“Mac, you’re done. You are clearly not handling yourself. You’re not handling things that you might otherwise be able to shrug off, so you’re done.”
This infuriated me. I was the problem? The problem was that I was overreacting, and I shouldn’t be this upset, and if I was my usual self I’d just be breezing through all this? It infuriated me because I agreed with it. Nothing had happened, really. Not to me. I’d only been scared. I had no reason to be flipping out.
That wasn’t what Gideon meant. He was making the argument that fleeing for safe-feeling ground, wether within the same city or outside a whole country, was a necessity on any assignment. He said that the news corporation he’d worked for had mandatory rest periods for a reason. When you were working away from home, if you couldn’t take care of yourself and had no support network, regardless of the reason, or even if you could but had been out too long, time to go was time to go.
“Admit that you cannot do it,” Gideon said, “and get the fuck out of there.”
“No,” I said. I wasn’t a loser who couldn’t do my job, I said. I pointed out defiantly that I was still in fact successfully doing it.
-Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story by Mac McClelland
Near the end of my AmeriCorps term at the middle school where I mentored students whose lives were filled with trauma, I had this conversation a lot. Conversations about my plans for getting my MSW and pursuing trauma-based care and crisis intervention raised the question of whether that would be healthy, given the frequency of days one could find me crying in a heap near the refrigerator at home, cake in one hand and kleenex in the other. This question always felt like a question of my strength. I am stubborn. Three years later, and I’m finally beginning to consider that not being able to sustain daily exposure to trauma is not weakness. Am I ready to stretch further and say that strength is choosing to leave something that is hurting you and to do what’s new and uncomfortable but offers hope?
“Nothing had happened, really. Not to me. I’d only been scared.” This is the completely fucked calculus of oppression. Always holding up your own experience to someone else’s, weighing the sums of what’s been done to you and what you’ve witnessed done to others, as though there’s any reward to be had for anyone in this. The exhaustion of at least this/that didn’t happen in endless iterations.
I feel like I’m just pushing all the same words around in vaguely different combinations. I’m sure it’s tiring to read and hear. It’s tiring to be living it, obsessing over it. I want to believe that at some point, there will at least be a key change, a new time signature.
I’m ready to head toward safe ground. I haven’t lived there in awhile, but I think I’ve started to define a few of its boundaries for myself. I’m learning its shape.
