imaginal realms

Poem from poetryisnotaluxury

I’m in the midst of reading The Body Keeps the Score, which had its moment a few years ago — I tried to get into it then and couldn’t get through it. I pretended to have read the whole thing because I felt like five chapters told me everything I needed to know and because sometimes I’m a liar. I now have to read it for a trauma class I’m in, so I’m finally getting through it.

In it, Bessel van der Koek writes about how trauma can dampen imagination: “Many of my patients have survived trauma through tremendous courage and persistence, only to get into the same kinds of trouble over and over again. Trauma has shut down their inner compass and robbed them of the imagination they need to create something better.” Doing the same thing over and over. Check. Relentlessly persistent. Yup. Unable to imagine anything could be different. Ughhh. A predilection for consulting psychics, friends, coaches, family members, strangers and people on the internet I’ve never met to tell me what to do because I don’t trust my intuition? Never.

This made me think about my own imagination — how, in the years following my illness, I was so moved to write and could do nothing but write about my traumatic experience. Unhinged and high on painkillers, I wrote endlessly about what happened to me; I wrote from my hospital bed; I wrote from a day bed in my parents’ apartment, surrounded by empty water glasses, medicine bottles and bowls of half-eaten food; I wrote in the notes app on my phone in a taxi to the hospital for blood draws. I wrote because I had no other choice but to write. I wrote about my friends and family in a way that looking back, was entirely inappropriate. I wrote with simmering anger disguised as humour tinged with sadness. If I didn’t write, I’d fall apart. It was as if writing about it helped move the trauma out of me in some way, which, knowing what I now know about the body, it most likely did.

Through it all, my world felt so small, impossible to break free from — but still, I dreamt about it being different. Slowly, it did change. Slowly, the grief melted. Slowly, I grew around it. Eventually, I started imagining a life beyond blood draws and pain pills. Eventually, it became a reality. Still, for those first few years, I could not make a decision to save my life: I second-guessed absolutely everything. I was desperate for someone to tell me what to do. I still am sometimes. The joke is that no one is knocking at my door to give me permission to build the life I want or tell me the right way to do something. I can only do that for myself. God, how great it would be if they would just tell me that I’ve made the right decision to keep me safe. The world is not safe. I’ve got to live anyway.

I think, too, about my childhood trauma and how sometimes I felt I couldn’t entirely create imaginary worlds in the ways others described. At the same time, all I did was daydream (and dissociate). I wanted so badly to have a rich imagination, but the most imaginative I could get was to make inanimate objects my friends and have one-sided conversations with them. Ok, I’ll admit that’s pretty imaginative—it’s just that I felt they should have had better dialogue. My boogie board never came up with the witty banter comedians like French & Saunders, the queens of comedy I obsessed over in my childhood, did. Agonizing over decisions was a huge part of my childhood and adolescence, too. I was the most regretful 18-year-old anyone had ever met, acting as if I was a wizened old crone who’d done a few too many stints in the clinker rather than a child with her entire life ahead of her.

I think about everyone’s trauma and how it can disconnect people from their imagination, purpose, drive and the possibility of creating a different world either for themselves or the collective. Another way to be. Away from all this death and suffering. The years since the pandemic have felt endlessly traumatizing. To imagine a different way can feel next to impossible, but I would like to believe that we can figure out a way to imagine new worlds for ourselves and others. It’s going to take a lot of work, but I think we can do it.

If you’ve felt like imagining a different type of world is impossible right now, it would make sense to me why you feel that way. I’d challenge all of us to do what we can to keep dreaming because we’re alive right now, and sometimes, in deep grief, dreaming is all we have. As Kim Addonizio says, Listen I love you joy is coming.

With love,

Nora x