Beginning: Bookcases, Dust Bunnies, and Trauma Recovery

I was surprised how sad I felt selling my bookcases. I dusted them off one last time before selling them to some nice people on Craig’s List who will make good use of them. They’re lovely, but just to look at them you’d really have to wonder why I was sad to part with them.

I bought these bookcases without a second thought because they were exact replicas of the ones I had in my previous apartment prior to an apartment building fire that ruined most of my belongings and brought my greatest fears out into broad daylight for the world to see. The recovery from that event was a long, hard road. As I set about putting my life back together physically and emotionally, it was easier to just replace some of the things I had rather than find things that really fit the space. That was my rationale anyway. I was lying to myself.

More to the story
What was really happening was much deeper and disturbing. I was desperately trying to recreate my space and be the person I was before the fire. Both were fruitless efforts. There was my life before the fire and then life after, and the two could not be the same. I was changed in ways large and small, some known to me and some that would remain entirely unknown for several years. Those Crate & Barrel bookcases held a lot of emotion and history for me. In selling them, that emotion was released, freed. And then there is a hole that remains.

It’s not a hole meant to be filled in or repaired or rescued. It’s a hole that reminds me in a striking way that this life and our time is so precious and short. It’s a hole that reminds me that while we search for and seek out meaningful and life-changing events, we forget that we cannot go back once we go through them. They change our view of the world and our place in it. We are left to make meaning of them, largely on our own.

We can’t run forever
For a while, we will try to dress up these events. We will valiantly and unflappably try to put the pieces back together, to recreate our reality. This is the safe way. The braver, and ultimately healthier, way to travel through change is to recognize that we will have to imagine our way into a whole new reality. We will have to let go of what we’ve known in favor of a new and richer understanding of life and of ourselves.

In dusting off my bookshelves, I also quite literally dusted off my life. I wiped away some of the leftover pieces of the fear and hurt and sadness that have remained in the embers of that fire. Like dust bunnies, I didn’t even know they were there until they stared me right in the eye. I flinched, and then swept them away. I had to.

The healing way
Recovery from trauma is a slow and winding process. We can’t see beyond the bend and we have only what is right in front of us. That was then and this is now. Trauma warps our sense of time, our sense of reality, and we will trip and cry and laugh and feel lost and then found again. We will be strong one moment and crumbling the next. This cycle doesn’t go on forever, but it does go on and we can’t always predict its timing or triggers.

That’s how it goes – there’s nothing linear about healing. The path doubles back on itself again and again. All we can do is be patient and persistent in our pursuit of wholeness. And I do believe, ardently and passionately, that we can all be whole. And that with enough time, we will be.