It’s the littlest things that can trigger the big ones, which is why past trauma can sneak up on you, out of nowhere. Memories that you didn’t know were memories, things long forgotten, can be unearthed by a word or a feeling. Have you seen that meme going around that says, “Can I get a body that doesn’t keep the score?” It’s funny. But no. It’s a hard ‘no’ on that one; our bodies are always recording what’s going on, at times more reliably than others.
When we were kids, my brother played baseball, and my dad was the coach, and so we spent years of summers at the baseball fields. Behind home plate, in what seemed like a narrow hallway built of grey cinderblock, mothers kept the score. But sometimes, there were no mothers to keep score, and so they’d look for the oldest kid they could find, and usually someone could pull a relatively seasoned boy from the snack shack and ask him to pay attention, and that kid was usually about 13. I know that because I was a bit younger, and so therefore, under the influence of a very hot, suburban summer, I thought he was cute.
What I was getting at — before the memory of ballfield afternoons and their ruddy-cheeked affiliates came wafting back — is that it feels like, to me, my body keeps the score like a middle school kid on a sweltering July day who is more concerned with consuming nachos than noticing every relevant detail of the game. Do you feel me? Memory is full of fuzzy math. And that doesn’t make the memories themselves any less worthy of being penciled out and given a second or a third look. It does mean you’re always a little unclear on who the winner is. Though, as any baseball mother knows (I was eventually one of those as well), it doesn’t really matter who won, because everyone’s white pants got stained at the knees.
Last week, I was at a friend’s house, and what happened was that my crazy cattle dog snuck into the room where we typically hide their sweet, geriatric cat when he comes over. It was all an accident, and no animals were ultimately harmed in the conflict, but for the first time, he found her, and there ensued some screeching chaos, and my crazy cattle dog, a victim of his own instincts, had to be dragged out by his scruff.
What happened for me, in hindsight, is that as soon as we realized crazy cattle dog was going rogue, I started to dissociate. My thinking brain shut down in favor of my survival brain, as I felt an immediate, deep sense of embarrassment. In other words, I was triggered long before I realized it. I quickly gathered our things and headed for the car, though my kind friends tried to assure me it was not a big deal. One tried to hug me goodbye, but I was already frozen, a victim of my own instincts.
Seconds down the road, my eyes blurred with tears, and I still didn’t understand. It took one curious pause while I drove — a skill I’ve learned, to check in and ask myself, What’s coming up right now? — for me to remember another dog-related incident, one that I’d forgotten. If you’ve had a traumatic memory visit you unexpected, then you know how sensory it is. You don’t think about it; you reexperience it with your eyes and ears and skin. Then, my crying surged ahead of me, ragged and gasping, into the headlights, dragging my car to the house. This was terrible, the memory raged. Just look at how terrible this was. It demanded my attention, looking for a brave witness.
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