Traumatic event?
I walked through Washington Square Park today on my way to dinner and Japanese, and as usual I was stopped by someone. This time it was a woman, probably in college, who stopped me very politely. [I haven’t decided yet whether it’s better to kindly refuse people and walk past, or to stop and listen and then refuse them (since I’m rarely interested in what they’re saying). So, I listened to her proposition.] She said she was doing a film project that required people to talk about something traumatic that had happened to them and how they got through it.
So I thought for a moment. I didn’t really want to stop and help her—possibly because it would require my being filmed, and I can’t really deal with that—but I wasn’t in a rush or anything, so I could have. Except there was one problem: I couldn’t think of anything really traumatic through which I had gone. Sure, my parents are divorced. I thought about that, but all that probably caused life to be a lot better for me than it would have been if they were still married. And anyway, it isn’t like I even knew the details. That was their trauma, not mine.
I told the girl that I couldn’t really think of anything. She tried suggesting possible, common situations that I could relate to her future audience. She asked if I had ever had boy troubles, namely if I had ever liked someone who hadn’t liked me back. Well, sure, I had, but in my mind those sorts of problems were too trivial to bother recording. I guess if she wanted commonplace, average troubles, those stories would be great, but how much of that could anyone really listen to? I know it is unfair of me to judge “boy problems” as trivial. They very well may not be for some or most people. In my experience, however, even my serious romantic difficulties do not seem so horrible in retrospect, so how could I deem them traumatic enough for her film?
I finished reading Sister Carrie yesterday. It really makes me worry about homeless people, and the sad paths that lead to their reaching that state. So, when I talked to the woman today, none of whatever I have gone through seemed so bad at all. And I know it isn’t. I thought about a woman I had seen earlier walking with her head so far down you couldn’t see her face, pushing a cart with around twenty plastic bages fixed to it. She might take offense, but I think the story of her troubles would be far greater than that of mine. I don’t think the young woman with the film project was looking for Dreiser’s sort of problems, though.
September 22nd, 2005 at 4:12pm
This is an interesting post. Sometimes I think about putting personal problems in the perspective of other people’s more severe issues; I suppose it’s an important thing to do sometimes, though I still believe in some occasional self pity when it’s a step towards addressing a problem.
Your mention of Sister Carrie reminds me of how I felt after reading Random House–if I hadn’t told you about it, it’s a journalist’s account of living among people in the Bronx for ten (?) years and how people are daunted in their ambitions to get out, if they make it so far as to have those ambitions. I guess it ends with some kind of vague hopefulness, but overall it is indeed depressing.
I don’t think traumatic even generally applies to “boy problems” and so forth, no matter how serious they are. Isn’t trauma more about the after effects? Of course some relationship problems have long term effects, but mostly that seems like a sort of “in the moment” kind of problem to me. Well, those aren’t good either, but it’s still different.
(I usually just say “no thanks” to anyone who tries to talk to me, but I guess if I heard enough of the proposal to be interested I might listen.)
I wonder what happens in our blog competition if one of us makes a comment that’s longer than the original post.
September 22nd, 2005 at 6:37pm
I’m aware of the fact that I’ve been comparatively quite fortunate. I usually end up ignoring that when I’m in a mood to complain, but sometimes I’m forced to remember that everything could be a lot worse than it is, and then I feel stupid for having complained about whatever trivial thing was bothering me.
Recently I was thinking about how authors put themselves in certain situations—being homeless, for example—and live that way for a long time in order to accurately depict how certain groups of people live. While it may greatly help the author to understand his or her subjects, I don’t think I could ever do it. It isn’t because I wouldn’t want to endure such difficulties. As they say, we must suffer for our art, right? I’d find it too unfair that whenever I wanted to give up, I could just rent an apartment somewhere, but for the people I’d be studying, the only way to truly give up would be to commit suicide, either directly or indirectly. It would be really good if such books created new public awareness of the situations, but it seems more likely that they would just bring the author a bit of money and the readers would be unaffected. That’s what would really bother me—profitting from someone else’s desperate situation.
I was mildly shocked when she suggested problems like liking a boy who didn’t like me back. Those were completely not the sort of problems I thought she wanted. I can see boy problems like a Byron sort of situation or being abandoned while pregnant as traumatic, but unfulfilled crushes are a bit of a step down from those.
(That’s what I do, too, usually. Ricky finds it funny that I say anything at all. I stopped this time because the young woman wasn’t pushing any flyers at me and she seemed pretty eager.)
And we don’t have to worry about that yet; my post beats your comment by 233 words.
October 3rd, 2005 at 6:30pm
Yeah, this is a late posting, but I understand what you mean by trivial problems. When you put things in perspective, we can’t really complain about anything: a hot room, dirty bathrooms, no cable, no internet, having to walk to places, not being able to buy something you wanted, etc. Whenever you think you had it bad, there are definitely people who have it worse and a lot of them don’t constantly complain or pity themselves for it. When one thinks about kids in the poorer countries having to walk 3-5 miles just to get to school in the morning barefoot with no breakfast or lunch, walking around campus or to stores isn’t that much of a big deal anymore (I only say this because Pasadena’s a suburb, and I have to do tons of walking. I admit I do complain from time to time.).
But my above paragraph is slightly off-topic to your original post. Like Christina pointed out (I think), trauma isn’t the same thing as hardships. If this were a movie, being traumatized means that you get constant flashbacks of some horrifying event and that these same images appear in your daily nightmares. I think one may be really scared if someone points a gun at you and robs you, but unless you develop a phobia or something against guns, it’s probably not trauma?