I assume you like doing things that could give you joy. I would.
Reading a book, singing in the shower, a slumber party, cooking dinner together, eating fresh snow, running outside barefoot to dance because it rains (I am looking at you in awe and admiration, Piroshka), drinking a bottle of bad wine with good friends, shoplifting that pluche toy to give it to your love interest once you make it back outside, laughing till you wet your pants, dancing all night, a hookup…
Joy is wonderfully contagious. It starts out small, somewhere deep within, and envelopes the whole person before they know it, and it spreads to others around them.
Amazing, right? Sounds easy enough; Do thing. Have joy. Share. Repeat.
And it’s all so simple, because it only takes doing that thing.
Who wouldn’t sign up for that?
Me.
Or more precisely, I stopped doing that when I was five, almost six.
And I am way more scared than I dare to admit, to start doing it again.
I have almost no recollection of that period in my life. Many upsetting and uprooting events happened at once (moving to a different part of the country, my parents’ prolonged divorce, and my earliest gender dysphoria sensations), and I think it swept me off of my feet. The whole word had managed to simultaneously uproot me and turn the floor into lava, while I had gotten blindfolded. And I never really got back up.
Even my younger sister has memories of and about me in that period, but for me, there’s only a gaping black hole. There’s older memories that are easy to access, but that one period, it’s like it never existed.
I had just lost my father, one of the two people who were supposed to love me unconditionally.
All it maybe would have taken was to – then – say: “I don’t like what you did. You hurt me.”
But I didn’t. And – this is me rationalising with hindsight – to avoid me saying that, lest the person I’d say that to, would get upset, and stop loving me, and leave. So, I stopped myself from saying it, and that meant not saying other things, and that way, self censorship became a tool to stay safe.
That same period is clearly the moment that “do thing. have joy” stopped being a thing. And I think that was an active act, not something that passively happened. I assume it – combined with guilt about even considering expressing my pain – was my earliest trauma response, for protection against further harm.
I’m sure there’s a whole psychological theory around it, but I am sure the dynamics are along these lines: A child observes and undergoes a traumatic experience because someone else does unrelated, that is obviously a direct and intentional action against the child. And it can’t be any different than that. The child’s belly button is literally the centre of the universe to that child.
So, father leaves child? Obviously the child did something to upset the father, and the father then can not react differently than to stop loving the child, and to then leave the child.
I am more and more convinced that what I “did”, which set that wheel in inevitable motion, was feeling, and maybe helplessly expressing, that I wasn’t supposed to be a boy. My father didn’t leave my mother because of my gender dysphoria, but me feeling that gender dysphoria, and my father leaving happened sort of simultaneously. And for all I know, there may have actually been a year in between the two. Trauma warps time.
My first active memory of my gender dysphoria is roughly from that time, but I have no idea when, in relation to the other things that happened. On TV, there was this series I watched, and on of the main characters, a cute girly girl with platinum blonde pigtails went by the same name (and diminuitive form) that I had. And that hurt. “Why can she be a girl, but I can’t?”
I have no recollection of it, but my mom often told me about that time during my adolescence, but not this gender dysphoria sensation; that I kept behind lock and key. She didn’t find out, until I told her in 2016.
From one day to the next, when I was still five, and we hadn’t lived at our new place for a full year yet, and my parents’ divorce was dragged out over many months, I simply shut up like a clam; I switched off, and friends’ birthday parties that I had been invited for and was looking forward to: “No, I don’t want to.” So I didn’t. And no one managed to (or even tried to?) convince me otherwise.
And my smile and giggle got traded in for a sullen, ashen stare. There’s loads of family photos that documented that face. And it stayed with me until 2016.
When I was a pre-teen, a similar dynamic happened between my mom and me. I had acted out my gender dysphoria, and my mom had caught me. Rather than her asking why I acted out, she admonished me for damaging something that was hers. I can now say that, subconsciously, I was catapulted back to the moment my father “got upset with me and left” while I first experienced gender dysphoria. And it happened again, but now, the last person who was supposed to love me unconditionally also got upset with me for the same reason; so she would inevitable also leave me for what I did.
A sidenote within all of this is: while I am focusing on “joy” and its role and self-inflicted absence in my life, this obviously applies for “negative” emotions as well. I had stripped those as well. There’s literally been three events in my life between age five, and that crucial year, 2016, where uncontrolled emotion swept over me. Two of them were me crying in my girlfriend’s arms, and one where heavy petting resulted in my whole body exploding in a wave of blushing pins and needles.
And once more in the period directly following 2016; again, in my then girlfriend’s arms; when I had a very nasty emotional flashback about my feeling unseen and unsafe, and how, instead, she did.
Since then, as I learnt more about myself, I’ve started being a bit more able to access emotions more freely, but not much. For a few years, rather than the emotion happening unaltered; I’d do a sort of “director commentary” about the fact I noticed an emotion happening.
Okay, back to my actual story.
I fled towards books, retreated to my mind. Virtual, fantastical, but mostly rational and safe spaces where no one could hurt me, judge me, and only I was in control, and only I had the key.
Think Bastian Balthazar Bux in The Neverending Story, but without the bittersweet hope that lingers and ultimately gives that personal redemption, and the joyous payoff.
And I took to models… and while I did enjoy assembling those DIY paint and glue models of planes, and playing with electric model trains and tracks, instead, I am talking about “catching the volatile reality outside in a model”.
I started making lists, charts, maps. Everything around me was turned into a model and sanitised representation of reality, including making ranking lists of ranking lists. One that I still maintain – and it’s so trivial, and there’s websites that churn out the same data on the fly – is the combining and ranking of the full history of Dutch professional soccer competitions. And obviously, I update that list after every single game played.
Another classic was keeping an all-time ranking of the yearly “top 100 of all time” list as voted by radio listeners.
And it’s all trauma response. There’s not a single doubt about it for me.
The best example of that is, while the world grinded to a halt, I started charting covid cases, hospitalisations, and deaths globally, and did a number of basic statistical calculations on those numbers. And updated all of that at least daily.
That was a whole lot easier than admitting I felt terrified by the fact that covid torpedoed my self-employed career (in live music) and with that, my economic stability, viability, and longevity were basically buried alive, and with it, my existence.
When I got access to computers (my first experience on one was as a kid, at my father’s place), I got introduced to Lotus 1-2-3, one of the first spreadsheet programs, and he said those magic words “you can do almost anything with this program”. And I believed that. Why wouldn’t I? It was my father who said it.
Models are safe. You can tinker with making a slight variation here, and see the effect 20 steps ahead. But no one would be hurt by that variation, no one would feel pain, and no one would get upset. Looking back now, and knowing what I learnt, it all makes sense.
I had gotten scared to experiment in real life. I subconsciously knew I had no safe haven to retreat back to in chance I’d need to. So I no longer did things that I couldn’t predict the outcome of, even if it was something as simple as “do thing. have joy”.
And not doing the real life experiment any more, and feeling the safety in that model, I developed that skill. People who have worked me professionally know that I’d show up with a large volume of thoughts and processes when proposing improvements, where the slight variations here and the results over there, and especially the logical outcome are laid out. Or in reverse – and on stage, it was a cruxial skill to possess – “there’s an issue with this gear, and by my deduction skills, I’d usually have the source of the problem sussed out before I could physically reach that source. They’re a nice professional skills to have; but a terrible bane to have them dominate personal life and choices as well…
One of my first serious career choices I considered was… drum roll… Cartographer. Making maps. For fun and passion. What probably would be called mindfulness nowadays (nod to all those adult colouring books with just about any them you could think of). I would draw realistic maps of my home town, from memory. And I’d be and remain calmer and more focussed for it.
My other career choice that came a little later, was air traffic controller. With me having trained my skill of seeing what “this change” would do “20 steps ahead”, and do that in reverse as well, and see (un)likely pitfalls too, that would be a marketable skill.
Who else considered a trauma response to be their future career?!?
A really clear example of how that “skill” worked out in my private life, is how I approached (making) phone calls as a (pre-)teen. I was scared @#$%^& of simply picking up the phone, and call someone. I’ve had countless arguments with my mother about it before and after those calls: “why don’t you just call them and ask, you don’t need to know every possible way they might to respond before you ask them.” Very easily said, but so impossible to simply apply, when the very feeling insecure lies at the basis of this to happen in the first place. And it inevitably resulted in that fear growing, rather than it subsiding.
If you tell your kid “Stop being so silly, you shouldn’t be afraid of xxx. Just go and do it!” With a well-adjusted child that would occasionally be a bit scared or wary of something new, that kind of approach may actually be the right one. With a child that bases its existence on not feeling safe, it’s a knife, straight to the heart.
And that crushes my soul… How could this have been allowed to happen?!?!?! Why didn’t anyone see that, and try to help me feel less unsafe. I obviously couldn’t pull myself out of that swamp by my own hair (nod to Baron Munchausen), but others could have, should have. And either couldn’t, didn’t manage to, or simply didn’t.
To some extent, humans have a natural instinct to avoid feeling (uncontrollably) unsafe. People who like feeling unsafe and the reinvigorating feeling that release of hormones gives them when they expose themselves to the unsafe situation, will still by and large do that in a controlled setting, think bungee jumping, sky diving, rollercoasters.
I don’t think I would ever consider doing that, but theoretically, I can see the excitement in it. And maybe even the hidden yearning “Oh, I’d love to want to experience that!” Practically, I couldn’t, and can’t. Not yet, at least. Why would I do something really big that makes me feel unsafe, if something really small, like saying “Hi!” could already trigger the same sensation?
I not only started censuring that possible craving for experiments, for spontaneous action, refused taking substances that would disinhibit me, or going on impulse, because not “going there” was simply the safer bet. Joy, or hedonism were to be avoided at all costs.
And it didn’t stop there.
And this is also where my gender dysphoria enters the story. Considering the possibility that Laura could be real, was supposed to be… When indeed that “Hi!” was already scary, imagine how dangerous acknowledging Laura would be to my already feeling unsafe… That’d make cordless bungee jumping seem safe.
Preventing Laura from popping out became as easy as saying “No thanks” to a free glass of alcohol.
It probably comes as no surprise that I never smoked, didn’t drink alcohol until age 28, and didn’t do drugs until 2020 (when I took a tiny crumb of an XTC pill three friends were sharing).
You sometimes get that feeling that things are moving “in the right direction”? That “big things are about to happen?” I was so averse to the possibility of joy (or maybe more the danger of no joy, or the dip after the joy), that I would deliberately derail that situation from potentially happening, even if the universe would basically throw it in my direction, for free, without guilt, expectation, or transaction.
That is a sad state to live in. Is it even living? I know that know, and I am trying to do something about it. Before, I didn’t label it “sad”. It just was. That Angel whispering in my ear was the proverbial antidote
I should have expressed my pain when it happened, and I didn’t. As a result I didn’t express or even dare experience other emotions, lest all the @#$% I kept inside would come oozing out. And all of that got covered in a guilt sauce. The more joy it could potentially award me with, the more guilt would rear its ugly head, and the more I’d try to avoid the joy and the ensuing guilt from happening.
Making myself invisible, not making any waves, making myself unseen, and silent. I shrank more and more. I’ve learned to explain how I was then versus now by explaining “emotional footprint” (a nod to carbon footprint, and “1” being the nominal value). ”Back then, my emotional footprint was 0.3 because I just couldn’t make myself even smaller. Nowaday, my footprint is a very sparkly and comfortable 1.4.”
Every @#$%&! time, that Angel would be there, whispering in my ear… Whatever potential joy I could have had, was drowned out by their whispers. By drowning out the Devil counterpart that would tempt me to do something that would need the Angel of Joy to come cancel it out, I’d finally be free.
Free of the temptation and Joy, and be free of the Guilt.
