You know how house cats can start eating plastic bags? Because of some nutrient deficiency or domestication-bred OCD? I know I’m eating plastic, but I don’t know where to get soul food around here.
My mom always commends my grandma for “breaking the cycle of abuse.” This got under my skin for a while. They overlooked the violence I experienced daily at the hand of my mother. I know my mother is referring to sexual abuse, but by doing so evidences she’s not yet ready to look at herself. Now, envisioning my grandma “breaking the cycle”, I see a refraction of my mother’s statement that rings true: my grandma didn’t break the cycle as in one breaks a microwave or car but rather as in breaking ground. She began the process of digging, then building.
So, at first, I thought these were growing pains, and I attributed it to these intergenerational wounds. But recently I’ve begun questioning the origins of my depression and anxiety. Am I simply swimming in the wake of the past, or am I wading in the surge of a new oncoming wave?
I was thinking about history, and how we tell it: as a string of events and people, and really only a certain kind of people, written by those same people. A collection of “facts” that on the surface aims to explain how we got here but effectively justifies the natural way of things. All our brains need is a few concrete “facts” between which they can spin a narrative, like clues at a crime scene. We’re good at confabulation; we have to be. Seeing what’s not there is our main survival tool, our not-so-secret weapon.
But our stories are vacuum sealed, sucking out all the thickness of daily living. How can we transcribe a time’s ambient anxiety? How to convey chaos? We project this order onto the past because we can see the causal sequences. This interpretation can’t begin until we’re out of the daily uncertainty. It’s like, I couldn’t flesh out my traumas until I was in a safe place away from it all spatially and temporarily. From here, it all seems so obvious and basic and sometimes silly.
I say this to reassure myself the time I live in isn’t more or less crazy than any other. But then I think about house cats eating god damn plastic, and I remember myself. I am of a godless generation. My ancestors coevolved with community and religions. Their brains and behaviors that led towards god also led them to survive and dot-dot-dot-make me. They wired around and so I’m wired for god. That doesn’t mean I have an empty god-shaped slot in my brain. It just means I have needs that aren’t being met. Religion provides community, ritual, witness, humility, order, accountability, a space to be vulnerable, blessings, a connection to humanity and nature. During this tumult, I find myself reaching for these things, trying to reverse engineer in a lifetime what took tens of thousands of years of evolution. It’s naive and futile, but all I have is plastic bags.