Processing

CW: Infertility, medical trauma, grief, emotional abuse

Today is April 31st. Outside, the Sun refracts through a driving rain that pounds at the window as if trying to break into the old, musty house. He sits at his desk, his notebook opened up to a blank page that trails sheets full of barely legible short stories he has been compiling since grade school; tales of strife, pain, suffering, and the murkiness that life so often brings forth. While penmanship was never his strong suit, he can’t dismiss the thought that hand writing his stories is somehow far better than typing them. The dusty bookshelf behind him contains authors like Faulkner, Hemingway, Brontë, and Austen. As he glances through the weathered window of his home office, he stares far into the distance, hoping to see the apparition of a rainbow; a small sign of hope on a confusing, dreary day. None appears. In the background, he hears the crackling vinyl of his old record player singing, “Yesterday and days before, Sun is cold and rain is hard.” Creedence Clearwater Revival is one of the bands he plays when he is in a fog; a murky mess between complex emotions that blocks his ability to think. The lyrics, the poetry, the artistic ingenuity of the band draws him to it, inspires him, makes him want to take the everlasting words of John Fogerty and paint a picture of his own words in his old, worn-down notebook.

When he sits at this cheap pine desk that he calls his writing station, he is no longer burdened by the nuisances of others’ opinions; he no longer cares what others think; he is not indebted to anybody but himself. He writes for himself, to inspire the creative side of his brain that has regrettably been sitting idly by for the past few years as he’s worked to advance his career and deal with the other hardships that life has brought him. A career and life that allows for little creativity, little imagination, and, unfortunately, no escape from the melancholy of the real world.

His parents were hard on him. Not physically, but emotionally. As he has aged, he has realized that the lessons his parents taught him were lessons borne in generational trauma. Perfectionism. Exceptionalism. Precisionism. All the “isms” that led him to have the constant fear and anxiety that plague his social and work life. He can’t blame his parents. They expected perfection the same way their parents expected it, and their parents before that, so on and so forth. Generational trauma that no one had yet escaped.

Writing was where he could escape from the pains of life, the life lessons that felt less like lessons and more like agony. In his notebook, he had no expectations; he had no one to answer about why he wrote what he wrote; he wrote for himself. The seldom utilized creative side of his brain would often surprise him with what appeared on paper. Twists and turns that would surprise even Shyamalan. Dark endings that would disturb Poe. Tales of brutality, murder, and other horrors wrought by humans that he had not ever experienced firsthand in his upper middle class suburban childhood.

Trauma and suffering were not foreign to him. He had been married to his wife for two years before they started trying to have a baby. After three years of despair in having no luck, his wife and he went to an infertility specialist. The joyous personality of the doctor at the clinic was welcoming, but also a bit unsettling. Everybody walking into that office was struggling with something that he had always thought was a routine, biological process. Middle school sex education taught him that unprotected sex leads to pregnancy. But, as life often does, it didn’t work out quite that easily. Numerous procedures, most routine but still emotionally tumultuous, failed to result in a positive pregnancy test. Until finally a positive test arrived. The joy and jubilation he had shared with his wife was more than he had ever experienced. After so long, the two were going to be parents - actual biological parents to a child they had created!

Seven weeks after this positive pregnancy test, he was selecting a casket for his wife’s viewing. The doctors monitored her through the first few weeks of the pregnancy. They felt something wasn’t right, though they couldn’t be sure until the pregnancy had progressed further. After turbulent weeks of doctor’s visits, testing, and monitoring, his wife was hampered by a sharp pain in her side that felt like knives constantly penetrating her skin. And all the blood, oh my, all the blood. It looked like a crime scene. He rushed his wife to the hospital. She was a little over six weeks pregnant. The doctors hesitated on caring for his wife because of the murkiness of the women’s health laws in the state. His wife died in the hospital from an ectopic pregnancy.

So, no, trauma was not foreign to him. The murkiness of life was not unfamiliar to him. The fact that the roller coaster of life can make you happy one day and depressed the next was well known to him. His writing portrayed that. Although everything he wrote was fictional, everything he wrote had a tinge of his own suffering, his own traumas, that he experienced throughout his life. His way of processing complex emotions, generational trauma, and the death of his wife was through his writing. It was where he felt safe, where he felt connected to an imaginary world that he could create and make his own.

He sits at his pine desk and again glances at the world outside. The Sun appears cold as the hard rain slashes against the window. He thinks he sees the sight of a faint rainbow in the distance. He wonders what would be at the end of the rainbow. He thinks about a distant world separate from the one outside the window, and he wants to write about that world. He wants to show that no matter what life throws at you, it will always be full of complex, often contradictory emotions. The experiences he has had in his life, from his childhood’s generational trauma to the death of his wife, are no different. They are all full of happiness, pain, glee, and agony. His way of processing life is through his written words. He starts to scribble his barely legible handwriting in his notebook. He doesn’t know what will come out of this writing, and he doesn't care. Whatever comes out is whatever he wants to process. He can create any kind of different world or story he wants to, and he wants nothing more than that at this moment. He thinks of a fantasy world at the bottom of the rainbow. And that’s where he starts. Where it’s headed, not even he knows. He picks up his pen from the notebook and reads the first few lines he has scribbled. They read, “Today is April 31st. Outside, the Sun refracts through a driving rain that pounds at the window as if trying to break into the old, musty house.”