Learning To Live With The Presence Of Absence

We live in uncertain times, but this much I know to be true -- live long enough, and sooner or later your life will go off script, leaving you with an aching feeling of dissonance precipitated by an incapacitating trauma, adversity, or loss. And when you eventually emerge from that mourning, it will have everything to do with your beckoning the courage to somehow claw your way out of the suffocating darkness.

Arising into a tumultuous sea of uncertainty, you might find yourself desperately clinging to that one person who will be your lifeboat... your safe harbor. And more than likely, you'll begin to amass a menagerie of talisman to which you summon your nescient, and oh so fragile strength. Self help books and spiritual texts will increasingly find their way into your life; and perhaps, you will even choose to be so bold as to mark this journey with a tattoo -- a forever reminder of how far you travelled only to get back to yourself.

As you step back from the chasm of darkness, you desperately try to make some semblance of the fractured pieces of your former life, now lying threadbare and scattered at your feet. "Just move on" people will tell you. "Put it behind you"... "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger." But what if that's not true? What if some scars and losses in our life simply run too deep for us to untether and ignore.

People often tell me that I'm resilient -- a quality that I find as elusive to define as I do to recognize it in myself. It's likely that what others see as my moving forward in life coincided with my decision to stop trying to slip the noose of the trauma and loss I experienced, and instead, to compassionately begin to make space for all that pain and absence. It was as though without even being aware of it, I began to entertain the notion of 'healing with' something rather than continually trying to 'heal from' something.

Those who live with the insidious scars of trauma see themselves as forever changed, altered, or re-calibrated in some way. And for me, at times, it can feel like I have four garbage cans, and only three lids. It's an intricate and exhausting stealth-like dance to muffle the less socially acceptable symptoms of my mental illness. It's constantly living in a 'grey zone' in a world that only sees things as either black or white. It's figuring out how to deny those vestiges of trauma the oxygen they need to breathe to life, while at the same time, searching in vain for the vocabulary to articulate their uneasy presence in my life.

The Christian pastor and poet, Eugene Peterson once said: "Poets tell us what our eyes, blurred with too much gawking, and our ears, dulled with too much chatter, miss around, and within us. Poets use words to drag us into the depth of reality itself... Poetry grabs us by the jugular. Far from being cosmetic language, it is intestinal." And to me, that is the essence of resilience -- a conscious choice to transgress the fragile boundary we erect around our pain, and a faith to move beyond that, which is 'cosmetic' towards that, which is "intestinal."

Resilience has very little to do with surviving, and everything to do with awakening into where you are at this very moment. When we distance ourselves from, or anaesthetize ourselves against trauma and loss, we inadvertently diminish the potential breadth and beauty of our life.

Trauma has such resonance in our lives for the very fact that its arrival casts a shadow over parts of our mind that were once open to us. I was listening to a BBC interview with the Scottish poet Jackie Kay, in which she said: "We write to understand the things that are missing in our lives... I think we are also often shadowed in our life by losses... that kind of strange loss becomes actually a presence... and so, an absence becomes a presence in our life... Writers often write to grapple with the presence that absence makes."

So, maybe that's where truth lies -- having the faith to wholeheartedly "grapple with that presence that absence makes." Resilience is not that which keeps us safe and allows us to survive; but rather, resilience is unearthed in each of us as we wrestle our way towards the pieces of us that terrify us most. In the words of embedded war correspondent David Morris, someone who has written candidly about his own battles with PTSD: "The goal of every survivor is to try to resolve this failed homecoming, to try to be less apart."

I'm currently interviewing people for a book on resilience that I'm working on. If you or somebody you know has lived a life of resilience, please email me at runjprun@gmail.com