"Your body's right here. You just have to step into it"

Content warning gun violence, gender-based violence.

I was reading Ocean Vuong's Emperor of Gladness recently when I came across this scene between the two main characters.

"Your body's right here, in 2009. You just have to step into it, alright? Can you step into it?"

The protagonist is trying to coax an elderly woman, who it seems is vividly re-experiencing some old event, back into the present.

I think I forget that other traumatised people have to be guided into re-inhabitting their bodies too sometimes.

Sometimes it feels like I've lived through too many traumatic experiences myself, like they take up too much room in my body that there's no space for me left in there. In my own way, I have to be reminded regularly to come back from places that I keep trying to leave behind.

Sometimes, I find myself back in the street where I grew up, and the men who made me afraid for so long are all there.

I'm alone with them again and I'm terrified of what will happen. When I promised myself years ago that I would never set foot in that street again, I hadn't realised that it could find me on its own.

I put my hand on my body, sometimes on whatever part is closest to me, sometimes wherever I feel the most tension, and I tell myself, you're here, you're here, you're here. I feel the warmth under my hand, the firmness of my limbs, the softness of my skin, the realness of my body existing in the present.

Sometimes I'm back on the Beetham on the night when something loud and flashing silver was hitting the cars around me. It's the Beetham highway so it's not far-fetched to think that it's bullets and I floor the gas pedal to get us out of there in seconds.

There's a trick that I learned to not feel anything in moments like that.

I learned that my body's survival modes aren't helpful in life and death situations. To weave in and out of cars and possible gunfire with the gas pedal as low as it can go, on an unlit stretch of highway, you cannot freeze and you cannot panic. You cannot have a racing heart blurring your vision.

All I do is calmly focus on unweaving us out of there as quickly as possible, a chaotic web of cars and bursts of light everywhere.

You're here, you're here, you're here.

To heal from trauma, we have to be witnessed in it. But how do I make any of this legible to anyone else?

How do I explain that sometimes I'm here and sometimes I find myself back in a car in Trinidad, alone and waiting for the light to turn green?

The man who tried to smash my windshield for refusing to let him clean it is standing next to the car. These men, they offer to clean your windshield while you wait for the light to change in exchange for a few dollars.

Although "offer" may be a strong word when it comes to the women they find in cars alone.

He starts raising the pole above his head to bring it down on my windshield in anger. I'm surrounded by cars, but somehow still alone. The light ahead of me turns green just in time.

I think that processing trauma inevitably involves time travel. I think that we stray from our bodies to find resolution to terrors that endure in us and we have to keep finding our way back into our bodies again and again.

Not that differently maybe from other disabilities.

These days, my fatigue is getting worse. I have to climb flights of stairs every few days now, and when I get to the top, I have to fight to remain inside my body, at least until I get inside the apartment so that I don't collapse outside of it.

Being disabled and lacking the support that you need forces you to be creative. Without realising it, I've been using strategies that get me through my trauma to get me through this.

I put my hand on whatever is closest or wherever I might feel the most sensation and I tell myself you're here, you're here, you're here.

Most times, when I reach the top of the stairs, I hold onto the table in front of the apartment. I put it there so that I could leave groceries on it sometimes that I don't have the energy to bring in all at once.

I grasp a slab of wood as hard as I can, and, while my head is spinning, I focus on the coolness, the firmness of it, and I tell myself you're here, you're here, you're here. I'm trying to bring myself back into my body quickly so that I don't collapse, especially not with two flights of stairs right behind me.

This way, I don't have to force my head to stop swaying. I don't have to reinhabit my whole body all at once. I can just focus on my hand and the texture in its grip until the world reorders itself around me and I can safely move again.

Sometimes getting out of bed is also a challenge. My fellow chronically fatigued people will know what I mean. Without the support that I need to help me get up, I hold onto to whatever's nearest.

I grip onto another table usually, the one that's next to my bed, to pry myself up, and I place all of my focus on the sensation of the wood beneath my hand. If I feel into the handful of wood, I can feel the weight of my body less.

Touch gives me an anchor to this world, it seems. It brings me back into a body that keeps expelling me.

I meet that body with my hand and I hold onto my surroundings, and, like other survivors, like other disabled people, I try my best to find a way to move on.

You can find more of my essays on trauma, disability and survivorship on Patreon.