Traumarama: Welcome to the Thunder Dome

For years of my life I have been attracted to the damaged. I have befriended the addicted, dated the complicated, and surrounded myself with people who propel themselves through life on a steady stream of turmoil.

Turns out it doesn’t often turn out.

My unpopular opinion: trauma does not make you interesting.

Trauma is a lot of things – a fact of life, an inevitability, a societal binding agent. However trauma is not a character trait, nor is it a justification for behaviour (good or bad).

“I don’t get close to people because I’m used to being left behind...”

“My ex hurt me so now I shut down so I don’t have to experience that again…”

“Someone made fun of my Spiderman lunchbox once so now I have a complex…”

It’s all a cop out.

As an adult (well kind of. I cried because we didn’t have enchilada sauce the other day and then needed to immediately take a nap) I’ve noticed that we hold on to our traumas and use them as important plot points in our origin stories. It acts as a supplement to an otherwise “normal” existence.

We all do it.

I’m the first one to try and one-up you at a party with an anecdote about how one time I got hit by a car in the West Edmonton Mall parking lot and lived to tell the tale.

I was seven and the car was going like 10 kmph, but still.

What fucks us up first and foremost is that we don’t realize just how normal trauma really is. You’ll be pressed to find someone who hasn’t lost a loved one, been devastated by an ex, or experienced something that they qualify as a world-shaking event. It won’t happen.

We’ve all been there.

This is not to say that trauma is not important or impactful. Trauma can make or break a person and that is absolutely valid. What is not valid is using trauma as a crutch or a defense when dealing with other people, as well as our own circumstance.

To project your fears (based in retrospective trauma) onto another person and allow that to strain your relationship is toxic behaviour and it doesn’t make you interesting.

What makes you interesting is how you come back from trauma. How you transform your losses and failures into lessons.

I want to hear about how you conquered your trauma and how it aided in your evolution rather than continuing to exist as your origin.

Whether you melodramatically moved across the planet after a breakup (ok maybe multiple times), wrote a book, ran a marathon, started a charity, or now subscribe to nudism – I’d rather hear about what you built from trauma than what trauma took from you.

Despite musings from the Scene Aesthetic circa 2006:

Beauty isn’t in the breakdown; it’s in the breakthrough.

(Shout out to the one other person that gets that reference)