Before and After: Living in the Shadow of Loss

The day after the election, before my brain kicked into gear and before I even opened my eyes, for a few seconds, everything still felt normal. My body was still holding on to the hope of the last few months. Like many people, I really believed that we were finally going to be able to start healing the morbid wounds of the last ten years with real governance and some actual leadership. I guess it really didn’t occur to me that after ten years of Trump’s divisiveness, racism, misogyny and lunacy, we could vote him into office again. But we did. And here we are. And now there is a Before and there is an After, and we can never go back to the Before, and the After is going to be really, really hard. There is an unavoidable awareness for many of us that life will never be the same. That the house we’ve been living in has a compromised foundation. It may even turn out to be a total teardown. That we are now facing what could at best be a very unpleasant and scary four years, and at worst, the end of democracy and life as we know it. 

There was something hauntingly familiar about that morning-after feeling: the semi-conscious ignorance of the last moments of sleep followed by the anvil of reality upon waking. I felt it the morning after the 2016 election. I felt it the morning after my dad died. But the time that came back with the most force was the morning after I discovered my ex-husband had been having an affair. It’s like waking up trapped in the cold darkness, upside down in a car at the bottom of a lake as the water rushes in. The feeling that life as we know it is over. That everything you believed was wrong. That you’re a sucker and a fool. That you should have been more aware. That you should have questioned more. You should have known better. Shoulda coulda woulda can’t. 

Trauma works in mysterious ways. Our bodies sometimes know what’s happening before our brains have time to catch up. I had a friend who’d had five concussions. He told me that there were things that he remembered when concussed that he couldn’t remember when he wasn’t. And as soon as he wasn’t concussed, those thoughts were gone like vapor. Trauma stores itself in our bodies, and when we are traumatized again, all of the other traumas rush in like the water in that car. 

Divorce, particularly betrayal divorce, is trauma. It lives in the body. It is triggered when we feel threatened, or exhausted, or weak, and sometimes it comes out even when we’re feeling great. Trauma is lonely and scary. It makes us feel unworthy and unloved and isolated. Trauma can make us want to close in, seal ourselves off, protect ourselves from threat and harm. And the truth is that we may need to hunker down and lick our wounds and howl at the moon for a while. There is, in my opinion, a grace period post-trauma that allows us to do whatever we have to to comfort ourselves, including isolating ourselves and shutting out the world if need be. But when we isolate for too long, when we cut ourselves off from feeling the pain and reality of the present, we do ourselves even more harm. Trauma thrives in isolation and ignorance. It feeds on our fears, our loneliness. The more we ignore it, the more power it accrues. 

When I discovered my ex-husband’s affair, it was an assault on everything I thought I knew. Why didn’t I see it coming? How could I have prevented it? What’s wrong with me? Why am I not enough? How am I going to move forward? How am I going to raise my children, pay my bills, keep my house, go to work, get out of bed, feel some semblance of normalcy? A lot of people are grappling with these same questions post-election. Hopelessness, helplessness, fear, grief, loss, injustice, disbelief. What can I do to fix it? What did I do to cause it? Where can I find some semblance of control? 

We are about to embark on a difficult journey. We don’t have any control over the outcome. But we do have control over the process. We can choose to hunker down and close off, or we can choose to reach out in community, to ask for help and support, to laugh, to create, to plan. It doesn’t mean we aren’t still traumatized, or that we’re supposed to be happy all the time. Grief is real and has its own time table, and we must acknowledge it and allow it and not be afraid of it. You may not be ready today. But at some point, we’ve got to get up and brush our teeth and feed our kids and go to work and feed the dog and ground ourselves in what we know and who we are. It doesn’t mean we can’t still take time and space to grieve and mourn and rail against the injustice. But here’s what I know from my own experience with trauma. The only way out is through. And you can’t get through without help and support. We are not meant to survive alone. 

So. Whether you’re mourning the election results or mourning the end of your marriage, take the time you need. If you want to use Cool Ranch Doritos to get you through the next few days and weeks, do it. If you don’t want to talk, don’t. If you need to sit in bed and watch comfort TV all day, great. But when you’re ready, and maybe even a little before you’re ready, get up, wash your face, get dressed, go outside, find one tiny thing to be grateful for, and reach out to find connection. Even if it’s with the Starbucks barista. You are not alone, and this will not last forever. We really are all in this together, whether we like it or not.