Content Warning: this post contains descriptions and mentions of animal deaths, the Holocaust/genocide and WWII, and school shootings. Brains are complicated things. Please don’t read about my brain if it will upset yours.
I have dreams about my childhood home all the time. I lived in that house from the age of four to nineteen (and a half), and then for smaller periods of time in my twenties.
The house was on five acres, and though we were in no way a true working farm, we had an assortment of cats, dogs, some sheep and chickens, and for a while, turkeys, ducks, and geese. Just for fun. My dad enjoys eating lamb (though he did not slaughter the sheep himself). We always had fresh eggs, and we hatched chicks in an incubator on our kitchen counter in the spring. We had frequent lessons on the circle of life when lambs or chicks didn’t make it, and when coyotes/hawks/raccoons disappeared various animals and perhaps left a trail of feathers behind. Two of my very own kittens disappeared without a trace, and I am still sad about it. Why didn’t we let the cats inside at night, you ask? Because animals live outside, of course.
Often, my childhood-home dreams involve wildfire and needing to evacuate, or some other kind of disaster or intrusion that seems perfectly normal in dreamworld. Almost without fail, there are small children or animals who need help.
In last night’s dream, I was showing an incubator full of fluffy chicks to a girl about five years old. But upon a closer look, there were a couple birds in there that didn’t belong. A skinny little black thing whose feathers reminded me of a shrimp, and some other kind of songbird. I wondered how we’d get the wild birds out of the incubator without them flying around the house. I got a cardboard box ready, and when Dad opened the incubator, I pointed out the skinny one that was definitely not a baby chicken. He was able to pick it up, and I noticed it now had blue painter’s tape wrapped around its body. I asked Dad if he wanted help removing the tape and followed him to the front door. I stood in the open doorway while he leaned over the porch railing, and though his body blocked my view, I could see feathers falling. I realized way more feathers were dropping than if I had helped, and that the bird was probably now very hurt. My mouth opened in a silent cry, and I made sure the girl inside couldn’t see. My grief felt overwhelming, and I woke up.
I have realized in my adulthood that there were small-T traumas in my growing up with all those animals, experiences I had that stayed with me. Experiences that are not the norm for kids who didn’t grow up in the country. My siblings also had these experiences, but don’t seem to be affected the same way I was.
My dad is a doctor and an anatomist, and as both a scientist and a man of religious faith, perhaps he has a different view of life, death, and suffering than I have.
He wanted us to see and learn and experience all that the natural world has to teach us. He delighted in using the chicken bones on his dinner plate to illustrate the way joints moved. He invited us to watch him slaughter the Thanksgiving turkey so that we could see the way the body moved even after the head was cut off. I watched him snap the neck of a tiny chick who was not going to make it. And perhaps most gruesome, one night he called us out onto the porch to show us something. There, by our front door, lay a deceased lamb whose whole underside had been eaten, probably by a coyote. He wanted us to see the way the predator ate the warm insides and left the rest of the body intact. “On the porch?” I asked, confused and staring. He chuckled and said, no, that he’d brought the body up to the house. My dad does not remember this, but I can’t seem to forget it.
I have snapshot memories of these three events: the dancing turkey, the dying chick, and the dead, eviscerated lamb. I have come to the conclusion that it was not appropriate for me to see these things. I’m not sure that it would even cross my parents’ minds to shield me from these parts of country life. Maybe they warned me and asked me if I wanted to see, and because my older siblings did, I did too. Maybe there was no warning. I don’t remember. I’m sure many young children could experience these events and not have any lasting negative effects. All three of my siblings grew up to earn master’s degrees in something sciencey. One even became a doctor like my dad. I majored in English and history.
I remember the moment that my kid-brain integrated the information that the Holocaust and the US dropping atomic bombs on Japan happened in the same war. I was in the car with my mom. Apparently, we were talking about World War II. I felt it like a gut punch. How could these horrifying events happen one right after the other? How could groups of people commit these atrocities against other groups of people intentionally? It was probably that moment that turned me into a history major.
There were two classes dedicated solely to the Holocaust at my university, and I took both of them. On the first day of the first class, we discussed the meaning of the word “genocide.” The term was coined in 1944 by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin and genocide was recognized as a crime under international law in 1946. Lemkin created the term in response to Nazi policies, but also as a way to define previous targeted actions against other groups of people. I knew about the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi in the 1990s, but I’d had no idea there had been so many others. We in the United States, for example, have a hard time recognizing the genocide of the Native Americans. I never heard it talked about in school using those terms, though books that call it what it is have been around since at least the 1990s. I have several memories of my Holocaust classes as well. One is of an old man coming slowly down the steps of the lecture hall to take a seat near the front. My professor introduced him to the class as a Holocaust survivor who came to sit in on the class whenever he liked. The other memory is of the professor reading aloud the poem “Death Fugue,” by Paul Celan. I still feel compelled, twenty years later, to read Holocaust memoirs and stories set during the second world war.
I know there are so many more historical events that, if I knew about them, I would feel a compulsion to learn more, to keep reading, horrified. It’s like I have to keep looking, keep learning. If we look away, if we ignore it, we forget. We forget what we’ve done and what we’re capable of. And we can’t do that, because we have to change.
I was watching a documentary (yes, it was about indigenous genocide), and the narrator mentioned a good friend who died in a plane crash, whom he still misses. That the maker of this film mentioned his friend struck me, and I looked her up. The wikipedia article about the commuter flight she was on included a video simulation of the crash, that stopped a second before the plane hit the ground. I read the article through and clicked on the simulation. And then I clicked it again. And again. And I imagined the people on board, and the mistakes the pilot made. And now it’s a tragedy I carry, in my catalog of tragedies.
In 2018, when a young man in terrible need of help went to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and killed seventeen people, I felt compelled to read about every other school shooting I’ve been alive for. I worked at a school then, and yes, we helped the first graders and kindergarteners when we held shelter-in-place drills. I developed shingles after that shooting, and the doctor who diagnosed me at urgent care chuckled, said I needed to work on my stress, and left the room. In May 2022, when another young man in great need killed twenty-one people at an elementary school in Texas, I again felt compelled to read about all the school shootings. But this time, I did not. It doesn’t help you, I told myself. It doesn’t change anything. I’m trying not to dive head first into every horrible thing that happens anymore. I try not to read the news, because we only publish horrible things.
Almost every day since I started The Gupta Program last July, I do a “Soften and Flow” meditation, often twice a day. During this meditation, I’m supposed to focus on an area of tension. That tension is trapped energy or “trapped emotion” that needs to soften, and flow through the body instead of being stuck. The idea that I have emotion trapped in my jaw and neck and shoulders simultaneously sounds incredibly hokey and makes perfect sense to me.
Recently, during my Soften and Flow meditation, I lay there, and I told my tension to soften and flow; I told my body it was okay to let go. I told myself that I could let go. I could let those childhood memories that bothered me go and keep all the good ones; I could let my childhood house go because we don’t live there anymore. And I told myself I could let the Holocaust go. It’s over. It’s long over, and I can’t change it. All that gut-wrenching, world-altering tragedy has happened; we will feel the effects of it forever. And I’m allowed to let it go. I don’t have to carry it. It doesn’t help me to carry it and it doesn’t help the victims for me to carry it. These are lovely, new ideas to my subconscious, and she doesn’t quite believe me yet, but I’m working on it.
When I was in seventh grade, a teacher informed me and my best friend that we didn’t have to save the world. I think that’s still the crux of what I’m struggling with. How can I live my life and be happy when there’s so much horrible stuff happening and so much to be done? But I cannot be AOC, even though the world needs thousands more like her.
In fact, I don’t have the energy or ability to be much of any kind of activist right now. But it is okay that I am just myself. I am allowed to experience moments of peace and contentment. I am allowed to feel joyful even while tragedy is happening at this very second. My happiness doesn’t ignore someone’s sorrow or pain. The world will always contain multitudes of simultaneous joy and tragedy. I and my highly sensitive nervous system have to find a way to reconcile that unconscionable truth. I will try to remember that in the face of our current overwhelmingly dire circumstances, our world full of fear and pain, that joy is rebellious action.
What Happened to Your Legs? 