on safe harbours, swimming demons, and facing your own stuff
- By Kelly Diels
- 3 June, 2011
- 17 Comments
“That’s your stuff,” said Joanie. She has a knack for delivering unwaveringly uncomfortable yet tender truths.
I spent a long, long time – a life – with a man who survived war and torture and wrongful imprisonment and ethnic persecution. Who witnessed atrocities. Who buried bodies knowing when his horrific task was complete, he’d be the last corpse in that mass grave. Who wasn’t the last body to lie in that hole and, of the dozens of men whose last journey was a one-way trip to the killing field, was one of only two men who made the grim, guilty return trip to prison. Who survived. Who, back in the jail, caught the eye of a wife demanding, pleading with her husband’s captors – “police”, “soldiers”, “bureaucrats”, sadistic, soul-dead thugs just doing their jobs and then returning home each night to their wives and children – to know the whereabouts of her man.
He knew where her husband was. From inside his cell, he held her gaze until tears streamed down her face. She said nothing. She knew. She left.
He survived. He survived that day because a Red Cross worker registered his existence the week before - which meant if he ‘disappeared’ there would be questions. And every day before and after, he survived because he was lucky, and he was wily.
And he drove me crazy. He circled around safe Canadian parking lots for eternities, passing up perfectly fine spaces for what? The one nearest the exit that he could back into and therefore drive out of in a hurry. Should he need to. In restaurants, he insisted on having his back to the wall so he could see out the windows and have a clear view of all the doors. No one could surprise him. He tensed up at the sight of skytrain police, who aren’t really even police, at all. They can give you stern lectures and semi-stiff fines and maybe the stink-eye for not having the right ticket. They can ask you to get off the train.
Public places, he scanned for signs of trouble. He knew every car and man and dog that belonged in the neighbourhood and on our street. He knew what time neighbours came and went and recognized the sound of a ‘foreign’ car from a block away.
Because that’s how he survived, in another place, where police and soldiers have permission to prey on the people they ought to be protecting.
And it wasn’t just men in uniforms who were a threat. It could be your neighbour, who told his soldier friend you had a big TV and small sisters, and then that soldier-friend would come with a few of his soldier friends in an army jeep to your house in the middle of what would be a long and terrifying night. It was a person you’d known all your life, invited to your parties, shared your beer with on a Friday evening, who said to an official, I know a family who speaks Swahili. They’re from the East. I think they’re Tutsi spies. And left the office a few dollars richer.
There were conspiracies. There was betrayal. There was danger. There were signs, and he knew how to read them.
And so he was looking for the signs, always, everywhere – even in bland Canada. And he found them. Others found them too. We knew a woman certain that the apparently Hutu student on the bus to UBC was looking at her and plotting to kill her. She knew he’d said something to the driver and any minute he’d pull over, lock the doors, and they’d finish what had started in Rwanda, continued in Congo, and undoubtedly followed her to Canada. After that, she couldn’t take the bus. Later she couldn’t eat at other people’s houses – brunches and dinners and kiddie birthday parties – lest they’d poisoned her food.
It wasn’t paranoia. It wasn’t even wrong – even here, a whole family could find harm at the fiery hands of a son’s friend. But most often it was post-traumatic stress. It was a soul-scarred sensitivity to signs. It was the same hyperattention that saved their lives two years and a lifetime before.
The signs were the same, but they meant something new in a new country. In a new context.
And isn’t just veterans and refugees and survivors of trauma who read signs and find danger where there is none. We all journey - scarred, experienced, innocent - to different countries and carry the meanings of one culture to the next. Even in our imagination. Especially in our imagination.
And in relationships.
Take the man whose last partner betrayed him. Cheated on him. He saw signs, and found a way to confirm his suspicion.
Now, in his next relationship, he looks for signs. He scans the contents of the bathroom trash can. He takes a close look at the sheets. He notes the call that doesn’t get picked up in his presence…and he thinks, maybe. And the last time he thought “maybe” it was sure.
And so he thinks his partner is cheating on him. But she’s not, and if he could see inside her head and her heart, he’d see his name in a continuously playing and replaying loop. There is only him. There is no space – and no need – in that divine harmony for someone else to play.
Sometimes it isn’t the external circumstances or true intentions of other people that trigger us. Sometimes our interpretation isn’t objective reality. Sometimes it is our own stuff. Sometimes the safe harbour – the secure country, the truly loving relationship – is where we let our gleaming-eyed demons and traumas out of our heads and into the water and hope with help and time and patience they will finally swim away.
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This is so beautifully written. For some, the trauma is clear, for others it’s only a shadowy dark feeling. But we are all the walking wounded. I’m trying to own my shit. Xo
[Reply]
Kelly Diels
replied:
on June 3rd, 2011 at 12:16 pm
@Megan, me too. ME TOO. And thank goodness for clear-eyed, women-of-experience friends who will knowingly remind you that it IS your own shit. mwah.
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So true. There are times when the ghosts of relationships past are visible imprints on current conversations I have with my husband. The sensitivities go way back for the both of us, and there we are toting our little red wagons full of them. Compassion, time, and patience. (tries to swallow lump in throat, fails miserably)
[Reply]
Kelly Diels
replied:
on June 3rd, 2011 at 12:20 pm
@Linda Eaves, true. so true. I am not ________; you are not _______; and what has gone before is not necessarily now. Or even true, any more.
That being said, OF COURSE our past experiences inform us and make us wiser, and alert us to danger. The trick is discerning between real danger and imagined danger.
How do we do that? I had a flash about that this morning. I think it is The Pause + The Question “what is going on here?”
Pause. Ask it of yourself. Ask it of the other person. Let the answers, the body language, the dialogue, the concern guide you.
I think. I hope.
[Reply]
Dear Kelly,
I have to read this post five more times (each time getting a bit closer to my truth – can’t do it in one sitting), but first I have to stop the shaking in my heart. Thank you for writing this, for showing me this, as both my partner and I try to trust what we have, and not try to find “understanding” through the numerous examples of betrayal from our past. Why, I always wonder, are we making each other pay for what others have done, a year ago, 10 years ago, 30 years ago? Swim away, stuff. Swim away.
“What is going on here?” I have to pause and think. And not just pause and think, but once I see it, try to step in the forward direction. One foot forward.
Thank you for shaking my world up and down. I need it. xoxo Kiki
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Well, duh!
; )
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Hi Kelly, a great intimate description of the hard work of doing our best to hold a compassionate heart in relationship. It’s clear you are doing your best to answer The Big Brain Question with a heartful, resounding “Yes!” as often as possible. Hooray for you.
(http://committedparent.wordpress.com/2007/11/03/the-big-brain-question/)
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I’ve been waiting for you to get back to what really matters, Kelly. Take your time. Do it right.
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Just popped by after someone on twitter referred me. This post took my breath away. It simultaneously broke my heart to be reminded what some people have to live with, and challenged me – me, with such small demons in comparison – to courageously stare my own stuff down. Thanks for writing this. It blew me away.
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Such a wonderful writer. Your words stay with me throughout the day.
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…I want to find the words to communicate how much this post moved me, how time stood still while I read it, and how it cracked my heart open…
But all I can really think to say is this: thank you for sharing this. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
~Meg
[Reply]
Yes Kelly, your words surge from your heart. But what moved me even more than this post, was your link to “He drove me crazy,” a post you scribed back in January. That story was about YOU and only YOU. And it rocked me tonight.
So I may be six months late but I’d like to respond to your quote: “Myth breaking: fairy tales and happily ever after and us, always.”
Gee, Kelly, I never gave up on that fairy tale, and now I live in one. It’s not a myth.
Sure, I know it doesn’t happen often. I know it’s magic. But true love does exist, and when you find it, you know it. And it’s not about lust or infatuation. It’s about FREEDOM, the freedom to express yourself with all your flaws, fears and doubts to the person you love. Because deep down inside, even deeper than that, you know your vows fired together long before this current reunion. You’ve been best friends from beginning of time and will be to the end of time. Words are not needed, nor are they appropriate. It’s all understood, even within violent confrontations. It’s a drama meant to burn insight into your souls and you both understand this. So after your drama is played out and the tension drops with the curtain, you kiss, hug and celebrate your vivid performance.
I know, it sounds so romantic, like a fairy tale. Well, Kelly, it is. And don’t you ever, ever, ever believe it won’t happen to YOU!
Irv
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Simply moving. It`s all our own stuff, yes, and it belongs to all of us.
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This post touched me. It reminds me of how I used to scan the school yard to find a safe spot to hide where people wouldn’t notice that I had no one to hang out with.
It made me realize that I still hide sometimes. Still ashamed of my loneliness.
It’s my stuff. I’m working on it.
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Sometimes our past rules our present and our futuere.
This beautiful piece makes me think about my my childhood and how i wished my father raised me differently. Now, i’m finding that i sometimes try to live vicariously through my children for better or worse.
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Kelly – this is beautiful and brought up so many pieces of me (seems a theme for us in the conversation here). Not just the war that we all live through inside but the way humans are when they are scared (because a human that is not scared/petrified of him/herself does not torture other beings) and I am grateful to see the journey and keep moving forward – with you – and all of us – who are working to live now. not in the past or even what we hope to be the future.
Thanks Kelly for always giving a beautiful voice to the dance of life.
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