Yesterday, as part of my faculty obligations, I had to attend my college’s Commencement ceremony. It wasn’t the waking up at 6:30 AM on a Saturday, nor the fact that I had to wear a scratchy, black robe in the sun for three hours, that made me irritable. It wasn’t even the bullshit rent-a-cop—the one who took out every vestigial, adolescent frustration he’d been harboring for the past twenty years on any employee trying to park near their office, with his self-satisfied officiousness and arbitrary rules-following—who told me that I wasn’t allowed to park in the same place I’ve been parking all year, at my fucking place of employment.
It was what I will, from here on out, refer to as “the chasm.” The chasm is that well of pain that is so deep, so relentlessly impossible to fill, so a part of me, that it may as well be a sixth finger or another gall bladder. The chasm is not only the initial shocks of trauma that I experienced in my childhood; it’s also the shitty lessons and the opposite of self-care I learned as a result of those experiences. It’s the poor decisions in my adult life that I made, because I had the equivalent of a preschooler’s amount of knowledge about how to establish healthy boundaries and hold others accountable. It’s the thing I always, in my hubris, think I’ve overcome--only to be shoved up against its loins, like Leda struggling against Zeus, because of some triggering experience. The following particular catalyst of disappointing memories came about as I chatted with colleagues as the procession of graduates glided willfully past us to pick up their diplomas:
“My graduation was so embarrassing. My parents brought a loud horn. Instead of yelling out my name, they just squeezed it when my name was called.”
“Oh yeah? Well, my whole family came, and my brothers were so loud and obnoxious when my name was called!”
“What about you, Katie? I know you have a big family. How many people in your family came to your graduation?”
“I was the first woman in my family to get a college degree. No one came to any of my college graduations. Either I wasn’t talking to them at the time, or they didn’t care.” Cue the asshole-clenching silence, in which my friends internally roll their eyes at another Katie-and-her-shitty-dysfunctional-family-stories-and-geezus-what-a-massive-crybaby-Debbie-Downer-she-is. Or at least that’s what I’m projecting. Of course, the voice in my head adds, “They didn’t come to your wedding, either. Not one family member came to your wedding. Every major, meaningful event in your adult life has been ignored by the ones who were supposed to be your tribe.”
Commencement ends. Students are smiling, crying, yawning. Families are huddled on the football field—cheap bundles of carnations and aluminum balloons trying desperately to escape the grips of sweaty palms to scatter anywhere (The ground? The sky?). I feel claustrophobic navigating my way through the crown of navy blue and black polyester robes that have been soaking up the climate-change sunlight for so long that they are almost scalding to the touch. I get to my car, and perform immediately several moving violations—anything to get me the fuck away quickly, so I can seclude myself at home with my dogs and breathe. That’s when it hits me. All those snide, snarky comments I launched to the colleague sitting next to me; all that complaining about having to be there to people who also had to work right along with me on a Saturday; all the obnoxious, off-color jokes—they’re all a way of dealing with the chasm and its volcanic pain bubbling in my gut. But they are also akin to a cheesecloth tarp trying to cover what's about to spew from the chasm. Despite nine consecutive years of therapy, those memories aren’t dormant. They erupt. I bawl my eyes out, in front of my dogs, on my bed. The pain is real, it is ready, and letting it out is necessary.
Sometimes I don’t know why I tell my stories. Sometimes I do feel like I’m nothing more than a pretentious trauma queen. I still have to get them out, though. I don’t know. I hope they are performing some function—beyond just what they do for me. Thanks for reading, whoever.
