Heres A Simplification Of Our Brains On Trauma. Trauma Is, At Its Core, Shit That We Werent Prepared

Here’s a simplification of our brains on trauma.  Trauma is, at it’s core, shit that we weren’t prepared for when it happened. Sometimes that means going out to our car and finding a bear. Sometimes that means being punched.  Sometimes that means having unexplained (or explained, cause fuck why not) physical pain. Sometimes that means someone leaving (by their choice or not). Sometimes that means not being allowed to join a group.  Sometimes that means someone calling you stupid, or anything else, or even just the tone they used.  If you weren’t emotionally prepared for it, even if the rest of the world magically was, it’s traumatic.  This matters because our brains remember traumatic things differently than they do little everything else.

When something bad happens that we weren’t prepared for, we don’t know what matters.  Our brain doesn’t know why there’s a bear there.  And if it doesn’t have context for the thing that happened it isn’t able to predict whether it’s going to happen again, which means no way it can control it happening again.  And that shit’s not cool.  We want to be able to predict and control insignificant things, that goes times 1000 for things that can or did hurt us in any way, shape, or form.  So our brain locks that memory down.  It’s tries to remember every little thing in as high fidelity as possible because it doesn’t know what matters.   It doesn’t know if the colour of our car or the sound of a motorbike going by or the smell of barbecue was ‘the thing’ that would let us predict and control wether we ran into the bear or not.  Our logical mind might say “holy shit dude, my car being red didn’t matter, the bear was only here because it was eating the berries on that bush, y’know, the ones that feel off when it snowed.”  But our emotional mind takes one look at the red of our car and goes “BEAR! THERE’S A MOTHER FRACKING BEAR HERE! FIND IT! BEFORE IT FINDS YOU!”

In case anyone wants some perspective on how utterly random triggers can be. I haven’t lived in a house with a garage door in four-ish years. Right now at this moment, I honestly can’t recall what they sound like, except something metallic moving and rather clanky.

There was one on tv. I wasn’t even paying attention to it, I had my headphones on and was actively trying to tune the show out. My ears picked up on the sound of the garage door, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through my body as I grabbed my laptop and moved to get out of my seat and run to my room.

I realized what happened after about two seconds.

The sound is gone from my ears, but my heart is still racing and I’m waiting for the door to the house to open, to hear the jingling of my mother’s keys and her footsteps moving through the house. My muscles are still tense and I’m fighting the urge to run to my room and stick a board in front of the door.

For years, the sound of a garage door was my warning to pack up what I was doing quickly and retreat to my room if I was out of it.

I can’t remember the sound of the garage door right now, but I can’t tell my brain to stop trying to react to it.

I just noticed, this is what’s different about Ava with Beatrice.  She does this little ‘I’m not smiling, you’re smiling’ mouth movement. Which is, like, paradoxically guarded.   Ava is so determined to experience as much of life as she can as quickly as she can. This is her miracle and she knows miracle doesn’t mean kind.  So she sets off in her second life ready to wring as much living, as much emotion from it as she can.  She stands in front of the world and says ‘Yes! All of this this! Give it to me!’

So, she should be grinning like as idiot.  But she doesn’t. Instead, she pulls her smile back as much as she can. Because there’s a vulnerability here Ava’s not ready to face. As much as she wants connection she’s scared of it. Scared to have it. Because you can’t loose things you don’t have. 

“We looked at each other a little too long to be just friends”

Honestly the biggest disappointment I had researching ABC was that medieval authors did not, in fact, see the creatures they were describing and were trying their best to describe them with their limited knowledge while going “what the fuck… what the fuck…”

Reading about abusive men and the way they think. Very unsettling and an incredible book so far. Here are my very professional notes.

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.

• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.

• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

• A question mark walks into a bar?

• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.

• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."

• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.

• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

• A synonym strolls into a tavern.

• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.

• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.

• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.

• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.

• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.

• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.

• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.

• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

• A dyslexic walks into a bra.

• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.

• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony

- Jill Thomas Doyle