13 years ago, about this time now, my family was loading the car for a trip to Florida.
Itās so surreal, the trauma my family faced.
People have dismissed my trauma because it isnāt the typical PTSD people experience from abuse or from war or violence.
But my experience was traumatic. I canāt speak to how it impacted everyone in my family, but I can still vividly remember the terror of that experience.
Imagine waking up to the bouncing of your car as the trees on the left approached, screaming, only to see the trees on your right inches from your face.
Imagine the disorientation of not know what is up or down, hearing glass breaking, smashing of metal.
Imagine waking up in pain, pitch black, emptiness, not fully aware of what has happened.
Imagine hearing your brother, who was only separated from you by a tree, screaming that he canāt breathe.
Imagine EMTs counting off your siblings, like victims, as the try to account for everyone.
Imagine hearing, āwe canāt find Jesse.ā
Imagine being face up as youāre carried on a stretcher only to see nothing but ambulance lights surrounding the road.
Imagine forgetting your birthday or your social security number because youāre so full of terror.
Imagine the ambulance picking up speed as the EMTs identify your brotherās blood pressure dropping.
Imagine waiting alone in the trauma bay, having siblings roll in one by one.
Imagine your parents pulling a curtain around you so they can talk to you in private, and knowing what is coming.
Imagine the tears run down your dadās face as he chokes back the words that your brother died.
I can still hear those words in my mind.
āJesse. [pause] Jesse died.ā
Iām a broken record as I share my experience. I recently spoke with an old therapist about my urge to share or even RE-EXPERIENCE this in some twisted way. Something called re-enacting. She shared that this is common with trauma survivors as a way of making sense of what happened.
I know I share a lot about the pain of being forgotten during the accident. And I fixate on that and sometimes think that the pain of being āneglectedā (whether or not that was true, but thatās how my mind read it) was worse than the accident itself. But I donāt know. I think it might be similar to feeling anxiety. They say anxiety is a secondary emotion because itās easier to feel anxiety than to feel the real, hard emotion. Maybe thatās the truth with this accident. Itās easier to fixate on being lost or forgotten, then the trauma itself.
I know I over share. But forgive me. This is how I process things.
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