The Trauma Box

Where we keep the bits we've collected

The priest began his little homily about the church being inclusive with a sexist joke. I look over to see a former student in the congregation, the one who spent two years testing and proving their power in the system, at the expense of harming anyone who might have challenged their charm. An in-law who missed my birthday says, in the most bizarrely-timed non-sequitur ever: "The only thing that's important is that you have your health".

And there are the hymns, one of them sung in English with the Norwegian emphasis on American twang cutting through the loudspeaker behind my head, and into my head. The lyrics are celebration of how God is not only going to stand by us to protect us from death, but from this horrible world He created - for us.

A tiny, charming wooden church as my own personal trauma box.

I concentrate on breathing.

I can point to the day when my body began processing fear in this new way. When my lungs began to feel porous. Two lobes of pumice stone. As though my organs had lost the membranes required to hold breath, to hold life, in place.

Once I let go of the idea that it is a pulmonary embolism, or a heart attack, I could rest in the sensation and acknowledge it as a reminder that breath is life.

It was as though I responded to the pressure of a physical blood clot in my pelvis by exploding metaphysically. I imagine now that my whole body breathes, like a wasp or a bee.

I am tiny and insignificant, and there is a freedom in knowing that I'm not holding my life in a kind of closed box - I am not required to make an impression on the world with my presence. I can be so much more subjective in my living than that.

I like the fact that the faux marble and Trompe-l'œil drapery are still visible in the Norwegian churches. It's a reminder of the secular purpose of symbolism, and how everything we want - by definition - material, intellectual, spiritual - will always be just out of the reach.