Writing about Trauma

    Writing is hard. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my blog and the increase in popularity this year. On one hand, when I have a post that I’m confident about I know that my work will be rewarded by having other people see it. When I have an idea, like discussing the Trayvon Martin case or what decisions I make before raising my hand in class, or whether the Thunder trading James Harden was really that bad of a move I know that other people will see it and comment on it. There was once a point where only one other person read my blog, and now my posts routinely get dozens of eyes.

    Trauma is a bit more difficult to deal with. When I’m at work, I deal with people’s trauma every day. I can listen to someones story and parse out what the best decisions are relatively quickly. I advise people every day about what they ought to do. My days are spent telling people “You should do this; you shouldn’t do that; you should do this, but not right now; you shouldn’t do this now but later you will” and then convincing them why it’s a good idea. I feel that my day is spent doing triage, more than anything else. Mostly, my advice just involves making sure that people aren’t worse off afterwards than they would have been.

Dealing with other people’s trauma is easy, writing about my own trauma here is not. There’s a post that I’ve wanted to write, but every time I draft it in any way, no matter which angle I take, or which facts I choose to use or not to use to support my point it still is too emotionally draining to publish. Writing about the good things that happen in my life is something that I don’t like doing on my blog, mostly because I always feel that the good things are uninteresting and often are things that I can’t talk about anyway due to privacy concerns. Writing about my own struggles is something that I’ve wanted to do (See "I still stay awake at night"), but there’s a lot in my life that I still haven’t found the correct angle to use, or that I haven’t found the right way to describe.  Even when I do have an angle that I’m comfortable with, having enough permission from others to discuss the situation in the way that I wish to is challenging because points of view often conflict. I find it funny that at work, the majority of my day talking about, discussing and mitigating the traumatic experiences of others, but at home on my blog I’m often unable to. When I was in high school, I wrote poems to deal with the lows of life. (Unrelated: It’s been 9 years since i wrote Loveless). Now, I use my blog as an outlet for the frustrating parts of my life.

I use the word trauma here, because that’s how certain life events feel to me. Traumatic experiences are by definition negative, but often something good comes out of those situations. I feel that if I had the right way of describing it (my often used refrain for posts like this is “Great Idea, Bad Writer”), I’d have more posts with those personal stories. I think that describing the events that make you who you are, good or bad, helps readers/listeners to understand the person you became. For example, my hearing loss isn’t the entirety of my being, but I certainly think that telling people that I’m hearing impaired helps them to understand who I am and the decisions that I make. More importantly, these stories are extremely interesting.

Eventually, there may be a story about my hearing loss here at some point. There may be a post about Loving v. Virginia and its relationship to DOMA, and my feelings towards both. There may be post about other experiences in my life that I haven’t yet discussed. But more importantly, there will be sports discussion. There will be album reviews and posts about music lyrics. More importantly, I will make a good-faith attempt to ensure that each post here on The 5 Year Plan is a worthy read, even if the author isn’t always a worthy writer.