A while ago, I was telling a friend that I was eager to move on to the next chapter of my life now that all the craziness of IVF was, at last, over. But I was, much to my frustration, having a hard time moving on as quickly as I would have liked. As she tried to console me, she said something I found very interesting. She said that all the negative events IVF had put me through had been “traumatic,” so it was no surprise that I wasn’t able to move on quickly. I appreciated her comment. After all, she was just trying to console me. But that word, “traumatic,” stuck with me because something about it just felt … off.
Those of you who’ve been following me for a while already know that I’m no stranger to trauma. I grew up in a broken home, survived a physically and emotionally abusive relationship, was forced to quit a job because a superior sexually and professionally harassed me, experienced financial hardships that made me live with rats and mold, etc. It’s a long list. But the result of all that was that I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder aka PTSD.
For years, I didn’t really have a name for what I had because trauma felt like a faceless thing that attacked me in so many different forms. I used to call it depression because that was the closest name I could come up with. But at the same time, depression simply didn’t encapsulate everything that was plaguing me. On some days, it looked like me driving down a regular old road then suddenly starting to hyperventilate. The silence and solitude of a car, sometimes a solace, could also act as a trigger. Memories would suddenly roll through my head like a train, mowing down any other thoughts standing in its way. Tears would start streaming down my face. My eyes would grow wide and freeze in an almost comical shape. I just couldn’t stop the thoughts. I couldn’t stop the memories.
Trauma also looked like my memories haunting me deep into the night. I use that word “haunting” quite purposefully because my memories were often like ghosts. Immaterial but terrifying. Dead because they had all ceased to exist long ago but were somehow still alive in the present and future. No matter how much I tried to exorcise them, there they would always be. And perhaps worst of all, they were visible only to me. During such nights, I’d practice self harm so that the physical pain would override the psychological one and give me even just a brief relief from it all. I’d start drinking to dull my mind and all the monsters still living within it. Drunk monsters can’t chase you as fiercely, you see, and when you’re drunk, everyone seems like a friend. It’s in sobriety that you both remember your roles again.
Trauma looked like insomnia, too, because the roots of my trauma, all those awful memories, all those things that never should have happened but, nevertheless, had really happened, would flower into nightmares full of man-eating monsters, blood and guts, rotting eyes, protruding teeth, and murder. I’d wake up, heart pounding, tears pooled in my eyes, so panicked and fearful, so alone. If you’re a vivid dreamer like me, you understand that your dreams feel more like memories than dreams. They have a certain vagueness, just like memories, but still hold a sharpness, a clarity, and an exact recollection of the horrible emotions you experienced as all those horrible events played out. Such nightmares were too much to handle on top of all the bad things that had actually happened in reality. There were many nights I refused to sleep for as long as possible because I was so afraid that I’d be forced to go through something terrifying in my sleep again.
Depression was and still is another manifestation of my trauma. It often feels like a black heaviness that makes the simplest tasks feel like lifting weights. It’s an inability to smile and a revulsion toward laughter. At its worst, it’s an all-encompassing, cave-like cold that rings of silence and solitude and blinds you with its darkness. It’s the feeling of my heart somehow falling and falling through that darkness even though it’s beating steadfastly right here in my chest. It’s a yearning for death.
Was our infertility journey traumatic? I’ve been mulling that question over in my mind for months now. And my conclusion? Well, for now, I have to say no, it was not. Maybe I’ll change my mind in the future after I’ve had more time to mentally chew on everything. But for now, I feel that our journey, overall, was not traumatic. Maybe there were some small instances here and there that have left me traumatized if I really think about it, but on the whole, I don’t think I’ve walked away traumatized. Instead, I’ve walked away grieved.
They feel like two different things to me, trauma and grief, even though they share so many similarities. But the different ways in which grief and trauma have taken shape in my life caused me to realize that they can be untangled even if they can’t be completely or clearly separated all the time.
I mentioned that there are some small instances of trauma I can trace back to our journey. For example, I can’t help but wrinkle my nose at certain parts of town I used to frequent for doctor’s visits or drugs, and I hate needles more than I used to. But these reactions pale in comparison to the panicked and spiraling reactions I’d have to triggers created by trauma. I have small aversions now and a distaste for certain places or sights that hadn’t existed before our infertility journey, sure. But there aren’t any hauntings, no terrors, no real triggers that create something like a great, unstoppable loss of sanity. There’s no haze, either. That drug-like, immobilizing numbness that accompanied my trauma. And the flashbacks, the suicidal wishes, the drinking … None of it them are here, even in the depths of my grief. Even depression, which also exists with trauma, feels different in the context of grief.
Grieved depression feels like a more vibrant shade of the same, dark color that I’m used to with trauma. There was also a certain numbness with trauma-induced depression. I was in a constant state of remoteness that helped dam the pain of my past and make both past and present feel distant yet close. It felt like sitting alone on wet sand under a gray sky, facing turbulent waves. I could feel the seaspray and smell the salt. I could see the waves rolling toward me. But they would never reach me completely. All of life and the events within them, past, present, and future, felt like those distant waves until suddenly, my past would rush toward me and drown me before receding once more. I think the depression which flows out of trauma often feels like a constant state of shock that leaves me cold and shivering, gasping for air, feeling both dead and alive.
But the depression I feel these days when thinking about my children in heaven and the fact that we’ll never have biological kids of our own doesn’t share quite the same level of numbness. More than even the numbness, I feel sad. And it’s that sadness that’s been a key factor in helping me to identify grief as separate from trauma. With grief, I don’t feel caged in the past or haunted by it or terrified of it repeating somehow. Instead, I feel an overwhelming sense of loss.
Grief is thinking about what I’ve lost and still crying at times. It is a feeling of missing someone who was right here with me in my tummy, even if only for a few days, and who is not there anymore. As C.S. Lewis put it so poignantly in A Grief Observed, “I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead.”
My children are dead. My dream of having a family is dead. Travelling through all of space wouldn’t make a difference. The journey is over. They are dead. With trauma, the awfulness feels like the bad times will never stop or that they will simply reappear if they ever do. With grief, it is the stopping of it all that is so, so awful.
With both grief and trauma there is a certain letting go of the past that needs to happen to move on. But even here, there is a difference. With trauma, I can’t let go, even when I want to. That’s the particular black power of trauma. Like a mad dog, it bites into your heel and won’t let go. But with grief, there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to let go. Because if I stay in the past, maybe I can be with what died just a little longer. If trauma felt like a haunting, grief feels like digging up a grave. I want them here with me. And that is another key difference, I think. I would never, ever want to experience any of the things that traumatized me ever again. In the times that I do want to go back to the past, it’s only out of a wish to fix it, to have done something differently somehow, some way, to avoid all of it completely. With grief, though, I want to go back. I want one more moment with that child and with that dream. I wish they all still existed. I wish that past still had a future.
It’s not easy to talk about the things that traumatized me, yet traumatic moments are somehow easier to talk about than the things that grieve me. Maybe it’s the numbness of trauma that helps me talk about it with a certain monotone calmness. But with grief, just writing about it, just talking about it, it feels so fresh. I can’t talk about it. Literally. I always choke on my tears. I loved my children and the future I envisioned for them. They died. They are dead.
Loneliness. That’s another point at which grief and trauma overlap yet differ. People are a bit kinder to you when you’re grieved. They know (at least intellectually) that they’re supposed to be nice to you when you go through something grievous, whereas with trauma, people tend to write off your pain and rub salt into your wounds with arrogant misunderstandings and lazy ignorance. But just because people know they should be kind doesn’t mean you feel any more consoled. If trauma is people gaslighting you and shaming you, grief is people giving you platitudes and saying all the wrong things despite their best intentions. Grief is craving the comfort you can find only in human interaction but feeling disappointed and resentful after every interaction too. Again, to use C.S. Lewis’ words, “I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in … Yet I want the others to be about me … If only they would talk to one another and not to me.”
Self disgust is another point of convergence and divergence. “On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it - that disgusts me,” Lewis writes. I agree. Even writing and uploading this post makes me feel unclean, somehow. I’ve already written so much about our infertility journey. Must I keep talking about it to everyone? Must I be emo forever? I’m looking for attention instead of being an adult and getting on with my life.
Grief feels like forever in that sense. The past is in the past, but now I’m left with the grief that I just can’t get over. Why can’t I get over it? I’ve asked myself this so many times while struggling with trauma too, but with trauma, I often feel confusion in addition to self loathing. I genuinely can’t understand why the past is still biting into me so savagely even when I’m trying so hard to shake it off. With grief, though, the question carries none of the confusion and just the self loathing. I know I can do this, so why can’t I just move on? I want to move on. Why can’t I just fucking move on? I wish someone would shake me and yell at me. And yet, I also dread the day that someone will.
Both trauma and grief feel like fear.
Both feel like anger.
But grief also feels like hope. One of the greatest blessings my children gave me is a clearer understanding of heaven. Nothing makes death realer than death, and knowing that my children are in heaven, playing with the deceased children of other friends who also lost their children early on, causes life after death to grow more detailed and vivid in ways that were impossible for me comprehend before. I now have people I must meet beyond death. Knowing death is to know that there is life after death, and knowing life after death is to know that no matter how awful or sudden the manner of death, it’s all just a brief dip in the chart of life before everything bounces up again. Grief feels like gratitude that God has conquered the grave.
Grief also feels better than trauma is some ways, and I think this is, perhaps, the biggest difference. A receding wave of trauma always leaves me cold, stinging, and raw. It takes a long time to dry off again, and even then, there’s still a gray sky, the wet sand, the constant, rolling waves. But a recession of grief leaves me feeling fine and back to status quo for the most part, or at least, in comparison. I can not only feel but also enjoy the full warmth of the sun after recovering from an sudden attack of grief. I can still feel myself moving on. As awful as it is to have a sad ending, an ending is still an ending, and there’s a certain sense of closure with that. With trauma, though, it can still feel like all the bad times never really stopped. They’ve just paused, at best.
I’m still figuring out grief and trying to understand it in all its depth. After all, it is a process, just like trauma. Both are a passage of time. They’re not just one feeling but a continuum of feelings and thoughts and changes with spikes and dips and plateaus. Maybe like trauma, grief will never completely disappear. No matter how much I work to hack it down and uproot it, it’ll always remain within my heart, a small, dormant seed, because no one can erase the past. I can’t erase how much I loved my children and how much I had hoped for them. But, perhaps as Andrew Garfield likes to say, grief is proof of our love. Grief is the sadness of loss. But you only feel loss if you love.
I miss my children. I miss having hope for them. Maybe I’ll always grieve them precisely because I’ll always love them. But because I love them, I now know more fully a hope that’s different than the hope that I lost. I have the hope that life exists after something as awful as death. Death is simply a passage into something more and a door that allows us to see each other again, but this time, never to be parted.
I just wish I could have had more time with them in this life too.
