Why bother examining our traumas? I mean, trauma with a little t, that is. Isn’t it a waste of time to brood over things we cannot change? To some, such retrospection may feel like needless languishing. To others, it is necessary languishing, but nevertheless the point is to ‘get over it’ and to ‘move on’. We process our traumas in order to get unstuck.
These and many other distinct attitudes toward trauma have a common goal in mind: we deal with our past in order to put it behind us, where it belongs. I don’t exactly disagree with this, but I’d like to reframe it somewhat.
The primary benefit of looking at our past is that it helps us to see who we are. The past is merely a version of the present that has been filtered through the psyche. Our memories are less a record of what actually happened as they are a carefully curated exhibit, a collection of moments that the psyche flagged as important. My goal is not to transcend my personality, which seems neither possible nor practical, but to see it clearly. To see the psyche clearly, we must look to our most vivid memories.
Let’s examine what was, for many years after it happened, the most embarrassing and most painful memory of my youth. I was thirteen years old. It was the only time I was sent to the principal’s office, ever. I vehemently disliked my Spanish teacher, who struck me as someone who enjoys the power trip of being a teacher. One day, I finished a worksheet early so I doodled on it. I was particularly angry at that teacher that day, so I wrote down a mean word that I’d only just learned and that I didn’t really understand. I wrote it in a little code that I’d learned about recently. It was apparently a very easy code to break, which my teacher did. I had not expected that. The principal and the teacher called a meeting with me and my parents. We all crowded together in the principal’s stuffy brown office. My parents were dressed in their Sunday best, and I was sweating through my school uniform like a chicken on the chopping block. The four of them then proceeded to give me a stern talking-to, while I bawled the entire time.
In the aftermath of that experience, I felt like I was marked, stained with something filthy. Overnight I had become a criminal, a problem. As I went about my day, I was haunted by the feeling that most people couldn’t see the stain, but I knew that it was there. A barrier had been erected between me and my peers. I felt like a phony, pretending that I belonged, pretending that everything was okay. But deep down I felt like I didn’t deserve to be where I was, or to have what I had. There were a few who knew what a filthy creature I was—my principal, my teacher, and my parents. I could never look the former two in the eyes again, and it took a long time for me to be able to talk to my parents without feeling horribly ashamed.
What is perhaps most remarkable about this story is how not-traumatic it should have been. Kids act out. They get sent to the principal’s office. It happens all the time. What’s the big deal?
This memory stuck with me because it exemplifies a particular feeling that, in truth, has never gone away. In fact, I think this feeling of being stained was always lying low, surging upward whenever I was reprimanded for acting out, playing rough, or showing improper manners. This fateful episode when I was thirteen was simply the ultimate opportunity for the feeling to come out in full force.
Ever since—and to some extent before—that episode, I’ve had the feeling that if I reveal who I really am, everyone will turn against me. So I smile and I play my part because deep down I feel that it’s for the best. I don’t like people getting too close to me because I am afraid they will crack my code. They’ll figure out what I am and then they’ll hate me. I feel like I am constantly tip-toeing through a crowd that could turn into an angry mob if I make the wrong move.
This memory has many parallels to my daydreams about Crastor’s early attempt to start a chaos magic movement. Like my principal’s office story, the daydream is about the bitter consequences of revealing one’s true self.
Chaos magic is, as Duinn pointed out, totally tied up with Crastor’s identity. Crastor sees chaos magic as a kind of home, and magicians as his people. He is at least partly convinced that he is somehow damned, perhaps even evil, but chaos magic accepts him as he is. Chaos magic says it’s not only okay to be weird, it can actually be fun and a source of strength. The struggle to defend chaos magic is really the struggle for his own redemption. If the movement succeeds, it is a triumph for freaks like him. If it is squashed, that is only more proof that he is really damned.
Crastor boldly placed his bet: weirdness will triumph. But then he encountered a wrench in the works. Upon meeting Rheol, Crastor discovers that this thing he is trying to save is neither helpless nor innocent. Crastor discovers to his horror that she is willful, destructive, and self-destructive. He thought he was saving something good, but he was only saving a creature he does not love and who does not love him.
The worst part of it all is that Rheol does not even want to be saved. This has been a consistent aspect of her character for a long time. This is infuriating to Crastor not simply because he went to a lot of trouble for her, but because she represented the very thing he was trying to save: his own soul. That she does not want to be saved does not bode well for his effort to redeem himself. It implies that his struggle is pointless and futile.
When I wrote down that mean word on my worksheet, that was my true self coming out, or a hidden part of me anyway. Like anyone else, I can be mean sometimes, intentionally or not. This mean part of me does not beg to be saved. In fact, I’m pretty sure my bitchy alter ego has it out for me. She is a rebellious brat, and she would rather die than suffer the insult of my attempts to coddle her or bring her into the fold of mainstream society. She’d rather get us both in trouble. There’s no point denying it: she is mean, and if she’s let loose, people will get hurt.
In the principal’s office, I discovered that I have this mean, destructive, self-destructive side. Like Crastor, I discovered that redeeming ‘me’ meant redeeming this side of me, too, which was dangerous to attempt and impossible to achieve. Did this imply I was damned? Evil? Beyond redemption? All the evidence was suggesting I was. I had shown my true colors, and now people were hurt and angry.
Like Crastor, I was not ready to accept the consequences of unleashing the chaos within. The simple fact is that if you’re going to be yourself, conflicts will arise. People will criticize you or disagree with you. You may even accidentally hurt somebody’s feelings once in a while. I have never been able to make peace with this. To this day, I struggle with it. It is agony to try and tell someone how I really feel. I dread it in advance, and I writhe in it afterward.
Crastor chooses to believe that he ‘belongs to the devil’ because ‘it makes more sense that way.’ Likewise, I unconsciously look for confirmation that I am bad. When I find it, it gets flagged as a very important memory. I unconsciously hoard these memories like a squirrel with so many nuts. Of course, I’m not so bad, and my Spanish teacher probably doesn’t even remember me. But I did not want to accept that I can be mean sometimes and that’s not a huge deal, any more than Crastor wanted to accept that if you do enough chaos magic, some of your followers will get hurt but that’s the risk they took. I am not inclined to believe that this event in the principle’s office produced this intense fear. A little trauma like this simply doesn’t have that kind of power, not even if you aggregate it with memories of similar moments. A more likely explanation is that our traumas are not pivotal events that changed us, but observations that appeared to confirm who we already, on some level, believed ourselves to be.
Through the continuity of my daydreams, I see that my past is my present. My behavior is still guided by the fear of the angry mob. I will go to great lengths to avoid upsetting anybody, from the more subtle, “No please, you decide what we’ll order for dinner tonight,” to the more disastrous, “Sure, I would love to move in with you!” I am afraid that somebody might discover my inner Rheol, that side of me who’s just going to upset everyone. Crastor’s dilemma about saving magic parallels my dilemma about saving my feelings: we want to save this part of ourselves that might turn out to be dark, unpredictable, and dangerous.
Our perceived personal tragedies reflect our character, and are intimately bound to our sense of purpose and direction. I hope that I have demonstrated here a useful way of relating to our traumas, one that puts perception front and center. I do not mean to present it as the ‘right’ way. However, rejecting our past, that is, barrelling forward without ever pausing to reflecting on it, does strike me as a particularly ‘wrong’ way, because the effort to disown one’s past is tantamount to rejecting one’s present and future.