Life As Performance Art 95

The show must go on. Those of you, Gentle Reader, who know me well, will also understand how much I live by those words. I will try to let nothing stop me, unless it happens to be death, or unavoidable hospitalization. Those of you who know me well will also understand that I am a trauma survivor. Two and a half years ago, when the shit was really hitting the fan for me, I ended up with snowballing crises in my apartment, my work, friendships. i was threatened by an off leash pit bull and that escalated into my not coping well with a lot of other situations. Then something happened. A friend, also suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, took way too personally my inability to communicate well to him or his friends at a social gathering in his home, and he was not about to consider that he wasn't the only person in the room who might be suffering from trauma. After he ended our friendship (in the long run, no great loss at all) I took stock of a few things, which is to say, I began to very carefully re-examine my life, my values and my way of reacting to stressful situations. I understood that I had to stop listening to a lot of the mental health propaganda about self-care, and for one simple reason. It reinforced a sense of victimhood. I knew then, that I must never again use my PTSD diagnosis as a get out of jail free card. I was determined to stop using it as an excuse for my own bad behaviour. I also decided to no longer let things escalate, or should they start, to do my due diligence to make it stop. At that time, on the pages of this blog, I was also exploring trauma as a theme and concept of our very human existence. Through my research and thought and exploration i have concluded that trauma is the one defining theme that unites us as humans. Trauma has always been a defining feature of our existence on this earth. The mental health industry has tried to persuade us that there are those who are traumatized, and those who are not. I disagree with this binary. I would rather be inclined to think that we are all traumatized, and that some react or respond to it in ways that are considered socially inappropriate. So I have opted to do better than that. For example, yesterday, when I was jumped by an individual outside my building who was going through a mental health episode. I was carrying home a jug of milk at around five in the afternoon from the local Shoppers Drug Mart, when suddenly the four litre plastic jug slipped out of my hand and some of it spilled on the pavement. I was able to rescue the jug before more than maybe two glasses worth had been lost, shared a joke with another tenant in my building about not crying over spilt milk, then this guy tried to grab the milk jug from my hand, saying he wanted to spill some too. I got a bit splattered with milk, told him to go away as I grabbed it back from him, and promptly escaped into my building. I did call police, because this was an assault, and they were kind to give me a follow up call to say he had been apprehended, is known to them, and to be sure I was alright. Truth be told, I wasn't quite shaken by the incident, but as I said to the woman on the phone, that I was in a gray zone between feeling pissed-off and shaken. I still continued with things as usual, cooked and ate dinner, cleaned the 'kitchen and had a Skype conversation with my friend in Colombia. (telling him about the incident in Spanish was excellent language practice, by the way, and it did give us something to talk about!). Am I feeling as if nothing happened? No, I am still feeling a bit odd. But I slept well last night, which is unusual, given what had just happened. I am also strongly aware of feeling compassion and concern for this individual who jumped at me, because I know that he is in a much worse place than I am, especially as a hostage to mental illness. I might even meet up with him again at work, since there would be a high possibility that he could become one of the clients that we work with and try to support. In the meantime, I am still carefully monitoring myself and my reactions, and the way I communicate to others, because I know that this kind of trauma can easily snowball if it isn't checked immediately. I am also reminding myself that life is never actually safe, and that this middle class assumption that life has to be safe and completely bullet proof is simply a lot of bourgeois nonsense. I am thinking here of the the words of Sara Maouie, the twenty year old activist in Sudan who has survived more than her share of trauma, incarceration, torture, and is now hiding and fleeing for her life. She said that she was born traumatized, and for this reason she is afraid of nothing. Words for us to live by, Gentle Reader.