Thrive and Survive: Performing Normal

Being a trauma survivor in the world can often feel like you are trying to 'perform normal'. Here I wrestle a bit with the value of faking it and the value of not.

Is the trick to find places where there are a lot of people like you and you ‘belong’? Or find places where there are lots of ways to ‘belong’ and a high tolerance for trauma survivors? Or find ways to fit in, wherever you are?

Thrive and Survive: Performing Normal

I am about to travel back to the part of the country where I began my journey, to attend a brief ceremony for the loss of one of my siblings. Last week, the home association for the place I now reside held a ‘community day’ where we all work on common tasks. I will do/did relatively little for both sets of events – paying in money for the community day (instead of working); and not leading anything, (as far as I know, communication isn’t great), for my family. But both, I reflect, are times where I try and do what I am calling ‘performing normality’.

As a trauma survivor, I am not normal, and am generally introverted and unsure about those crazy homo sapiens. Like all trauma survivors, what Bessel Van Der Kolk calls my ‘smoke detector’ goes on too easily, (detecting threat and turning on my ‘fight-flight-freeze’ responses) and goes off very slowly (returning me to ‘rest-and-repair’ neurological mode aka sanity). So, I am anxious and unsure more often then ‘normal’ people. I am also not rich, and don’t have a nuclear family of my own. So, the ‘normal’ conversations about remodeling and growing children which will occur in both settings won’t be ones I can easily associate with. It always makes me feel like those scenes in movies where someone is entering a factory under false premises and trying to blend in by saying things, slightly awkwardly, like “working hard or hardly working, buddy?” or “TGIF!” when you know it’s a Wednesday.

It occurred to me that probably a lot of trauma survivors do this so I thought I’d write a post on it. I find that it is better than nothing, but doesn’t do much in terms of creating anything real or making me feel like I didn’t waste my time at this event. I hate those moments when someone is clearly expecting me to laugh or join in with agreement in places where I clearly missed the boat. And it looks like such a nice boat – that boat that all the normal people sail in. They have vacations and parties, watch their children grow and support each other. How do they do that?

At the 'community day' a new neighbor chatted with me about renovating their kitchen, something I am unlikely to ever be able to afford, and hating snakes, which I rather like. I tried to talk about how expensive things are and that we can only fix one thing at a time and it’s endless (I am a home-owner) and that was well received, but when I talked about how snakes eat mice (implying - so maybe you don’t always need to kill them) things broke down and my neighbor went back to what he was doing, clearly annoyed. Evil snake lover.

So, what to do? The ‘performing normal’ is tiring and irritating and doesn’t seem to do much for me other than make me a little less weird. Not the worst accomplishment - and sometimes critically helpful - survival-wise. I suspect many of the people around me here in the rural South and Midwest are survivors, too, but they seem to survive by having rigid rules that everyone unconsciously follows to perform belonging. I, of course, don’t know the rules, didn’t grow up with them, and am not ‘one of us’. And I don’t drink or go to church so I immediately fail a whole host of rules, right out of the box. So even if that's a path that works for some folks, it won't work for me.

So, there will always be lots of places where my rhythm is not ‘on beat’ for the people I am talking to. And I expect that’s true for most people, although hopefully most people don’t spend as much time in places where ‘their kind’ don’t belong as I have, although I know that is an almost constant experience for many folks of color and immigrants in the U.S.

They do, however, seem to build supportive communities. I was overwhelmed with the beauty of the communities all around me in some urban spaces I inhabited in the past, and I felt much less like I was ‘performing’ normal there – possibly because so many folks there may be trauma survivors? Or because the communities were so diverse?

Is the trick to find places where there are a lot of people like you and you ‘belong’? Or find places where there are lots of ways to ‘belong’ and a high tolerance for trauma survivors? Or find ways to fit in, wherever you are? On-going story line here – I’ll continue to report as I (possibly) figure it out.

Update: Since I wrote this post, I attended another community meeting and someone much more like me was there. They used language like "Cis-Het" and talked about "Decolonizing". Whew! Because I felt more like I belonged I told a story of an activist friend who did amazing work and helped create a transformative shift between Palestinian and Israeli families. This time I spoke naturally, we had a great conversation, and I noticed folks at other tables listening. Huh. Who knew?