Dislocations

I had bad dreams last night. Something had happened–a natural disaster perhaps. We were looking for a place to sleep. Imagine it: a city full of people suddenly homeless and wandering in herds like sheep, looking for an empty house still standing, a bed. The strange thing is that we found them.

Someone was with me. There is often someone with me in my dreams that I can’t really see–a girl. She’s not invisible, but I can’t remember her face. I often assume it’s Nata, who wouldn’t ever leave me. I don’t know. We found a bed and shared a narrow mattress. She was there. I don’t know more than that.

Maybe I’ve had dreams like this all along, or maybe they’ve finally started. It seems obvious to me I’m grappling with the dislocation of coming back to the United States. Return is more traumatic than leaving, but I had dreams like this when I left also, in 2014.

At that time, my dreams were about airports and flights, confusing experiences going through Customs and being stuck somewhere in the middle between departure and destination, never being able to arrive. I had those dreams for months.

Years earlier, following a short stay in India, I sleptwalked for weeks. I don’t know what I was dreaming, but I woke up looking for someone or something: once in the oven, once at the front door. I didn’t usually get as far as that, but would catch myself just after I got out of bed. The feeling was the same each time: an urgent sense of absence. Where are you? I can’t find you.

I think what is missing is empathy. That’s a longer story than it sounds. It demands explanation. The people who care about us imagine our feelings, our point of view, and our experiences. We exist not only within ourselves, but within their imaginations, and within our imagination of how they imagine us. This requires that they care enough to know us, but also that we share enough with them to be knowable. In other words, empathy goes beyond concern, although concern is part of it. We exist in the minds of people who don’t care about us too, but their images of us may not be accurate or as detailed. You have to care enough to get it right.

If you don’t have relationships in which you feel comfortable enough to share your experiences or perspective, then it won’t be possible for anyone to know you well enough to “see” you. People cannot help but imagine you, but their imagination of you will be wrong. It will feel wrong. You will, in the end, feel like Gertrude Stein’s Oakland: “There is no there there.” You will see yourself reflected in the eyes of others in a way that is either distorted or vague.

The conflicting images of yourself that you see–your own image as you observe yourself moving through life, the image of others of you, your image of yourself as others seem to see you–mimics culture shock, which  is distorted by differing interpretations of behaviour between the sojourner and the host culture. So it is not really surprising that culture shock, including the culture shock of return, would recall traumatic memories of other dislocations for me: namely, I tend to imagine, the shock of removal and foster care, as well as the more habitual shock of moving between the closed world of a cultish religious upbringing, child pornographers and sex-traffickers, and small-town America.

The child taken into care in response to abuse is physically safe, but not emotionally safe, in part because the child does not know what to expect, but also because the child is not known. There is no history yet, and there are no shared experiences with the foster family to create a sense of shared meaning that might heighten communication about feelings, needs, desires and perceptions between the child and their carers.

I remember standing in the grass the sharp grass tickling my feet. There is something in my hand–a teddy bear or, more likely, the plastic trash bag they still hastily throw the possessions of foster kids into, never thinking of the clear message this sends to the child: you are being thrown out with the garbage, because that is what you are.

It seems to me it happened more than once or it may be that the second memory is a memory of returning. In one memory, I am silent, shocked into obedience. In the other memory I am screaming and won’t let go: I am so frightened that my fingers need to be peeled one by one from around the arms of the woman holding me.

In the first one, there is a sense of heat. I remember a car, the light reflecting from it and sparkling new paint that burned to the touch. The second one feels different, more shadowed, as though it were colder or later in the day.

Much of the impact of traumatic experiences comes from the way we understand them. The take-away for me from those experiences, collectively, of removal and return, was of a profound aloness. I did not belong to anyone. I could lose everyone and everything at any moment.