Notes from a Class on Trauma Hannah Soyer

Hannah Soyer

1 Assuming, then, that trauma has a voice.

2 Assuming, then, that trauma is a wounding: the incision made down my back when I was eight years old.

3 Assuming, then, trauma as a result of the wound: the insistent terror I encounter in the face of “I consent,” the hazy feeling in my body during other medical procedures, my writing.

4 Assuming, then, that the body itself provides the link: It can become difficult to hold both these truths simultaneously: Without spinal fusion surgery at eight years old, you would have died and you don’t want to die. You also don’t want your disease to magically disappear. When you think of the body as a link, you think of the body as the answer, or at the very least, an answer. You also think of your friend who had a similar disease to yours and who died when you were a freshman in high school after her parents took her off life support. What percentage of the circumstances leading up to her death were rooted in her body? What circumstances were not?

5 Assuming, then, that this is not an exaggeration: You cannot remember the first time you saw a romantic relationship involving a disabled individual represented in the media. Maybe 2016—the release of Me Before You coincided with your first realization that you have panic attacks, dissociation your most recognizable symptom. You sat outside your grandparent’s house and cried, feeling as if you were floating right above your body, and that the flowers in their backyard, the cement of their patio, the wood of the ramp that traversed the step into their house—all of these were not real. It took you awhile before you could talk, but you finally answered your mom’s question of what was wrong by saying, “There’s a movie that just came out where the disabled protagonist falls in love with his helper and then he kills himself at the end.”

6 Assuming, then, that the individual cannot be separated from the collective.

Hannah Soyer

7 Assuming, then, that there is no guilt-free speech: Also all in 2016–an employee at a care facility for disabled individuals in Japan writes a letter stating, “I envision a world where a person with multiple disabilities can be euthanized, with an agreement from the guardians, when it is difficult for the person to carry out household and social activities.” He later murders 19 disabled individuals living in this facility and injures 26 more. Julianna Snow, a five-year-old with a form of muscular dystrophy, tells her parents she doesn’t want to go back to the hospital the next time she is sick and wants to go to heaven instead. Her parents oblige and she dies. 14-year-old Jerika Bolen, who had the same disease you have, decides to end her life, citing intense pain as the reason, pain that was unable to be effectively managed. There is a “last dance” held in her honor. Two important components of Jerika’s identity that are often overlooked: she was black, and she was openly queer.

8 Assuming, then, that trauma marks the body–the scar down the middle of your back should not be read as a signifier of social trauma, but rather as a mark of privilege that you have access to and can afford this medical procedure.

9 Assuming, then, a pattern of non-consent.

10 Assuming, then, a pattern of non-consent: The realization that your body isn’t yours might come to you instantaneously, in the moment that four residents file into the room behind the doctor, and you’re sitting on the table with your shirt off, slouched to the side because that’s how your muscles work and that’s what they’re all here to see. Of course the doctor asked you and your parents if it was okay for the students to observe, and of course you and your parents said yes. You are six years old. You don’t understand how consent works. You understand that you have the ability to say no, but you exercise this mainly in what one might consider normal six-year-old activities, such as playing imaginary friends with your brother, or not giving up a certain crayon at school. This isn’t exactly what one would consider a normal six-year-old activity, is it? Being looked at by doctors and medical students in this way?

11 Assuming, then, a pattern of non-consent: Something happens to you when you are (you think) in 2nd grade. When making drinks at your apartment with A., the girl you are dating, you tell her about the abusive helper you had your freshman year of undergrad, the gaslight-y, manipulative friend but more than friend from a year or so ago, and then you say something that you surely only say because of the alcohol inside of you: “There was this incident with a man when I was little. I’m still stepping around it and only recently realizing how much that experience shaped me.” You don’t say anything more than that; your instances of trauma feel inconsequential next to hers, and you don’t want to undermine her experiences with details of how your helper at that time–who worked for the elementary school you went to and stayed with you all day–had carried you out of the bathroom after helping you and placed you in the lap of a man you detested (you don’t know why you had such a strong aversion to him, but your guess would be that he made you feel small and helpless and insignificant. Once you realized you were being carried out of the bathroom to be placed on his lap, you started screaming and crying, which somehow cruelly mixed with the laughter of your helper. You think the man was laughing too. You were wearing shiny blue pants, like 2nd graders do. This is all you remember of this experience, but you did not want to go to school after that, and your mom had to assure you each morning that this man wouldn’t be there–what does this mean?) The point of telling all of this now, though, is not to illustrate how your mind or memory went blank after you had been placed in his lap (you have always been, for the most part, physically at the mercy of others), but how the intricacies of this memory are not ones you want to divulge to the girl you are dating. You don’t want to tell her all of this, you want to kiss her. You want to curl your body into hers.

Hannah Soyer

12 Assuming, then, an impossible dichotomy: the imperative to tell vs. the impossibility of telling. What Audre Lorde meant when she wrote “Your silence will not protect you”–not that bystander’s complicity will circle around to harm them (although, sure it will), but that our own omissions will not end up keeping us safe.

13 Assuming, then, that trauma fractures linearity: Time behaves oddly in response to bodies being stolen. It splinters and warps, bubbles and collapses in upon itself. For just this moment, though, entertain the notion of time as straightforward, and learn to go back. Go back decades to your grandmother giving up her job at a music store to have children, centuries to the farmers’ wives being defined in relation to their husbands, eons to the women who kept their children alive, who kept their families alive, who did what they had to do which sometimes meant, you’ll come to understand, sacrificing parts of themselves for others. Sometimes, the parts of themselves that they have no choice but to sacrifice are their children—the ones whose lungs are too weak and filled with fluid, the ones who cannot see, the deaf ones, the lame ones, the ones who twitch and scream and cannot vocalize their understanding of the world in front of them, who cannot, for instance, say no. But of course these children never did belong to their mothers, just as you will come to recognize that your body, along with not belonging to you, also does not belong to the woman who birthed you. During the years that you teeter between childhood and loosely defined adulthood, (loosely defined because if adulthood equals autonomy surely adulthood is a lie), you spend a lot of time wondering if girls are born already shrouded in armor with knives for hands, and if so do they tear up their mothers’ insides on their way into the world or do the gouges only make their mothers’ bodies stronger?

14 Assuming, then, that trauma fractures time: When you say The girl I’m dating, you’ll stop mid-sentence, wonder at your need to continue to refer to women as girls—is it because you, yourself, feel stuck in a perpetual girlhood? Is it because of the perceived infantility that haunts disabled individuals well past their infancy? Alcoholics stop maturing after their first drink, time stops turning after a body is stolen, if a body was never not stolen, does time pass for the woman living in said body?

15 Assuming, then, that trauma entails leaving: A body without fear as a body refusing to harbor the belief you will only be known in your abandonment. A body without fear as a body that does not have to do anything besides exist to keep others from leaving it. If you have to have left the traumatic experience or site of the traumatic experience seemingly unscathed, seemingly becomes the word you latch onto.

16 Assuming, then, bodies as stories: During undergrad, you work on an investigative journalism piece cataloging the abuse of people with disabilities and learn this–In the time period of January to June 2014 alone, there were 3,161 reports of dependent adult abuse made to the Iowa Department of Human Services.

Hannah Soyer

17 Assuming, then, that narratives produce catharsis.

18 Assuming, then, the need for collective memory work: The disability community will never agree on how to talk about the deaths–of Julianna, of Jerika, of so many—because the disability community is made up of individuals, all with differing perspectives and different histories of hurt. You didn’t know Julianna Snow or Jerika Bolen (You had met Jerika once, actually, at a conference—the narrative isn’t that neat). You didn’t know their bodies, you couldn’t know their pain. You would like to hold these two truths simultaneously: As a child, during a particularly terrible battle with a respiratory infection, like Julianna, you had begged your parents to let you die, and you are lucky (surely this is the right word, as precarious as disabled life seems to be) that they had not obeyed your wishes. At the same time, the amount of ongoing, physical pain that Jerika talked about you have no experience with (the acute physical pain you’ve experienced from medical procedures are isolated in their acuteness and intensity to the time of the procedure. The pain following your spinal fusion surgery is hazy—you know it was there, but have only flashes of memory of it). It seems cruel to silence her voice even more than it was systemically silenced as a black, queer, disabled woman by saying she should not have been allowed to end her life.

19 Assuming, then, the erasure of the body: You want to honor Julianna’s and Jerika’s bodily experiences, their bodily pain, their bodily fear, while still questioning what was at work to make it so easy for them to choose to die. Is a choice really a choice if you’re being told over and over again that your life is not worth living, that you are a burden to your caregivers? Is it a choice if you’re 14 years old? 5 years old? 8? The traumas don’t match, the choices don’t match, the pain is not commensurate, how could we even think they are commensurate? But what choices need to be made to keep living?

20 Assuming, then, there is no definitive settlement, no resolution: You could never quite figure out—still cannot quite figure out— what happened after you were carried out of the bathroom in 2nd grade and placed on the man’s lap.