A History of Scars

As a writer I see trauma can’t be captured in isolation—it can be measured only in images, quantified only in its aftereffects. When you’ve grown up with a mother who has suffered from nearly every symptom of each of the seven stages of Alzheimer’s while remaining undiagnosed, who was often delusional throughout your upbringing, it’s hard to know what reality should look like. When you’ve suffered the abuses of family, it’s hard to know what decency and kindness are. When you are this silent, you become a mirror to others, partners and strangers alike.

There isn’t a clear “before” and “after”—there’s an “again” and “again” and “again,” only each time different, new. It exhausts slowly, a war of attrition. It was long-lasting, started young, and it eroded my sense of self. It’s not easily understandable, because the images don’t come as clearly.

“In some ways it was worse,” my therapist said to me about the kinds of trauma I had experienced versus the kinds of physical violations that are often more validated or legitimized, discussed or understood. I’d needed the sorts of trauma I’d experienced to be legitimized, to be observed. “It wasn’t a one-time incident, but something that recurred.”

I began seeing her only after it all became too much. “Entered first lesbian relationship, broke up with girlfriend in past two weeks, grieving her ex-girlfriend’s father’s death in a climbing accident in days after,” the intake notes say.

Ideally conversations about trauma shouldn’t begin and end in questions of blame, or in comparison of degree. What they should reflect is consequence: that deeply felt trauma leads to real, long-lasting consequences that shape one’s future. That these consequences affect those around us. That they require time and effort to heal, and they do not simply fade on their own.

* * *

Finding ways to come to terms with trauma, and to heal, isn’t selfish—it’s essential. Both to self-preservation, and to finding a way to move through the world without causing harm, to oneself or others.

The problem with re-enacting trauma, as a form of salvation, is that salvation always has the power to destroy, too. To devastate. The stakes of climbing are truly life-and-death, even if gyms will minimize them to the language of a liability waiver, even if the activity has become mainstream. I doubt there are any climbers who’ve been at it for a few decades who haven’t known someone personally who’s been paralyzed or lost their life.

When I think of my ex-girlfriend’s father’s death, I don’t think of the moment itself. The enormity is too much to grasp. I can conjure no mental image of his fall, the full half mile of it, nor do I want to. The images I do have, of the aftermath, I try to block out. Instead I picture happy images from our last trip together. I picture his daughter’s grief.

The only comfort might be in that he knew the risks. He chose. That is the great appeal of climbing. Unless one’s partner is at fault, the wound is self-inflicted. These wounds can be equally senseless, equally difficult to live with, but at least there’s no wonder about why someone else chose to do what they did—why they could be so unknowingly cruel.

With a certain type of innocent climber, I wonder, sometimes, if they’re aware of the possible consequences of their new fitness routine. If the potential for loss feels real to them yet.

You can’t manipulate the end result in climbing, without improving yourself in technical terms, in mental strength, in physicality. There’s some sort of fairness that doesn’t necessarily exist in socially constructed systems. Sometimes you don’t get the second chance.

We carry with us the memories of those gone. On a different day, that harsh logic of gravity might’ve cost another of us. We might have made a tiny mistake, committed a small act of forgetting.

* * *

I finished sorting through my old gear, deciding what to keep and what to discard. I know that Jackson Falls bail biner will be there, waiting for me, unless someone has snatched it up before I return. If it’s gone, I’ll wonder whether its new owner will remember the contours of that climb, or that day. Whether they’ll palm it as a memento. Whether it’ll later appear on a different crag in a different state, for another climber to collect.

4 SEASONAL DENIAL

For much of my life, I lived in denial of seasons. As a child dressing for soccer practice in Colorado, for example, I didn’t learn how to prepare properly for wintertime weather. I donned my short-sleeve jersey, shorts, shin guards, long socks, and cleats, even when I was stomping through thick shoals of snow. I was the only one on the field dressed so ill-preparedly, my exposed skin reddened. Despite the freeze, I acted as though I didn’t feel the frigid air, going somewhat numb to it instead.

As an adult in New York City, I established my habit of walking down sidewalks carefully, of hopping around large puddles at intersections where water pooled, rather than buying rain boots for torrential spring rains. Sometimes that meant taking a running leap, or glancing over my shoulder for blue Citi Bikes and cyclists before stepping out onto black asphalt. I got used to landing, in any commute, in a wet splash, my socks soggy and cold, when distracted by cabs, people, or my own thoughts. Inevitably I suffered some lapse in every journey, where I’d forget to be careful. But somehow this system of mine seemed more logical than investing in plastic boots, which would only be worn for a few days each year, and which weren’t something I’d ever learned were an essential. My motto was not to live or dress seasonally, but to live and dress the same in every season, defiantly and without reason. I forgot the seasons were going to change, until the switch was thrust upon me.

I only changed my behavior when I moved to the Midwest, where seasonality doesn’t allow itself to be ignored in quite the same way. Where gloves are a necessity, where I own a car for the first time, where door locks freeze themselves shut, where I’ve learned about winter vehicle maintenance, about warming the engine and scraping down the windshield in the mornings and evenings.

This sense of denial seems a family-born trait. Members of my family refuse to recognize the truth of our circumstances, until we’re absolutely forced to. This trait is beyond the comprehension of outsiders to my family, who ask, “But how could you not have known?”

The greatest source of friction over denial within my family has been in my relationship with my oldest sister, ten years older than me. In fairness to her, she applies this principle to her own life, as well, if unwittingly. I saw this principle in action in the hours after her first chemo treatment. I was twenty-five to her thirty-five, at the time. “I want to go for a long run,” she told me, after we made our way in a cab from the Upper East Side to her apartment. “Before it’s too late.”

She was genuinely ready to strap on her running shoes and hit the pavement for an eight- to ten-mile run, not yet ready to think of herself as someone who was ill, in the present tense, not ready to think of her beloved running routine being taken from her. I was concerned about the basics—whether she needed her prescriptions for anti-nausea medication filled, whether she was stocked up on the things I’d read about being helpful, like ginger ale. She had different concerns.

“Maybe you should just lie down,” I tried to convince her. Within the hour the chemo had kicked in and she was passed out on her sofa, while I snuck out to Duane Reade.

Her and my relationship has defied easy categorization, over the years. She remembers me as a baby. “You cried so much,” she used to tell me, with fond irritation. We became friends only when I was in college, when I began inviting my sisters to the climbing gym at which I worked, when we began frequenting bubble tea and frozen ice parlors near my college campus downtown, where she often treated me to large concoctions, covered in mango syrup and mochi and tapioca pearls.

She and I grew up in different geographical states, and in different eras of my family. When she was growing up, my mother received assistance from food banks, at times, visited dental schools to get work done. My parents were still finishing their PhDs and beginning their teaching careers, at times living in different states.

When I grew up my mother was financially successful, upwardly mobile as a tenured professor, and, in flush, happier times, she was preoccupied with things like upgrading most of the flooring in our house from carpet to hardwood and tile. My parents were living and working in different countries.

My sister was away for college, then graduate school, then work, while I was still living at home with my mother as a child and teenager. She called home often, visited home on breaks. My mother, in particular, seemed a different person during the short visits my oldest sister made home when I was growing up. She gossiped with my oldest sister as she would a friend, her personality changed, hiding the worries that consumed her when left alone with what were, in comparison, children: my middle sister and me.

Over the years my parents each individually re

sponded to my oldest sister as a plant responds to sustenance, their tendrils visibly firming up, drawing water through their veins, and rotating their upturned faces toward the sun.

Still, there were signs of my mother’s decline. My mother grew increasingly concerned with financial matters when I was a teenager, obsessive beyond reason. One day she panicked over the size of her credit card bills. She’d given my oldest sister permission to use that card in graduate school, but now she worried about the figures coming in—the restaurant dinners and other amounts beyond her control. As she kept complaining to me about the situation, I called up my sister, shrilly voiced my mother’s concerns.