Historically traumatized cells by Ruth Neuwald Falcon

I want to write. It is better for me when I can. So I push myself to sit down at the keyboard. This is what comes out: Every historically traumatized cell in me is flipping the fuck out.

I didn’t know that those words would emerge through my fingers. But I do know that they are true. Especially at night, when the exhaustion vies with the pounding in my head that gets worse when I lie down and close my eyes, as if warning me that sleep isn’t safe, that I must stay alert. I struggle with the lightheadedness that weakens me and makes me want to lie down. But when I do, the pounding starts again, and rest is not possible. During the day, between times of functionality (because food needs to be consumed and bills need to be paid), I read and do crosswords (for five weeks in a row, I’ve completed the Sunday NYT puzzle; I don’t know that I’d ever finished one before). I’m working my way through a Sudoku book that claims to be teaching me how to get better at it. Not so much. This is particularly discouraging at 2 in the morning. 

And this was before the Fourth of July—the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence (something that 46% of Americans and 61% of Gen Zers couldn’t tell you)—when hundreds of masked men rode the Metro into D.C., and marched past Union Station and lined up in front of the Capitol, Confederate and Betsy Ross flags waving, as they chanted “Reclaim America.” The Patriot Front’s manifesto finishes the sentence for them. “Blood, not ink.” (Read Michael Fanone’s Klansmen Crashed America’s Birthday Party on Substack for excellent insights. Fanone knows a thing or two about being beaten by white supremacists.)

I know that the future is not preordained. I know that we are in the middle of a great battle for the soul of this country. I know this is not Germany in the 1930s. This is what my mind knows. It also knows that there are people here, in this country, in concentration camps, and that last week ICE rounded up 2,000 people a day. It knows that people are being sent to prison for protesting. It knows that the images and videos of ICE brutality are not getting the kind of attention they were six months ago.

I could go on and on, and that is part of the point. We are drowning in offenses so that all we can do, all I can do, is struggle to sleep and do what little I can to push back. Astonished outrage makes not a dent in what is happening, though some legal cases do. We pray that the November midterms will bring some relief. We know those in power will do even more than they already have to challenge our ability to make that happen.

I do not know how this ends. What I know is that I am still here, still functioning between the times when functioning is hard, still finishing the Sunday puzzle, still pushing back in the small ways available to me. The historically traumatized cells are also, somehow, still doing the work. That is not hope, exactly. It is persistence. And on the days when persistence is all there is, it will have to be enough.