine him screaming. Hear him screaming. Everyone gravitating toward the car and the body—but they only move so close. Like the injured woman is off limits. Or they are afraid of imposing. Or of seeing the damage up close.

I am still moaning, hands covering my mouth, trying not to shove the agony down into my secret black hole where all the hard stuff can be disappeared. Like green card holders on the streets of America in 2025. Bury it. Sit on it. Don’t let it up.

I let the feelings up. My therapist said, notice how you used to bury your feelings, but now your feelings are saving you. Is this saving?

I am clearly the only person reacting like this, and it’s like Christmas 1961 all over again. I am four years old, and the family is out in the chilly-not-chilly San Fernando Valley winter to pick out a Christmas tree. I see a man with no legs and suddenly can’t stop crying because… it’s Christmas, and it’s not fair. To my four-year-old self, life is joyful, Christmas is joyful. There isn’t supposed to be pain in this world, not at Christmas—yet there he is, a man with no legs. And I don’t understand how god can allow it, how my parents can allow it. This may be the moment I realize my parents are not all-powerful, that I am not protected; I am not safe. No matter what any of the concerned adults say—not my parents, not the man working at the Christmas tree lot—I am inconsolable. A four-year-old child giving birth to an endless existential scream.

Finally, my parents settle on a tree. I have no memory of this decision, but we end up with a tree. And not just one tree. The man from the tree lot offers me a small Christmas tree—for free. I imagine him thinking: take this; please, take this; stop crying; just go home already. Even now, I can see the tiny tree, decorated and placed in the room

I shared with my one-year-old brother. I can tell you exactly where the tree was relative to the door, to my brother’s crib, to my bed. It is a marker of my first experience with the complexities of human emotion, the nuances of communication, and how those can go awry.

Tonight, at the wooden table, on the decomposed granite patio next to the theater—with two sips of a gin and tonic under my belt, as it were—my four-year-old self and I meet. I let the feelings come. No one truly understood. I was alone. And I realized: This is what it’s like to be a highly sensitive person. A person likely on the autism spectrum. This is what it’s like, in moments of disaster, when I have to choose either to mask by staying in control, or to be true to myself, and let the emotions sweep me away. And, if I let the emotions flow, I can’t be the person who calmly calls 911. I can’t be the person who speaks with authority from across the street and says, I need someone who is a doctor or a nurse. I can’t be those people, because I am jelly. I am liquid agony and grief. I am this tragedy, and every other tragedy I have ever witnessed, or felt, or heard of. Each one playing itself out again inside my body. And though I can stop it, I can’t let myself stop it. Because shutting down my emotions has not worked out so well in the past.

Tonight, I finally understand why I buried my memories of incest fifty-five years ago. My highly sensitive, probably Autistic self would have shaken apart otherwise. For years, I’ve wondered: what did I feel when it happened? What was it like? Well, now I think I know. Dad coming into my room, slipping his tongue into my mouth and his hands across my body was not the only time I had been overwhelmed with emotions. The Christmas tree lot may have been the first, but it was not the last. Many vague memories of being told I was too dramatic, too emotional, a baby, and that if I think-that-hurts-wait-till-I-find-out-what-real-pain-is, paint a sad picture of learning that emotions—my earth-deep, tsunami-strong emotions—are not acceptable. Are not appropriate. Are something to suppress. To hide. To bury.

So I let the feelings flow. Let them incapacitate me. I am aware simultaneously of my feelings and also of how I am perceived in this moment: as a child, as a weak link, as a hysterical woman. Never mind that I identify as nonbinary—no one over fifty is ever going to see me as anything other than a not-particularly-feminine woman. But I realize I don’t care about any of it. I realize I am committed to feeling these feelings because I don’t want to carry yet another fucking trauma around for twenty years—basically, for the rest of my life. I know where that road leads. So I think fuck it and moan (a little) and cry (silently) and sit with my head bowed over my hands scrubbing at nothing. There is nothing I can do, not even to pray that she is still alive, though I fervently hope she is. Hope she is alive, even though I can imagine the pain and horror that accompanies being tossed onto asphalt by a speeding car and surviving.

Or, I could wish for her pain to be over.

But then there is still her partner’s pain. And nothing I can do or wish or pray for will change that. Acceptance is a bitch.

Somehow, I get through the two hours of the play—which is very good, very emotional. It deals (of course) with trauma and parents and childhood and brings up loose bits of bedrock from my therapy session earlier today. The tears that leak onto my cheeks are probably because of the plugs in my tear ducts to alleviate dry eyes. Sure. Go with that.

And as we drive home, I think, yeah. It makes sense. By thirteen, when Dad began to molest me, it was probably second nature instantly to deny any powerful, negative emotions. So I could fit in. So I could be accepted. So I could survive. A habit that has been almost impossible to break. Until recently. Until tonight. And what a fucking horrible way to make progress.