tw: references to trauma + sexual assault (SA)
Hello. I hope you’re having a lovely day.
Recovery felt like an appropriate topic to embrace the new year with in my first letter of 2022. In the past few years, we’ve seen a significant paradigm shift away from new year’s resolutions which encourage complete self-reinvention, towards those with greater emphasis on happiness, wellbeing and self-care. Thankfully, more and more of us are starting to reject appearance-oriented or otherwise damaging ‘goals’ which have dominated new-year rhetoric since I can remember.
Recovery as a return to a healthy body or mind, or both, seems to align quite nicely with the drive behind new year’s resolutions and the idea of ‘new year, new you’. Striving towards self-improvement is not inherently bad, but none of us exist in an ideological vacuum, unaffected by dictatorial beauty standards or other yardsticks of self-worth. A ‘new you’ is seldom ever just about you.
Likewise, recovery isn’t a clear-cut, two-step process of mental or physical illness, followed by a return to normalcy and an absence of ill-health. If the existence of long COVID has shown us anything, it’s that illness is not static or dichotomous - you don’t exist as either ‘well’ or ‘unwell’, and most people who experience prolonged mental or physical illness live somewhere in between. As Henry Marsh puts it:
Recovery is not always complete. With some illnesses, it is a question of coming to terms with loss, and that you will never return to what you had, or were, in the past.
Reconciling the need to present as ‘well’ and persist with the demands of daily life discourages a pursuit of true recovery. Workplace presenteeism and its subcultures in educational institutions and other organisations are only part of this problem. To view recovery as a complete absence of illness discredits your experiences as an ill person and their influence on the individual you exist as now. Illness can change you irrevocably, to the point where returning to ‘normal’ or ‘before’ is unthinkable or impossible.
I also think, in many ways, that recovery is inextricable from the topic of my last letter, home, and how one defines and establishes home for themselves. For me, this relates especially to recovery from trauma, which impacts the memory in such a way that the idea of ‘before’ is often completely annihilated for the individual.
I believe that home can be a place, or a state of body or mind, where one feels happy, safe or secure. When this home is violated, it can result in trauma. This can be violation of the mind and the body or, as is often the case, both simultaneously. Once trauma is inside the home, the same body, place, or person can become your home again, but it can never exist in quite the same way as before. It must be reformed in order to ‘recover’ and protect itself from the invasion. This is one of several truths I came to terms with over Christmas, as the sanctuary of my childhood house and a break from the present reality of working 9-5 gave way to uninhibited thought and a rekindling of the past. I see now that recovery is an ongoing and unreliable act.
I hope it’s not gauche to cite an essay I glimpsed within another newsletter (Parul Sehgal’s “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” in Brandon Taylor's Sweater Weather) — from which I found out that traumatic flashbacks weren't reported until after the invention of film. To me, this suggests that trauma and the way we process it is invariably connected to narrative itself. I have often viewed my own experiences of ‘traumatic flashbacks’— though I struggle to fully embrace this label as I often point to myself as the chief cause for said ‘trauma’ — through something of a cinematic lens, feeling as if I am watching from outside myself. This sense of spectation surely relates to the representation of trauma in fictional narratives and its influence on the ways we visualise, and expect ourselves to express, trauma.
This is perhaps rooted in the fact that the act of narrativising a trauma can be both traumatic or therapeutic. Traumatic affectation of memory enables it being re-narrativised. In other words, trauma confuses the mind’s ability to demarcate past and present, and so prompts an ongoing ‘reliving’ of the event. This re-visitation of the past, which often resembles or feels like the present to the individual, can happen alone (e.g. experiencing flashbacks) or can involve others (e.g. a retelling of the event). Either way, recovering from a trauma can be deeply affected by the narrative we attach to it and our choice to share this with others.
The name that we give to a traumatic event affects how we perceive it. Redefining a memory can change our own mental narrative of it, sometimes reducing the immediacy of it or reframing it, by applying the perspective of a new observer. Finally validating something as a ‘trauma’, in this sense, can feel both liberating and confining.
My last point on the connection between trauma, narrative and recovery, is the commonality of SA victims blaming themselves. A narrative of self-blame endures, perhaps, because it is a way of retroactively reclaiming control. It is a way of ascribing trauma to your own, rather than someone else's, actions, in the present-day. Recognising this pattern of guilt attribution has helped me find some peace. Affecting the narrative of trauma can affect the process of recovery.
To (at long last) return to my earlier point, I hope this new year offers an opportunity to reflect on the idea of recovery and how we narrativise it. As the world around us attempts to recover from prolonged illness, we should not do ourselves the injustice of forgetting what we’ve lost, but instead embrace new ways of living and continuing on.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. Speak soon.