Suffering

Was thinking quite a bit about trauma and suffering last week, especially in relation to art. Generally exploring the idea of art as healing and how that links to concerns about texts being 'triggering' for some readers. Had one long and illuminating conversation on the topic, with part of the light being shed touching on my own experiences. (The illumination being mine only, I suspect, rather than that of my interlocutor. But that's the usual way of things, I suppose.)

I saw very clearly that the suffering I endured in the course of my protracted visit to what I termed Fantasyland around this time, two years ago, has not resulted, as far as I can tell, in any sense of trauma at all. I know that 'suffering' sounds a wee bit over the top here, but that's what it was, something I generally hesitated to let friends & family know at the time. The experience didn't involve anything quite as extreme as torture porn at its worst, but there were times it wasn't too far off, and the fact it lasted (as far as I could tell) pretty much continuously for some three and a half weeks comes close, I think, to a definition of protracted mental torture. Mind you, all in all it lasted less than a month so, keeping it real, I was a good deal more fortunate than those poor souls whose experience of psychosis literally can be counted in terms of years, or prisoners who are subjected to deliberate mental torture over months and months.

But back to the point: Why no sense of trauma at all? I think the answer, inadequate as it may sound, is pure luck. I'm not built that way, or, at least, my brain isn't. And I'm not implying any particular resilience or ability to rise above pain on my part. In fact, the experience showed me that those are qualities I lack. I was purely a passive sufferer with no direction or sense of agency. Other people saved me - Noi, my friends, the medical team. But the flat truth is I can think about these things now without any feelings of distress at all. Just a kind of somewhat bewildered, puzzled, slightly fascinated, interest.

And that leads me to something else that crystalized for me last week. Those who can somehow carry on when the pain is unremitting are truly astonishing. I'm thinking here particularly of those who endure psychotic states for long periods (for some, forever) without falling apart. (On Friday I was reminded in a confab with a couple of colleagues of another colleague of many years standing, whom I didn't ever know all that well, who went through some kind of crisis a few years back and sort of disappeared. (That can happen in a school with a staff as large as ours.) I saw the colleague just once in the crisis period and was taken aback at the degree of pain written into them. Somehow I'd managed to forget this, until being reminded on Friday. I suppose that's the way we protect ourselves from the reality of unreasonable, unfathomable, suffering. And I suppose it's good that we are able to.)