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Next week is Easter. That day marks the five year anniversary when everything started to fall apart.
It is strange how my mind has forgotten most of that dark period in my life. But not my body. No, my body still remembers. Every April, I feel the trauma all over again, like a screw in a bone. It seems that trauma never fully leaves the body. Nor the soul. We carry all the darkness down deep. It requires real courage to draw out the darkness. To bring everything into the light. The coward in us would prefer to keep everything locked up and hidden away in the vault.
One way the light gets back in is through storytelling. Not just any kind of storytelling, mind you. The storytelling I am talking about is the kind that requires one to shape words around the very thing that gives shape to our trauma. I would like to think that if we can say the thing that we do not want to say and tell the story we do not want to tell, then perhaps we might just have a chance at healing ourselves. And maybe, just maybe, in telling our stories to each other, we can become what Henri Nouwen calls a wounded healer.
Author C.S. Lewis once wrote, "We read to know we are not alone." All good books—at least the ones worth their salt—are, in some way, about ourselves. We can find our way into them the way Alice found her way into Wonderland. When I have read stories of others who have survived the storm and lived to see land again, I have found immense comfort. The stories have given me hope and helped me push back the darkness.
The world we live in today has a trauma shape to it. We carry around the darkness of our world in our bodies. It is easy for scales to grow over our eyes, blinding us to the light we can no longer see. That is where storytelling comes in. Brene Brown puts it this way: "Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it ... Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light."
Stories that explore the trauma-shaped darkness deserve a space in our collective consciousness, especially now. Because I believe that when we share stories of calamities, simply by telling them, we make something good out of the bad. At least, I hope so. And in the very least, I hope my story will serve as a lighthouse, a guiding source of illumination pointing toward the shoreline.
Henri Nouwen was a professor of theology at Notre Dame and Harvard University. I first learned the term wounded healer in Nouwen's book titled Compassion.