Chapter 13. Between the Lines.

Many years ago when I was in Budapest, I visited a palm reader.  She looked at my lifeline and said that I would suffer some sort of trauma, but I would survive it.  Then she charged me $75 which, in 1995, was a ridiculous amount of money to pay.  I created a scene about it, embarrassed my cousins who were with me, then paid the psychic.  Since then, I’ve wondered what that trauma would have been.  I’m pretty sure it’s not even about me.  I think it’s about the people I have loved.  It’s about watching them live their lives between the lines.  Between the night terrors.  I’ve watched them for many years now and I’ve seen their resilience despite trauma.  The child who suffered unspeakable childhood trauma, now fully grown and struggling to grasp the moments afforded her.  She takes them and then they’re snatched away by a world over which she has no control.  Her father’s death.  Her mother’s illness.  9/11.  She finds her dignity and goes on. 

Or the child of revolution, now grown into a beautiful, capable woman. She evolved into the loving caregiver for her own parents and her son afflicted with bi-polar disorder.  She worked her way through life to have a home of her own, a family, a career.  She could see nothing but good in the future, only to lose it all to a disease no one understands.  Bi-polar disorder doesn’t afflict the one; it paints the whole.

Do these children, now grown, live their lives between the lines? How do they hang on to their lives when the reality of the dysphoria intrudes without warning.  Is it like a lightning bolt striking suddenly from a clear blue sky and scorching the earth below?  The earth absorbs it, verdant bushes grow around it but the earth-strike itself remains forever black.  

I’m not so much saddened by the interruptions in life as I am angry.  It just seems as though we should have some control over when lines are intersected by trauma.  But we don’t.  And, it’s easy to say, “No, we don’t have control over that but we can control how we respond.” Wow.  Doesn’t that just exonerate us from empathy?  The fact remains, there is no control.  We all live lives between the lines it’s just that some people are afforded more space. These women I know have operated well within that space.  At times, that space has grown large, and they’ve blossomed to fill it.  Other times, the lines once parallel, crash into each other and these brave and beautiful women galvanize themselves for the fight.