I Will Be There When You Get Sick.

With Thanksgiving quickly approaching, my heart keeps sinking into my chest. I worry tremendously about the amount of new Covid-19 patients who will emerge in the next few weeks. This breaks my heart because I became a Covid-19 patient back in March. I have learned more than I ever cared to know about the virus’s damaging effects and its complicated convalescence.

At this point, it seems almost inevitable that there will be a surge in cases unlike anything we have ever seen. I feel extremely powerless when I imagine all of the new patients who will never see this coming. My heart breaks when I imagine that some of them will end up shocked when they are sick for months. I feel devastated when I think about all of the casualties that are about to take place. It’s truly ironic that we wanted to be together for the holidays so badly that we caused ourselves to endure more separation, illness and death.

I also feel extremely naive. I thought that people who knew me, people who watched me fight my own battle with Covid-19, would be deterred from engaging in risky behaviors around holiday travel and congregation. I can’t believe I thought that I could act as a deterrent. I know that’s not how it works. I came of age during the D.A.R.E. movement, and while its just say no slogan was catchy, I’m not sure that it stopped anyone from engaging in drug use. The truth is, human beings always learn the hard way, and we learn from our own painful experiences. We are also famous for thinking: that won’t happen to me.

I have been listening to a lot of people talk about engaging in holiday festivities as if there is not a pandemic that rages on. At one point, I had to take a step back in order to realize why this phenomenon is happening. This holiday surge in Covid-19 cases is inevitable because we have all been living in a chronic trauma state for over 8 months and we just can’t do it anymore. I understand this because I know what trauma does to the brain and body. A lot of what I know is because I am a survivor of Complex PTSD (or C-PTSD). I am also a therapist who specializes in working with trauma.

C-PTSD is unique because trauma becomes a way of life. The effects of living this way seep into everything. C-PTSD happens to those of us who are born into unsafe families with untreated intergenerational trauma. It happens to those of us who hold marginalized identities and who are victims of racism and structural oppression. It happens when fight, flight and freeze become our baseline. It happens when just being who we are is traumatic.

When the body is forced to live in a chronic trauma state, risk-taking behaviors become more prevalent. The body becomes accostomed to navigating a world that is fundamentally unsafe. I know this firsthand. One of the first indicators that I had C-PSTD was the fact that I engaged in very risky behaviors while I was driving. But, only when I was alone. I would never think of endangering someone else, but when I drove alone in my car, I threw my body around. It was my dirty little secret. This went on for years.

Between the ages of 16 and 30, I drove very recklessly. I would blast music. I would text and drive. I would speed down side streets. I would chase yellow lights and drive through them as they turned red. I knew that all of this was dangerous. I knew that all of this was wrong. And let me tell you, it didn’t change a thing. No one could have inspired me to deter this behavior. And, yet, plenty of people tried. There was one year where I was involved in four car accidents and all of them were my fault. After the third one, a friend said, “you really need to be careful, Lauren. Something really bad could happen to you.” I laughed. I laughed because my first thought was, so many bad things have happened to me and no one cares.

I am now 38 and I no longer drive that way. I wish I could tell you that I stopped engaging in that risky behavior because I listened to all the cautionary tales and the concerned friends. But, that’s not what did it for me. The reason that I changed my behavior is because there was one final car accident to end all car accidents.

During the Chicago winter of 2013, I was driving down I-55 and I lost control of my car. I spun across 3 lanes of on-coming traffic until I crashed into a divider. I managed not to hit a single car. I also walked away from the scene of the accident without so much as a scratch on my body. The universe had sent me a message: Wake up.

That car accident did what it was supposed to do. Suddenly, I was awake. While I drove much differently after that accident, it didn’t even begin to heal the pain that lurks underneath C-PTSD. That’s because wake up calls are not inherently healing; they just force a course-correction. I didn’t truly care about my body until much later. I didn’t truly care about my body until I almost lost it to Covid-19.

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Back to my original point. We all learn the hard way. We learn through pain and losses. We learn through wake up calls that hit close to home. We are especially forced to learn this way when we have been living in a chronic trauma state. Something has to happen that has enough force to shake us out of a place of numbing and dissociation. And, my heart breaks over that.

So, I am not going to fall into the trap of trying to be the one to shake you. But, I will be there when you get sick.