Recycling: On Choices and Changing
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I spent last week moving. Again. For the third time in one year.
Last week, I looked up the house where I spent part of my adolescence on Zillow. I do this every once in a while, and previously there had always been a diffuse picture of the driveway and my mother’s old flower garden, which last existed in 2006. My stepdad kept the house in the divorce.
This time there were new pictures, and the house was pending sale for nearly a million dollars. For the first time in about seven years, I got to see the inside of that house, except, of course, it wasn’t the same house. My stepdad has remarried and taken down the wall separating the kitchen and living-room, replacing it with a giant island with a quartz countertop and white cabinets. Our old kitchen with its ugly brown cabinets and semi-functional oven now looks like every rich person’s kitchen, because my stepfather is a rich person. We haven’t spoken in several years, ever since he got mad at me for not inviting him to my MFA graduation, for not wanting to stay in that house after my mom’s suicide, a death that happened after his divorce and a death I navigated on my own.
Whew. Okay.
For some reason I’d always thought I would buy that house when he sold it. Now I can see that idea for what it is: a trauma fantasy. A fantasy about being able to put things back together, kintsugi style. I will never again have a relationship with my abusive stepfather, because I no longer choose to be in relationship with abusive people. My mother is dead. No house can revive something that never existed in the first place.
The past is gone, but it is not gone. the past is only gone if I believe in a linear concept of time, which I don’t. If the past were gone, it would be gone. The past lives inside of me. As does the future. It is all here.
Two days ago there was a full moon, and in fifteen days I will turn 43. I am inching closer and closer to my mother’s age when she chose to leave this world. Less than a decade and I’ll be there. As the moon wanes each day I shed a new thing. Unlike the physical act of shedding, recovering from trauma means that nothing ever truly sheds. Nothing is ever fully worked through or discarded. Traumatic events, whether they are ongoing or one-off, lodge themselves into the psyche and stay there. They appear and, if we have the resources, we do our best to find presence with their manifestations.
My trauma often manifests in irrational ideas about what I deserve, what I can have, who and what I can trust, and how safe I am. It’s easy for me to simply decide that I will never have a house or a solid community, when that’s not true.
A reframe is often necessary. I can’t change what has happened to me. I can’t change what will happen to me. I don’t subscribe to the idea of “manifesting” my reality. But my beliefs and perceptions shape my world and can hold even more power than events themselves. When my CPTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder) tells me I am powerless, I remind myself that I have agency.
Agency doesn’t mean that I can control what has happened to me or what will happen to me. Agency isn’t control. None of us truly has control in the world— not even fascist dictators. That’s what makes being alive so hard; wanting control and never being able to have it. I’ve often made my life harder by believing that having control is a realistic expectation.
But agency? There’s that. I’m not going to delve into the question of free will because I have no answers. But I do know that within the confines of my own understanding of the world, I have choices, and having agency means that I am making my own choices.
A choice doesn’t always look like a choice, especially if we forget about agency. There have been many times I’ve blamed my circumstances on others when in reality I was scared to make a choice for myself. Resentment, for me, is a red flag signaling a choice I’ve made and not taken responsibility for. A choice to stay when I truly want to leave. A choice to remain silent when I long to speak up.
Trauma survivors have lived through something that robbed them of choice. We have, at one point or another, been victims. CPTSD, unlike PTSD, is a term that represents having experienced an ongoing, chronic, long-term trauma. Think child abuse, incest, kidnapping, war. When trauma is chronic and ongoing, someone loses their agency. As a child who was abused, I had no agency. I was not allowed to have my own ideas or even to fully form my Self.
Things are different now. I get to make choices.
Do I have control? No.
My mother’s suicide taught me that I will never have control. I can’t control the choices of others or the world around me. I can’t even necessarily control myself— I will inevitably betray myself and act in ways that feel out of alignment with the person I think I am, or who I want to be.
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