Ends - Winter Solstice 2021

 

The time of secrets is upon us. Today, I’ll share one of mine.

 

People often underestimate me. Mostly, I think, because I try to get along. Unless I implicitly trust the individuals I’m with, I listen more than I talk. I also watch how they treat others, fully aware from experience that if they treat others poorly, I or someone I value could be next. I am generally conflict-averse but not above it.

 

That dichotomy confuses some and leads them into thinking I am weak or an easy target. In reality, I am just choosing my moment and method to strike if necessary. Mostly, I just hope any issue goes away. Because when I choose to act, it’s game on.

 

As readers may remember from Switching Sides, the engineering setting I worked in was often confrontational and contentious. Toxic is a better word. Years after the events laid out in that essay, I found myself at a crossroads. By then I’d set down a financial plan that eventually led me to where I am today. That plan was still years away from fruition, four to five to be exact. But I am patient and goal-oriented. Once I set one in my mind, I am likely to see it through. At least when the time is right. Life doesn’t always cooperate.

 

At that time, I was still unhappy with my day-to-day. Mr. Wizard, I don’t want to be a defense contractor anymore. For a number of reasons and unique circumstances, I didn’t feel I had much choice, not at that exact moment. I had a mortgage. I would soon have a spouse. I wanted to move but she didn’t. Her career was bound up with our current location.

 

By this point, the toxicity of team rivalry in my workplace had morphed into a new kind of tribalism. Bias and prejudice against women and minorities in my workplace were patently obvious to anyone with eyes. There were inappropriate jokes and nicknames, and slights meant to cast individuals’ race or gender or religion into stark relief. Often to their face. Often in a distinct power play. Often within management’s hearing. A distinct old boy’s network was very much in evidence.

 

To give you an example, one of my coworkers, one of the sharpest, most talented, most intelligent engineers I worked with, was dinged on her annual review for the way she dressed (which wasn’t provocative even at the time). Not only dinged but called into her supervisor’s office to specifically address the situation with interim reviews. Her middle-aged, white, male supervisor who had enough contacts and seniority to be considered untouchable. All the women I listened to considered this outrageous. I don’t think this man understood that corporate culture had begun to change.

 

Around this time, the system my project was designing was in the middle of demonstration and certification. Which meant extended fieldwork all around. Unlike the previous rounds of fieldwork that I’d been involved in, this time our workforce, specifically our software department which heavily figured into the design, was more gender-integrated, or at least had more than minor female representation.

 

Management had no experience in dealing with that. Which showed when they laid down a set of unique rules that only applied to women who went to the field. One of these was that they had to observe a strict buddy system. So, unless two women’s schedules and expertise aligned, neither could be assigned to a field site. Management viewed this as a safety issue, although clearly it did not apply to all travel. Women traveled to our client’s site alone all the time. Another rule was that women couldn’t be assigned to a support a ship even if that ship was in port. They would only be allowed aboard if there was no other option, read no other male was capable of performing their job. This was seen as necessary so as not antagonize the Navy or its commanders. There were a host of other minor guidelines, all of which amounted to making it difficult for women to get field assignments whether they wanted them or not.

 

Fieldwork in engineering is often a make-or-break opportunity for career development and advancement. Especially in defense contracting. If you keep a site up and running smoothly under adverse conditions, you can find yourself in the spotlight. If you are the individual who solves a critical problem holding up a test or demonstration, you are suddenly a hero. Upper management remembers your name. Promotions are in the offing. As are team lead positions required to advance.

 

As well, the field is not a design review. It’s not even like the lab. The problems you encounter under real-world conditions provide insight into future designs and inform the way you debug problems. The field is a practical, not theoretical, experience for any design or systems engineer. It’s also a moment to shine as you highlight your understanding of the overall system, not just your tiny segment, along with any interpersonal or technical skills you bring along.

 

In other words, unless you are the best ivory tower designer or system architect, your career may depend on how you perform in the field.

 

Which requires being there.

 

This was well understood the day those field rules for women were announced. As I remember it, they were only announced to the women themselves, not to all members of the team. Perhaps I missed the meeting. But I distinctly remember the information came down to me secondhand. By this time, I was slated for significant fieldwork. Volunteered for it, in fact. I knew from my previous stints of extended fieldwork how critical it could be.

 

The women who discussed the rules with me were generally offended. They had maybe one advocate in the lowest level of the management chain. When they complained to her, she had stated their case and was overruled by upper management. Vehemently and with alacrity. They considered the gender rules settled divisional law. Case closed. Protest at your peril.

 

That attitude didn’t ameliorate the situation or the undercurrent of dissent. This was not a happy sailor is a bitching sailor scenario. Mostly these women were junior engineers who had come up in a time that promised them equal treatment, much more than women just five years their senior. But they had no agency and knew it, other than voting with their feet. I got the sense many were growing used to this level of bias and discrimination, and had begun to accept it as a given.

 

As a warning shot or a distress flare, a couple years earlier my company had gotten caught up in a pay scandal which was pretty unusual for a defense contractor, the resolution not the act. In their annual reviews and raises that year, a number of employees found their base pay raised significantly, in some cases by double digits. The official explanation was that the company was transitioning to a new employee evaluation system that placed people in quartiles based on current and previous review scores, each with a minimum salary they should receive within their job title.

 

The unofficial reason for these startling but selective raises was far more troubling. For whatever reason (likely under government duress, or from due diligence by an ever-present buyout suitor), the company had reviewed the salaries of women and minorities and found both to be significantly underpaid compared to their generally white, male counterparts with equivalent experience and education. To the point where certain female and minority employees were earning below even the minimum salaries for their job titles by 10-20%.

 

These pay deficits were large enough that it sometimes took two years of what amounted to unheard of raises for certain individuals to catch up because of corporate policies that limited any employee’s annual raise to a maximum of 10%. In at least one case I have direct knowledge of, an individual (whose voluntarily disclosed ethnicity marked them as a minority) received first a 10% raise one year, followed by nearly 10% raise the next. This in a time when a 3% raise was considered good.

 

Of course, the true explanation was veiled in secrecy although rumors of what had happened abounded. It wasn’t hard to sort out who got good raises and what they might have in common. In the way of all management, they discouraged employees from comparing salaries for just this reason. But in the way of all employees, they often did if only informally and circling the edges. Rumors were abundant about who made what and where they fell on the department’s informal totem pole for the ever-present next round of layoffs. I had the truth confirmed a few years after I’d left the company by a friend who sat in on some of the meetings where that pay disparity had been discussed.

 

Right after this, the company made a concerted effort to hire more women and minorities, many of whom were gone within five years. Some number directly because of the reception they received.

 

From my earlier experience, I was more outraged than jaded when my management announced those the gender-based fieldwork rules. I refused to accept them as the norm. I took the situation as a personal affront. Precisely because I knew how I’d benefited from fieldwork in the past and thought others deserved that same opportunity. I was sick of seeing petty egos who I never saw as that outstanding threatened by perceived competition. I’ve never seen diversity as a threat to my position or career. I’ve always seen it as my opportunity to work with, and learn from, the best. Period.

  

Discrimination always sets me off when I sniff it out, even if the people around me don’t always note it. I’ve brushed up against too much prejudice too many times concerning too many friends, black, female, and/or gay.

 

The problem was, I had no real agency then either. I wasn’t particularly senior, just a few years more senior than the women I’d heard from. I didn’t have any contacts higher up the chain that might give me a hearing. But I knew in my heart what I was seeing was discriminatory and unethical.

 

While I am goal-oriented, I am also a problem solver. People who know me understand that when I set my mind to something, I know how to get things done.

 

And yet there was a problem with tilting at ideological windmills in my environment. There was a very real threat of reprisals against anyone who pushed the issue. That I’d learned from a long line of experience. I had an idea of what my company’s management would and wouldn’t tolerate. I also knew how far they would go to reinforce their reputation and protect their prerogatives.

 

The example foremost in my mind involved our division’s annual savings bond drive. Our company had a reputation of universal voluntary employee participation in buying US Savings Bonds. Higher than a similar campaign to support the United Way. Our divisional vice president had more invested in the savings bond campaign than any charity. Our 100% participation rate resulted in him being flown out to corporate headquarters each year to be feted. A trip he relished and had come to expect as his due.

 

The thing is, that 100% participation was only on paper. But the division took it seriously enough to assign people, usually supervisors or people aspiring to promotion, to talk to everyone in their department who hadn’t already signed up. On company time. Their pitch was that you could have as little as a quarter a week ($0.25) deducted from your check and assign it to a bond with a face value as high as $500 ($250 purchase price). Which meant it would take nearly 20 years to get one issued. If you left the company before then, all that money would come back to you.

 

When I was first approached, I looked over the information including the rates of return (which at the time were locked in as long you owned the bond) and decided it was a good way to create an emergency savings fund that I might later use to buy a house. This was before George H. W. Bush changed the terms by fiat, directing that the interest rates float at a reduced market rate to save the government money. Which basically gutted the biggest benefit of the program.

 

Either way, it didn’t matter to me. It was still a convenient way to save money that was accessible outside retirement with a reasonable return.

 

It did matter to a friend of mine who had been hired a couple years later. He was a savvier investor. He looked over the terms then turned in his card, declining to participate. Which meant his savings bond representative, in this case his direct supervisor, came around to ask him to reconsider. Because this was a “voluntary” program, he politely declined. Which then resulted in him getting called first into his manager’s office, then a program manager’s office (the one who told people who complained they were lucky to have jobs), a director’s office (who once ripped the wallpaper off of a conference room wall while demanding the name of an engineer who had accidently damaged a piece of equipment so he could fire him on the spot) and finally into our divisional VP’s office (the one whose trip to Texas depended on my friend’s participation), each stop with an increasing amount of pressure and intimidation. A lot of attention for a junior engineer.

 

I very much remember my friend describing his final encounter with our divisional VP. When asked why he wouldn’t participate after hearing how good of an investment these bonds were, my friend simply answered, “I have better investments that make more money elsewhere” and laid out exactly what they were. After a brief stunned silence, that encounter quickly turned to veiled threats about him not being a team player with the unspoken understanding that his refusal would be remembered when raises and promotions came around.

 

My friend remained unphased. After seeing the way the division operated, he wasn’t planning to make a career out of our company anyway. In fact, he took a better paying job within a year. A very sharp design engineer who we should have been trying to retain. He’d recognized the strong undercurrent of good ole boy network tinged with sometimes very literal gun-toting conservatism (one of my former supervisors carried a handgun in his briefcase). Many of the people we worked with were former military which shaped their thinking in ways most civilians didn’t cotton to.

 

As it turned out, the US Navy was also in transition at this time, against its will, as was American society at large. Around this time, our recently elected President was considering repealing the prohibition against female military personnel serving on combatant ships, which he did several months later. After the debacle of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings under the previous Administration a few years before (rivaled only by the recent confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh), his EEOC suddenly had some teeth. The times they were a-changing.

 

All of which I understood as I examined the board and plotted out my best, most productive move.

 

Because I had no agency, and because I knew the threat of reprisals was very real, I treated this as an asymmetric warfare situation. I listened as events unfolded as a way to gather intelligence but I kept my own counsel. I didn’t grumble to anyone, not even friends, or give a hint that I planned to act. But plan to act I did. From the moment I heard those gender-based fieldwork rules announced.

 

Because our company was a defense contractor, many of which had been caught up in various ethical scandals dating back to Reagan, we had mandatory ethics training every year. From that, I knew we had a corporate ethics department. I knew their contact information was in our employee handbook.

 

But I was not naïve. I knew that corporate ethics departments, much like modern HR departments, are more about preventing the company’s image from being tarnished than about what you might think their job description might be. They are servants of the corporation, looking out for its best interests, not the employees. In many ways, they are the foxes guarding the henhouse.

 

I also knew that while the EEOC had strong legal mandate regarding discrimination, it had limited reach and powerful political enemies even after it had been revitalized by the then current Administration. Finding their contact information was a bit trickier as I recall.

 

With that in mind, I chose an uncharacteristic path. I embraced my inner Niccolò Machiavelli’s and heeded his advice, from Discourses not The Prince.

 

People who know me know that I have a complex, ambiguous and sometimes ambivalent relationship with Machiavelli. On the one hand, his words have been used to propel any number of despots into power. On the other, he captures a great deal of truth in the way people interact politically. Having played enough of the Avalon Hill game that bears his name, as I’ve mentioned in other essays, I had an idea how to use his principles for good. I see them as a tool, not inherently good or evil.

 

My plan was simple. I would outline my ethical and legal concerns over our corporate policy in a professionally crafted letter, using all the communications skills I’d picked up to make the arguments for my case. I would send it to both relevant parties, our ethics office and the EEOC. Since I was dealing with two weak allies with suspect individual motivations, I opted for a strategy that would force an alliance between them, much like I’d seen used quite effectively in the Machiavelli game.

 

Not only would I send the letter to both parties, I would clearly mark each as having been cc’d to the other. Which meant it would be more difficult for either to bury the incident for fear the other would act and blame them for not acting, thus exploiting their mutual antagonism. At the time, any ethics complaint involving a federal contract was required to be forwarded to the government. That did not always happen. Or if it did, the issue was often buried.

 

The thing is, if I believe in something, I don’t mind signing my John Hancock, despite the potential consequences. I don’t mind making a stand and have made more than a few unpopular ones. I don’t mind going toe-to-toe when necessary. I understand there are times you have to die on that hill just to protest, just to make a statement. Because sometimes by losing now, you can win later. You don’t do it capriciously, but there can be a long-term strategy at play.

 

Winning and losing are only words that reflect personal investment. My only real goal was to get the policy changed and give these women the same opportunity I had, to rise or fall on their own abilities, not their gender. An equal opportunity you might say.

 

But I knew I was dealing with some petty, vindictive people in my chain of command. If they were willing to threaten reprisals at highest levels over a bond drive, I had a pretty good idea of what they might be willing to do here. Which meant my letters would go unsigned. That rubbed my personal ethics wrong, primarily because I believed in what I was doing.

 

There was an advantage in anonymity. If corporate could ID who had complained, they could attack the individual (with rumors or reprisals). Without knowing who it was, they could only attack the ideas. As well, if that anonymity held, they would be more likely to hesitate in the future because that whistleblower could still be lurking. Those advantages outweighed any reputation I had at that moment, which honestly wasn’t much. As squeamish as I was, and as dishonorable as it felt, I had to the let the ends justify the means.

 

You may remember from Leadership that I value actions over words. In the end, I value actions over credit though credit can be nice. Effort matters but results matter more. I won’t die on hills for glory or recognition. I will die for results. It doesn’t do anyone any good to be martyred. Any martyrdom complexes I may have harbored were long dead, killed by practical experience. I intended to continue fighting for what I saw as important. Like this.

 

The risk was that the blame might fall on the women themselves and make their lives more miserable. Were that to happen, I planned to come forward before they could take the fall. I had to trust my instincts that the culture had begun to change. And that I could engage in round two if round one didn’t result in a KO, mine. To keep fighting, you have to survive.

 

And I very much intended to survive.

 

So, I let my native paranoia take the wheel. I didn’t compose my letter on a work computer, or even the laptop I rarely took to work. I wrote it with a different style, different words and a different voice. I didn’t put a return address on the envelopes that I ensured were typed, not hand addressed. I mailed both through a company drop box that went through the mailroom to the post office rather than dropping them where they might get a defining postmark, like say in Seminole. I stopped short of wearing gloves.

 

I told no one what I was doing except my wife, then fiancée, who I swore to secrecy. I trusted her implicitly. She supported my decision. We both held clearances, which if nothing else teaches you how to keep a secret.

 

I buried those two letters in different corporate mail drops, each in stacks of other envelopes of interdepartmental, corporate and personal mail. That was a risk, but so is tampering with stamped and addressed US Mail. Not that they should have been able to ID exactly where either came from. When I was finished, I deleted the files from my home computer.

 

Once I released those letters, I treated them like fire-and-forget weapons. Don’t linger in the area. Fire and move.

 

I wasn’t certain my actions would do much more than serve as a protest to be honest. I figured in the way of the world, no one would take my complaint very seriously. Management was more likely to find a reason not to act than to change the course they’d chosen.

 

Imagine my surprise a week later when I arrived at work and found the building already abuzz. I asked one of my friends what was going on. One of my female friends. She said word had come down from on high revoking the gender-based fieldwork rules. The women were now on the exact same footing as the men.

 

I quickly dropped a stony poker face in place. The eyes that look right through you, as I’d been told. Oh, I said.

 

Then she lowered her voice conspiratorially and looked around. Her contact higher up said that someone had complained anonymously and everyone in management from our divisional VP down was livid. Another of her contacts said there were management meetings all over the building trying to ferret out who it was.

 

Huh, I replied, then headed to my cube. I just went about my day, pleased my plan had worked better than expected, trying not to let it show.

 

Another friend in a different department who was in some of those meetings later confirmed that management was actively hunting for the whistleblower. They desperately wanted a head to roll to serve as an example. They never claimed one.

 

No one ever asked me about the incident. No one ever leveled an accusation against me or anyone else, at least that I know of. If management suspected me, I never heard.

 

I don’t believe they did as a few years later, I received a divisional excellence award for Development (for a different “accomplishment”), about the time I was slated to lead two dozen engineers on three teams (predominately of our female engineers) with a multi-million-dollar budget. I RSVP’d that I wouldn’t be able to attend to the dinner ceremony where the award would be presented by that same divisional VP. Instead, I had to go to HR to pick it up the Monday after. They didn’t realize that by that point I was beyond caring. I’d seen enough. I was already on my way out the door.

 

Before today, I’ve only shared this incident with a handful of people. With the exception of my wife, that happened only once, twenty years later at a Kitten*Con as we were discussing gender bias after the wine and cognac had flowed. I am still not entirely sure why I chose to share it at that moment. Maybe it was after a lecture on feminism in science fiction. Maybe after a discussion of the Bechdel Test (wiki it). I guess I trusted the people I was with. Although I could see little harm coming of it by then, I’d just gotten used to keeping that secret to myself.

 

So why reveal it now? Why bring it up again?

 

Perhaps because I’ve been thinking about that incident a lot recently. It is one of the few clean victories I can claim in my life, even if unattributed. A small victory which gained more meaning as time went by and other conflicts in my life have drawn to more ambiguous closures.

 

Perhaps because I feel we’ve been slipping backwards, that hard won progress has been eroded in recent years as old attitudes not only have resurfaced but are now rewarded. And likely will be again in the near future. The authoritarian, Q-Anon, Proud Boy opposition isn’t playing at their goals. Or rather they’re playing for keeps. Social progress, unlike technological advances, are often cyclic. While it’s rare for society to set aside a new technology, that is by no means true for civil rights.

 

And perhaps because I feel I’m getting too old to fight. Or I feel I’ve spent too much time fighting. I am tired and don’t know how much practical fight I have left in me. Perhaps I just hope someone else will take up the torch, using all the tools they are given, and leverage them to get the job done. If my experience serves as a guide or an inspiration, all the better. Or perhaps I am just reminding myself that I once knew how to fight and will again if necessary.

 

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

 

As we approach the day of deepest darkness, we may do well to reflect on the light we bring to this world. Sometimes you need place that lamp high on a pedestal for all to see. And sometimes concealing it beneath a bushel basket, or in a cellar to light a stop on an underground network, is much more effective.

 

Often you will never know how others perceive the path you light. If the right light guides you, you don’t need to. Even if, within the framework of the greater good, you sometimes compromise your personal code and allow more ethical ends to justify your means.

 

 

© 2021 Edward P. Morgan III

Kintsugi (from Four Fragments) – Fall Equinox 2021

 

The season of secrets is once again upon us.

 

The time when we tell children harmless little lies to increase their joy and sense of wonder. The time when we hide gifts from them and our significant others. The time when we paint on a smile and pretend that our families don’t drive us completely bat-shit crazy. The time we tell ourselves that all those cookies we baked are for everyone else and not secretly for us. The time when we think we really mean the words we say, that it was great to see you, that we should get together again soon.

 

Though by that standard, this time of year isn’t special. We all keep secrets year-round.

 

When I was younger, I didn’t talk much about my life. Pretty much I didn’t see the things that happened to me as secret, more as normal events that no one chose to talk about. It didn’t take me long in middle school to learn that I was mistaken. The few times I related a story about things that had happened to me or my sister, I was greeted with open-mouth astonishment that quickly turned to stunned silence. Silence that spawned avoidance which felt suspiciously like rejection, whether of me, my experiences or just a reality that didn’t fit someone else’s illusion, I wasn’t sure. But I took away a reading of the implicit social contract that home life was something I shouldn’t talk about. It made people uncomfortable which made them drift away.

 

Keeping my silence felt less lonely and vulnerable than actually being alone. Older now, I am beginning to re-appreciate the wisdom in that.

 

Well into adulthood, I kept to that personal rule: Don’t talk about family. Don’t talk about things that happened except with the few people I felt I could deeply trust. To this day, I still have friends I spent inordinate amounts of time with growing up who tell me they never knew anything was going on.

 

The problem is, those secrets never went away. They continued to cast doubt on what was and wasn’t normal. On whether I did or didn’t have self-worth. Sometime in my late twenties, I began to rethink what I’d learned.

 

I was thirty when my wife revealed her own family secret to me. As she struggled to cope with how to finally deal with what had happened, I realized I couldn’t very well advise and encourage her if I didn’t confront my own experiences. As she sought counseling, I made an effort to begin to share more of my experiences more openly. Not just with her, she already was pretty familiar with my background, but with people I knew when the opportunity seemed right.

 

Initially, unlearning that early lesson was hard. But slowly I discovered there is power in the truth, power in revealing secrets. While those secrets protected me, they protected others as well. Those people had more to lose than I did when the truth came out.

 

Over the next twenty years, I became more comfortable with telling people things that happened to me. By the time I was forty, I would openly tell people there was abuse in my family if it seemed pertinent to the conversation. By the time I was fifty, it no longer made me particularly emotional. It was just another story from my background I had to tell.

 

That’s not to say it wasn’t difficult along the way. Hearing the answers from the people involved as to why they thought they did what they did was emotionally painful. But over time, reviewing those answers provided a modicum of peace even if I didn’t like what those answers said. And that’s not to say I don’t still engage in arguments in my head with people not present. Or sometimes not living.

 

Recently, I began reconsidering the lesson from nearly forty years ago that I’d taken so much effort to unlearn. Anymore, I wonder if I’d initially gotten that lesson right. It turns out that adults even well into middle age aren’t really much better about how they respond to other people’s adversity.

 

Yet, I also know that if no one is willing to speak out, the perpetrators continue to get away with their crimes. They hide behind those secrets. They rely on the pain and shame their victims feel to shield them from what they’ve done. There’s a reason for the admonishment about not shooting the messenger. It’s the action we’re naturally inclined to take, because the messenger is an easy target who stands right in front of us.

 

There doesn’t seem to be a path of least suffering. Only one of right and wrong which requires personal sacrifice.

 

And maybe all the talking in the world won’t make you feel any less alone.

 

---

 

No good can come of what I am about to write.

 

Six years ago, I awoke in the middle of the night suffering from an existential crisis. That’s not a euphemism; it’s an accurate description of how I felt. My thoughts then strayed onto choices, mechanisms. I won’t share the details. Suffice it to say, after a couple hours reviewing options, I came up with something that seemed palatable.

 

As soon as I settled on that possibility, I got back to sleep.

 

Sleep, that’s all I really wanted anyway. Rest. Peace. A brief respite from pain and struggle.

 

When I was young, I never really thought about suicide but I often thought about going to sleep and never waking up. Let God claim me. I prayed for that more than once. That was back when I still believed.

 

Those were the type of thoughts that emerged again that night.

 

Now there are going to be several reactions to what I just wrote. Let me outline the most likely.

 

First, there is: Oh my god, I never knew. These are the people who will never get past the word “suicide” whether stated or implied. They will treat you like a Faberge egg for the rest of your life. Something fragile and easily broken, if not quite beautiful. Something to be pitied, not someone they can understand or relate to. An object, not a human being.

 

The next reaction is to run as far and as fast as they can. This one is more common than you think. I don’t really know him that well. I don’t need his drama, I have enough of my own. I’ll let his friends and family deal with it. I hope he gets it all straightened out. Maybe if he does, I’ll come back. Maybe, but probably not. The damage has been done. So de facto exclusion and exile.

 

Perhaps the next most common is cynicism. This is just a cry for attention. You weren’t really serious. You don’t even know how good your life is. I wish I had your privilege. What a waste. You’re not special. Everyone goes through it. Just get over it and get over yourself.

 

Then there’s the even more callous variant of: Someone should really call your bluff. You want to die, then do it. I dare you. I double-dog dare you. If you succeed, maybe then I’ll believe you. But either way, you’re a coward.

 

And finally, there is: You really need to talk to someone. Not me, of course. We’re not that close. I wouldn’t know what to say. A professional. Someone who is trained and gets paid to deal with stuff like this. Someone who knows the exact right thing to say. Someone who can make it magically go away, or prescribe the drugs that will. So, I don’t have to deal with it. Because I’m not sure I can. Or that I really want to.

 

These are the pretty standard reactions to anyone else’s existential crisis. Any revelation that makes us uncomfortable or upsets our worldview. This I know from observation and experience. I’ve called it out time after time. And yet, I am still surprised by how exactly right it turns out to be.

 

One of the first basic lessons I was taught growing up is that if you are upset, if you feel bad, you must have done something wrong. You, not anyone else.

 

Not only family reinforced this lesson, friends have, too, as well as the whole pop-psychology social media. It’s like a surficial reading of Buddhism by someone who never cracked the book or even the Cliff’s Notes. Life is suffering, snowflake. It’s all in your mind and how you deal with it. You. Not me. Not what I do. My actions bear no responsibility. That’s what led any number of nominally Buddhist cultures to think the Enlightened One would have been cool with torture. That’s what led to our current society to see Ayn Rand selfishness as a laudable trait.

 

Then why am I writing this? What do I want or think will happen? Now that’s the fundamental question.

 

First, let’s get something straight. I am not now and have not been suicidal.

 

My grandfather committed suicide. The Best Man from my wedding committed suicide. I’ve told the story that my mother slit her wrists in our driveway when I was very young, although I don’t remember it (but have seen the scars). A friend from high school later told me he made two or three attempts in college. Another friend from high school tried at least once, seriously enough to end up in a college infirmary two thousand miles away.

 

I’m familiar enough with the signs by now to have talked a near total stranger off that ledge for hours late one night, because I recognized their pain and knew it was the right thing to do. Which was evidenced the next morning when they told me that right after they stopped talking to me, they called a suicide prevention hotline.

 

I’ve never made a move in that direction. No overt act. I’m pretty sure I won’t, although I can never say never. None of us can.

 

But as I’ve talked about before, I have had someone actually try to kill me, up close and personal. I remember exactly how hard I fought to keep that from happening, using every bit of force and guile at my disposal. I know from experience that I have the will and stubbornness to keep going under adversity, both mental and physical. I’ve suffered enough shocks to feel fairly certain I can do it again, though I also know it takes me more time now to recover from the initial hit. Or hits.

 

What this little late-night episode told me was that something in my life needed to change and I didn’t know how to do it. I was profoundly unhappy. I felt trapped because I couldn’t see a clear or easy way out. Just like when I was a kid.

 

Now comes the hard part. Because what I write next will probably hurt any number of people. That is not my intent. My intent is to outline the truth of the situation as I see it. As I experienced it.

 

The cold, harsh reality is this: In the past several years, I’ve had to confront the dark side of human nature. I’ve witnessed some abhorrent behaviors, heard life-altering statements. Things like that rape doesn’t matter as long as the rapist is more fun to be around. Things like that I should never gotten involved, no matter who I was trying to protect, who I was trying to defend because it threatened someone’s cherished illusions. By implication and action, that this was somehow my fault for pursuing it, and not letting it go. No matter who was at risk.

 

At one point six years ago, I said very publicly that I had checked out. That all I was able to do for two solid weeks was lie in bed and watch movies. I was unable to think straight, unable to write, barely able to function. Exercising and daily showers were major accomplishments. Maybe two people checked on me, both a couple thousand miles away. No one local. No one stopped by to see if I was ok, or just to say, hey, I’m here if you need me. I heard that statement once or twice well afterward but saw no follow-up.

 

In fact, I watched any number of people put daylight between me and them when I needed them, when I had said I needed them, because they didn’t know what to do or say. So, they said and did nothing. People who I thought meant something to me. People I thought I could trust.

 

One brave soul apologized, saying they had done exactly that, months after the crisis had passed. While it showed a great deal of honesty and integrity, it also served as confirmation.

 

Most people aren’t as forthright.

 

---

 

Beyond the time of secrets, we enter a brief, ten-day twilight zone between the solstice and the New Year. It's a time we usually reserve to do a few things we enjoy as well as looking both back and forward to sort out where we've been and where we think we're going.

 

Six years ago, in that interstice, we visited with college friends we hadn't seen in nearly twenty years. In the process of catching up, I started thinking beyond the normal where have we worked and what we’ve seen on trips to what was really important. Looking back, I think there are really three things I am extremely proud of having done, none of which I talked about that night.

 

That's not to say I don't have achievements that I'm pleased with. Things like reviving two dying organizations when I was younger that meant a lot to me, and keeping a third on life support before finally pulling the plug. Or the design and debug I did in engineering, though I'm sure someone somewhere by now has found any number of issues with it, if it still exists. Or more in having a body of writing that includes a novel, fifty plus short stories, twenty plus poems and over a hundred essays.

 

The problem is, I can't point to any one thing among them that feels like something meaningful.

 

The first accomplishment I felt, oddly, was managing our finances. Meeting my goals, many earlier than expected, has meant both Karen and I have been able to pursue careers we really wanted and enjoyed. It also meant that when things stopped being fun for her at work, she could bow out when she wanted. It involved a lot of hard work, worry, long-term planning and sacrifice. But the security and stability has been worth it. It's one of the few things I feel successful at.

 

The second accomplishment was taking care of Karen when she was diagnosed with cancer. Being home to do what needed to be done felt and feels important. I know how lucky she was in needing as little care as she did. Yet it constantly amazes me that her situation was not and is not a given, how many spouses and SO's walk away or fall down when things get tough. I can only hope that my small effort made a difference in how she responded to treatment and in the speed of her recovery. The pieces I wrote to entertain her while she was going through it still feel like some of the most important things I've written, though not the best.

 

Finally, I am proud of going to bat for her and for others who didn't know, some of whom may never know, the darkness her brother wrought. Of trying to defend three little girls from a sexual predator without losing my marriage in the process, which ended up being a close-run thing. For twenty years, I stood alone. I fought as hard as I could as long as I could. While I know I could have said and done certain things differently, I don't regret a thing. Except maybe that I didn't fight harder and do what I thought needed to be done from the beginning. I just hope I did enough.

 

Not exactly the types of things you recount over Indian food while everyone else talks about their jobs, their kids, their houses and their vacations. An odd collection to say the least. But I think if I look back in another thirty or forty years and that's all I have, I'll be content.

 

I’ll have to be.

 

---

 

Two years later, I revisited that third accomplishment. For decades, I thought I’d wended my way through a very narrow path to success on that one, despite the cost. Then, without warning, part of that accomplishment was ripped away. I thought I was doing something for someone else, because they couldn’t and I could. Turns out, they never wanted it. None of it. Ever. More the pity that I even bothered.

 

I could have turned my back and moved on. I had been lied to from the onset, repeatedly, overtly and covertly. By the time I learned the truth, at least part of it, a vow had been extracted. Not the last as it turned out. I kept them as best I could, at least the ones I swore.

 

But in that moment, I burned a final bridge to the waterline and fully expected it to remain in ruins. In fact, I still see that river as my Severn. If anyone from that clan brings that conflict back to my side, they are fair game. Like an onion eater straying west of Offa’s Dyke. This time, I will not stop until I’ve done what I should have from the start. But for now, I’m content to just enforce the border. With fire if necessary.

 

Yes, I was angry. And deeply hurt. Twenty years of effort is a lot to have devalued.

 

As a result, my writing, suffered. I stopped writing essays about my life entirely for years because they seemed to have become a sort of entertainment for the audience. Something titillating or voyeuristic rather than a mechanism to relate to people, to speak a truth of one kind or another I knew from experience many people shared but were too afraid to express. That was just too painful.

 

In the isolation of the pandemic and a time of social uncertainty, I still struggle with that.

 

Even fiction became more difficult. It felt trivial. Each time I sat down to work on a story that had been in process for months, I just pushed it away. Most days, I was no longer sure who I was writing for. To entertain an audience who may not really care if I lived or died? That may not be true, but some days that’s exactly how it felt.

 

I don’t write for me or to perfect my craft. I write to share with others. Because I can and they seem to enjoy it. Or because it sometimes enlightens them in some way by putting something into words they can’t. Though I have developed some deep trust issues on that score now.

 

As I’ve said before, the only thing I write for myself is poetry. Unlike fiction which is meant to entertain and so has to connect with the reader, poetry for me is about expression and capturing something I see or feel. I share it as a curiosity, not because I think it’s particularly good. Maybe it will resonate with someone, or reveal some portion of me that will help others understand. That’s why for a few years I posted so much of it.

 

But my choice is either to self-censor, or to attempt to express a truth destined to be misunderstood. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. So, I often sit, bound up in knots, trying to sort out a way to see myself clear, or set it down forever.

 

Which is a third option in a way.

 

---

 

When that third accomplishment was taken away four years ago, I checked out again. This time instead of movies, I read ancient science fiction for two weeks straight. Same deal as earlier. Only this time, I didn’t bother to mention why. It didn’t matter the first time, and I was well aware people were tired of hearing about it. So, I held them at arm’s length for my survival.

 

I knew how to survive. I’d done it as a kid. Then, I’d learned through social convention that talking about things didn’t help. People just looked at you in shock and turned away. Responsible adults didn’t or wouldn’t intervene, despite my then having no power to change the situation for myself. No agency.

 

Since I was young, I’ve heard excuses like, maybe if you’d been a better kid, I would have done more to help you. Or, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. Even recently, I’ve watched conversations with people close to me get actively shut down, diverted or minimized.

 

A great deal of my faith in people had been shattered. I’ve been trying to piece something, anything, back together ever since. Not some Humpty Dumpty Faberge egg. Something more akin to Kintsugi.

 

---

 

"We are all just three bad breaks away from seeing throwing scud missiles as a valid career path."

 

More importantly, we are all just three bad breaks away from being that person so much of our society loves to look down on. That person who struggles. That person caught in a downward spiral. That person who needs help. 

 

Those bad breaks could come from your attention wandering for a split second too long in a parking lot with a pedestrian, your birth control failing under normal parameters in high school or college, or that lump that turned out to be something malignant rather than a sebaceous cyst. It could be identity theft. It could be getting laid off from your job. It could be the family or circumstances you were born into. It could be an addiction or mental illness. It could be the extended isolation or lingering illness from a pandemic that only half the country seems to take seriously. Stack any three of them together and you could be almost anyone.

 

Your life and circumstances can change in an instant, not always because of poor planning or poor choices but rather because sometimes random bad things happen to random decent people. If you've avoided them in this life, you are exceptional, in that you are lucky, not superior.

 

The day you forget that is the day you put your first foot into the grave. Because your sense of compassion and empathy has begun to die. And with it, your humanity.

 

And in a time of personal struggle, pandemic and insurrection, our shared humanity is all that stands between us and chaos, the container that holds in civilization while keeping anarchy at bay.

 

That vase is vital to our continued communal survival, no matter how we manage glue it back together, with platinum, gold, or silver. The flaws may be clearly visible, but the whole is stronger despite its imperfections.

 

And perhaps more beautiful for what it has overcome.

 

 

© 2021 Edward P. Morgan III

PTSD - Lughnasa 2021

 

Just before Independence Day weekend, I was once again storm watching, this time a girl named Elsa. This has become a regular occurrence in recent years, earlier and earlier each season. This year was the first on record with five named storms by the first week in July. We ended up watching the intensity models with interest. While most kept Elsa to a sedate high school homecoming dance level (tropical storm to cat 1), one blew her up into full prom queen meltdown mode (cat 3). That outlier had my full and undivided attention. Because I was not ready for a major storm, psychologically not physically.

 

I knew what needed to be done. We have been through storms and even bad seasons before.

 

I rode out Hurricane David as a kid, watching as a tree in our back yard fell in slow motion, barely missing a corner of the house, which left us without power for ten days. We watched Andrew make landfall in Miami a few months after we bought this house, the same year one tornado in a local swarm destroyed the last house we lived in while another rolled through the park behind this one. We rode out the year of four hurricane landfalls in Florida (Charley, Frances, Jeanne, Ivan). We got seriously lucky when Charley took a sudden righthand curve after blowing up in intensity over a three-hour span. By the time we got to Ivan, we were in line buying plywood, which we then put up for Jeanne. Followed the next year by monitoring Katrina, Rita and Wilma as they devastated the upper Gulf after passing us by.

 

Before she retired, my wife studied the impacts of hurricanes on the coastline through her career as a geologist. She has always been fascinated by storms. She flew recon for research after Katrina, after Sandy, after Ivan, after numerous other storms. She witnessed some of the post-landfall carnage firsthand. Some of those images are seared into her memory as well as captured in her pictures. But that only increased our respect for these powerful forces of nature. None of that made us, or at least me, fear them. Even before we replaced the windows with hurricane-rated upgrades, I could still find an inspiration for writing in them.

 

All that changed with Irma. After 2017, I no longer experience a childlike sense of wonder; I experience a childlike sense of dread.

 

Here’s where the story gets a little complicated because, like most PTSD triggers, it’s about two peripherally related events that got intertwined.

 

In late August through early September of 2017, I had a few things going on. Over Labor Day weekend that year, as for several years before, we held our annual Kitten*Con for a small group of friends. All but one of our attendees were local. She flew in from out of state. Because our little mini-con fell in the middle of hurricane season, she sometimes had to rearrange her incoming or outgoing flights to avoid a storm brewing in the basin. It was a running joke that she had become our storm magnet.

 

That year didn’t disappoint. By the time we convened the Thursday evening before Labor Day, a tropical storm had formed off the Cape Verde islands. Only my wife took much notice as it was small and literally thousands of miles away. It was something to keep an eye on rather than something to pay strict attention to.

 

So, we didn’t. We played our games, watched our movies, discussed our lectures, ate our con food and drank our wine, generally having a grand old geek time without a care in the world, as always.

 

That peaceful fantasy shattered for me when someone left a message on our phone either Friday or Saturday. Oddly, the message wasn’t for me but for my sister who has never lived here. The caller, my mother’s landlord, must have confused our numbers somehow. But he directed the message to her so I didn’t call him back but dutifully passed it on, desperately hoping I could ignore it since I had a house full of company for the next several days.

 

Unfortunately, I had a feeling I knew what it was about. A few weeks earlier I had called my mother to see how things were going. She told me she was having a plumbing issue in the house where I grew up.

 

A little background here: she had owned the house outright after my parents got divorced, but I’d discovered she’d lost it at some point before 2006, the first time we were over trying to get the house into something resembling habitable shape so she could continue living there after she broke her neck. She never told me she no longer owned the house and only acknowledged that fact after said I no longer saw her name on the deed as I was trying to piece together her finances to see where she stood, not knowing how things might unfold.

 

I did more digging in 2012, when we were called back over at our anniversary by a friend of hers who informed us that, first, she was in the hospital, and second, that the EMTs who had taken her there were ready to involve the Health Department because the house had gotten so severe as to be a health hazard, a distinct change from what we left in 2006. That’s when we spent two weeks of sixteen-hour days spread over three weekends excavating that hoarder-esque nightmare back to something akin to the more orderly level of decluttered I remember growing up. Which involved nearly a thousand books donated to the public library, several SUV loads of donations to Goodwill, numerous trips to a recycling drop-off to ovefill their dumpsters, an overflowing grocery cart of shredding (after we burned out a retail shredder and threw out anything that was moldy), and so much bagged trash for curbside pickup that the neighbors thought my mother had died. Nope, that was just all the broken, moldy or otherwise unusable, unrecyclable, undonatable junk we cleared out. And that didn’t include the boxes and boxes of unwanted, often duplicate items her friend sold for her on eBay. Even after we finished, my mother still had an entire 2000 sq. ft. home’s worth of contents inside, including enough clothing and shoes to fill four full bedroom closets. In the end, the authorities were satisfied enough for her to continue living there, although she lied to them to stack the deck.

 

All that happened while my father was slowly dying from cancer some twenty minutes away. As I’ve said before, 2012 was not a good year. In terms of the Machiavelli board game, it was plague and famine, rows and columns. Only maybe topped by this year when we added rebellion to the mix.

 

On top of that, I caught acerbic criticism for what we’d done in every phone conversation I had with my mother for the next eighteen months. She made it plain that she didn’t want our help and didn’t think she needed it. I swore at that point I would never do it again. Yeah, that experience left a mark.

 

Circling back to 2017, her landlord, the father of one of her former students when she taught severely multiple handicapped children, was out of town. The only contact number she had was the office of his day job in investing which didn’t know how to reach him (he rented property as a sidelight). The gist of the plumbing problem was that the substandard cast iron pipes in the master bath had finally rotted out and were leaking into my sister’s old bedroom. I told her that I was pretty sure under state law (the Landlord-Tenant Act) that she could get a plumber to stabilize the situation and deduct it from her rent. She had a second bathroom even if the master got shut down for a little while.

 

Now what I said and what she heard were likely two different things. By the time she talked to me, she was well into a fifth of vodka, her alcohol of choice. Just getting the details of the situation out of her and piecing it together was a bit of linguistic legerdemain. As I have said before, my mother was an alcoholic (verifiable from the Paul Harvey rest of the story of how she broke her neck and how she ended up in the hospital before she died) who was very possibly using alcohol to moderate the symptoms of other mental illnesses (anxiety, depression, OCD, perhaps bipolar disorder). I could never confirm whether those were treated conditions or not, although in 2006 and 2012 I found medication that might be prescribed for each. Just another layer to the onion.

 

What I put together long after that Labor Day weekend was that she had drunkenly harassed her landlord’s workplace every day, then called out a plumber to rip out and replace all the pipes and sent him a bill for thousands of dollars of work he didn’t know about until he got home. Needless to say, he was pissed. Enough so that he was ready to start eviction proceedings right away before my sister talked him down.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I didn’t know all when I heard his phone message. I assumed something related to the plumbing had slipped incredibly sideways. Because for the past decade plus, that was the nature of the calls we got from or about my mother.

 

Perhaps the most illustrative call, if I haven’t painted enough of a picture, was the one from her dog groomer just before midnight one year. She was in tears telling me the hospital (which I didn’t know my mother was in) was about to street her by putting her in a cab within minutes with no one to take care of her while she was still injured and somewhat delirious. While my mother considered this woman a friend, that relationship was not reciprocal. She clearly thought of herself as just her groomer. It took all my skill picks in Diplomacy, Admin, and Medical to calm her down enough to get her to explain the situation to the head nurse on the floor who could concoct a way for them to keep my mother overnight (they quickly “discovered” a UTI in her bloodwork). That after explaining this was all news to us and we were 3-4 hours away so couldn’t stop anything that was about to happen and couldn’t get there before it did.

 

Or the time my mother called to say she was going to be streeted from a rehab facility for not agreeing to pay her bill, which burned several hours of my time in intense, sometimes professionally threatening, negotiations with the nurse administrator only to have my mother call back and say, never mind, she had signed the original agreement after all. Or the time she called to say she had a similar dispute with the IRS where I told her not to sign anything and find a lawyer (the IRS is punching about my weight class), only for her to sign a payment agreement when they threatened to appraise the contents of her home to see what they could sell, then try to reneg by claiming she was under duress when she signed it. Which was the same tactic she tried when she revoked the POA she’d given my sister when my mother was in the hospital after a heart attack, an agreement both I and a floor nurse countersigned as witnesses as she calmly signed it over.

 

Phew, ok, there are many more examples involving other surprise phone calls filled with enough convenient memory and magical thinking to necessitate me taking active defensive countermeasures to avoid any Imperial entanglements, but you get the picture. A phone call from or about my mother was a percentile dice roll on an exotic, chaos-driven encounter table which could be moderately dangerous if said encounter sucked me in, which, somehow, they always seemed to do. Usually at the worst possible time. Like, say, just before, during or after a vacation. Or when I finally duct-taped and superglued enough of my own mental health back together to feel inspired enough to write. More on that in a special note.

 

Where was I? Right, back at Labor Day weekend. Kitten*Con friends have told me that I came out of the office from listening to that message visibly deflated. Even though the situation wasn’t mine to handle (my sister startlingly opted to paratroop in and take the lead after being MIA for all of 2006-2012), I was subdued for the rest of the weekend. Subdued but undauntedly determined to enjoy our mini geek Mardi Gras knowing what might be coming. And yet still managing to underestimate what those constantly weaving Norns had in store.

 

The Tuesday morning after Labor Day, we gathered one final time for our post-con hot washup breakfast before we dispersed back to our jobs and lives for another year. That was the moment my wife, who was checking the National Hurricane Center website on her phone, informed us that our little Irma was now all grownup, pre-post-menstrual and whirling a brickbat above her head as she endured her labor pains while raging against the injustice of the patriarchy, which at that point included all of us despite women outnumbering men at the table. While we’d been dancing at our invitation-only party, which we hadn’t realized was the Masque of the Red Death, she had blown up to a full category 5 storm with sustained winds of 175 MPH and was beelining for the Virgin Islands (where one of our number’s parents lived) with Florida sitting atop the bar as a chaser.

 

I think my exact response was, “Are you fucking kidding me?!”

 

That set off a mad five-day scramble of preparations the likes of which we had never done before and hopefully will never have to do again. We began compulsively checking every model run and interim positional update, trying to discern whether this beast of storm was headed for us or for the east coast of Florida where many of our friends and my mother still lived.

 

Of course, when I talked to my mother again, she said she had no intention of evacuating, despite having enough significant medical conditions that being in a special needs shelter with emergency personnel onsite might have been prudent to say the least. But just as she did with Dorian a couple years later, she lied and bluffed her way through by saying she would be fine, had people coming in to help and knew exactly what to do. My sister wasn’t on the ground at that point. I frankly didn’t have time to worry about it as we were in full self-preservation mode. We were busy making multiple runs to top off our hurricane supplies, scrambling around at 10 at night trying to find enough gas to fill our cars and containers, making ice, prepping coolers, checking equipment and supplies.

 

For a while, the models continued to dance back and forth as to which side of the peninsula Irma might hit, to the point where friends who had been at Kitten*Con and quickly made a reservation to evac to Georgia ended up canceling it because the storm wasn’t playing by the hotel’s timetable. They then decided to ride it out only to pull stakes on Saturday morning. How they got out is still beyond me. They slipped through a narrow window where millions of people were on the move, ending up in the only available hotel room two states away. A wiser choice than ours, perhaps.

 

Somewhere in there Irma grazed Cuba, dropping back from a cat 5 to a cat 2 but then drifted farther west into the Florida Straight where she reblossomed into a cat 4 and was still deciding whether and/or exactly when to take a northbound exit. By then, our county was firmly in the center of the cone of uncertainty with possible landfall sometime late Sunday or early Monday, a target that was holding fast. 

 

By Saturday morning, we were in full-force prepper mode. We put up plywood over our hurricane-rated windows as a double-strength precaution. We filled gallon after gallon of drinking water for the first time ever. We pulled in everything we could carry from the yard and the porch, wind chimes, bird baths, pots and pedestals, patio furniture. Knowing that cat 4 winds could peel off roof tiles like flipping pancakes, we retrieved the cat carriers from the attic and put them beside the first aid kits in the laundry room which doubled as our internal shelter in case we lost structural integrity.

 

That’s right, we were afraid some goddamned spinoff Dorothian tornado might Toto the cats like flying fucking monkeys. This was all off-script and well outside our playbook.

 

Once we finished around noon, we headed over to a different friend, another Kitten*Con attendee who would be sheltering with us, to help him finish his preparations, lifting the final plywood in place over his front windows somewhere around four o’clock. We came back for a cold dinner while he finished up inside, then drilled around our sliding glass window to mount plywood over it using an improvised bracket to hold it in place, again for the first time ever. Exhausted, we finished up as the first squalls rolled in just after dark.

 

Which led to a long twenty-four hours of waiting. By the next morning, we were staring down a cat 4 storm again and regretting our life decisions. We watched it first strike the Florida Keys, then weaken ever so slightly before slamming into Marco Island, still as a major hurricane.

 

All day Sunday the winds ramped up as the eye edged closer and squalls increased. By nightfall the track had shifted west again, putting us back in the bullseye. Amazingly, we still had power. We only lost it just before midnight but wouldn’t see it back for another five long, hot, brutal days.

 

When we finally went dark, the whistling winds seemed to amplify as they echoed down the stove hood vent. We heard creaks and crashes from the trees outside but with the windows completely covered could see nothing. That alone was eerie. Slightly more surreal, at the peak of the storm when the eye was just west of us (not over us, thank the gods), our oldest cat, Mara, who apparently had no fucks left to give, started ringing the bells on the sliding glass door, wanting to go out on the porch. She was quite insistent and demanding. Uh, no little one, not possible right now. Nyala continued hiding under the couch.

 

All this time Karen was texting with the last of our Kitten*Con attendees remaining in the county, the one whose parents were now out of communication in the Virgin Islands. Just after one in the morning, as we could barely hear the howling winds just begin to slacken here, this friend declared the storm was over so she was going to bed. We didn’t think we were far behind. Then fifteen minutes later, just as we were beginning to relax, thinking we had weathered the worst of it, Karen got a text from this friend saying a major tree had just crashed onto their roof, within feet of where her husband lay watching the television a few minutes before.

 

Bink. Wide awake again. No rest for the wicked. Thankfully, they were otherwise intact and ok. They didn’t even lose power. But that set off months of wrangling for them to get the damage to their roof and garage repaired. And the image of what could have happened and how close our friend’s husband came was inked into our memories.

 

Around two, as the winds began to trail more noticeably, we finally gave in and called it a night. When we crawled out of bed at dawn, we popped the seals on our shelter and slunk outside to survey the damage. All our trees remained upright. There were some small to medium pine branches down but nothing on the roof. All our neighbors were intact. Walking the neighborhood, we saw a couple big trees down, one blocking the road, another laying across a different house. But everyone we talked to seemed ok.

 

We all understood how incredibly lucky we’d been, especially as the pictures started rolling out of the Keys and Marco Island. We then slowly put our lives back together as Maria grabbed the headlines from her one-week older sister.

 

And that concludes our special presentation tropical excitement, so we now return you to your regularly scheduled family trauma.

 

Which stood with my mother being slow-roll evicted. With the storms out of the basin, my sister could finally fly in.

 

Things started out auspiciously enough. My sister seemed content to handle this round without us going over, which she said she was ok with (spoiler alert: she wasn’t). My mother had made it clear she didn’t want us over there at all, never mind my sister. She said she could handle it, which usually meant she would ignore the situation until she no longer could and then call in the cavalry to rescue her.

 

Still, I provided my sister with all the information I had gleaned over the years on my mother’s situation, from financial to medical to where to find the lease. Information that had taken weeks to dig up and compile so not worth her duplicating the effort. Not that she bothered to read any of it as I later found out. But I helped her out as much as I could, while still trying to keep the boundaries I had set. To the point of reviewing and marking up a sheaf of legal documents from a hotel room on the first weekend getaway we’d taken in several years.

 

Predictably things devolved from there, first to receiving passive-aggressive messages from my sister’s friends which duly went unanswered, then to icy silence, and finally to outright hostility and recriminations over something my mother (not I) had done nearly a decade before. It came to a final head over the legal documents I’d reviewed. My sister insisted on them; my mother was reluctant to sign them. I used as much influence as I had to get those signatures because I thought they were the best way forward. But just as I finally had my mother convinced, my sister sabotaged the situation by trying to throw me under the bus to get her way, despite my efforts on her behalf. Resulting in the documents going unsigned.

 

All of which peeled back the layers and layers of familial trauma by dredging up various unpleasant memories. These are scars that never go away, especially when they are constantly reopened.

 

Without belaboring the details further, this was mostly expected although still more than disappointing. That deflated look my friends had seen at Labor Day? That came from reliving every prior experience that told me this was coming, along with several unrelated traumas that came flooding back, ones I had recognized but no one else would acknowledge. 2006 and 2012 had witnessed the same pattern, the same harsh words, the same phone calls with me being screamed at for an hour and a half before I finally lost my temper. Only this time, the words couldn’t be unsaid. Bells couldn’t be unrung.

 

But even knowing it was coming had left me with a childhood feeling of being trapped no matter what I did. Even though I had made clear where I stood up front and desperately tried to cling to that position, regardless of how untenable it felt. As though the scales had fallen from my eyes, I finally accepted that nothing would ever change except the actions I took or, more importantly, refused to take. I had served my time with these people and had zero interest in extending my sentence. Selfish? Maybe. By that point, I viewed it as self-preservation. As the afterimages linger, I still do.

 

Of course, all that went dormant once my mother, with the luck of the damned, was safely ensconced in a new apartment, unscathed, after my sister had bolted home. But the same pattern predictably reestablished itself when my mother died two and half years later with the same predictable results.

 

My family life boils down to the instructions on a shampoo bottle: Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

But like waking from a nightmare, it’s hard to convey the emotional distress in words to where people who didn’t experience it can understand. As those who have read other of my essays and poetry about family life know, some of those family experiences contained existential threats.

 

That was just over a year ago, which brings me back to Elsa. Remember Elsa? This started as an essay about Elsa.

 

Elsa arrived just about a month after the anniversary of mother’s death, which saw all that lingering familial dread relived. So, when I saw the intensity forecasts bouncing up into a potential cat 3, I felt all the energy I’d recovered after Covid and the election drain, just like listening to that message during Kitten*Con. I felt completely exhausted. Knackered. Like I wanted to curl up and go sleep until it was all over. Wake me up when September ends. The same reaction I often had when I was a kid.

 

Which made me question why. As I said earlier, this wasn’t my first hurricane. Even after the parade of destruction that was 2004 and 2005, I’d still been able to joke about storms, as I did in Feeling Fay in 2008, or at least write about them as I did more seriously in Operation Skytrain after Dorian in 2019.

 

Even in 2011, as I stood at the same sliding glass door watching another tornado roll through the park behind the house after a lightning strike not 20 feet from my office window had dropped power and fried almost all my office equipment, I didn’t fold up. At that moment, Nyala and I (she was watching the slashing rain outside beside me) just looked at each other in shared a moment of connection I’ve rarely felt with any other individual, human or otherwise. I’m sure we both bore the same expression that said, “well mate, I think we’re fucked,” before turning back to watch events unfold. The remainder of that morning involved me, the Jeep, a payphone, an emergency call to my wife, and three Duke linemen sheltering in the lee between concrete buildings as they waited for the weather to clear so they could do their jobs staring at me being out in it like I’d lost my fucking mind. And that was after I’d waited for the worst of it to abate. Ah, good times. But I didn’t sit. I didn’t sleep. I seized what control I had and ran with it.

 

So, I began to question my creeping dread reaction to Elsa.

 

It took me a little self-reflection to untangle exactly what was going on. As with most PTSD (and I don’t use that term lightly), there were two things going on that in the course of events unfolding had become conflated in my mind. For those of you who have never experienced it, conflating two events is how psychological triggers work.

 

My mind had tangled up storms with family trauma from my experience with Irma. Because both shared a timeline and both generated a deep, instinctive, memorable, emotional response. You see the human mind isn’t particularly efficient or discriminating in how it processes information. In many ways it’s designed to deal with Darwinian situations of immediate, existential threat. So once an intense emotional response gets set, it becomes associated with anything and everything co-temporal, often focusing on the larger, more stressful event.

 

In this case, that meant storms had become synonymous with the running train wreck my family life had been in 2017 and again in 2020. Even after those situations were over and somewhat resolved, they still felt like they would never end. And they may not, or at least my reaction to them, as long as I’m alive.

 

So, Elsa triggered the existential dread of family trauma. Especially falling so close to the anniversary of my mother’s death, which was when very thoughtful and emotionally grounded friends decided that alcohol, albeit good alcohol, was the best solution they could offer other than a sympathetic ear. Because they had more than an inkling of how FUBARed the situation was, and they still haven’t heard the full story. But cognac, like a mother’s kisses, should be a salve for many wounds.

 

Some of you are probably saying to yourselves, yeah, well, duh. But piecing together that view is less intuitive and straightforward than you might imagine from the bottom of a well. Which is the other way triggers work. They release a set of intense hormones and emotions that by design scream for us to take immediate action without question in order to survive. We tend to get stuck when we question that reaction too closely, or when we feel, right or wrong, there are no good options left. Depression often stems from that damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Which easily leads to a psychological vapor lock until the knot gets untangled. If it ever does.

 

But a Nine Inch Nails Downward Spiral isn’t what I’m here to write about today. In reality, I don’t write about this stuff to help myself at all. I don’t always find it does, except maybe writing poetry. Even typing all this out has left me fearful, shaking, exhausted, and angry. I have been through this too many times before. The paths are well worn, the roadways sunken, the terrain fully mapped. Except maybe the blank spot ominously labeled Here Be Dragons.

 

No, I write in hopes I can capture something that someone else can relate to, and maybe use to improve their own situation however slightly.

 

A couple weeks ago, I ran across an article on feeling happier. Which is why I decided to write this essay rather than one of the two I’ve been threatening to get out for a while.

 

Normally, I don’t fall in with the Bobbie McFerrin don’t worry, be happy crowd (you’re welcome for that tune wedgie in your head). If others can sing Que Sera, Sera through the existential dread of an impending personal apocalypse, more power to them. It is not the way I’m wired. My head is more likely to echo either with Siegfried’s Funeral March or Men of Harlech.

 

But this was an NPR science article so not to be discounted right away. In it, the author pulled apart her own feeling of being trapped. In her case, much of her mental health decline was driven by the pandemic and its languishing isolation. A situation many of us can relate to.

 

Interestingly, the current research on reactions versus emotions has changed. Where we once thought that emotions drove reactions as a Darwinian survival mechanism, what we’ve found, counterintuitively, is that reactions actually drive emotions. Basically, your body reacts to certain stimuli instinctively by dumping a bunch of hormones into your system that drive other physical responses (like your eyes dilating, your heartbeat increasing, you sweating, etc.). Then your mind searches its memory database for an analogous situation so it can figure out the best emotional response.

 

As an example, the author cited that if you see a bear in the woods, you get an adrenaline dump to prepare you for what might come next, which isn’t limited to fight or flight (often bad and worse options with a bear). In reality your mind tries to put what just happened into emotional context. If you are an urban-dwelling hiker whose only experience with bears is hearing stories about people getting mauled, your mind will likely choose the emotion of fear. Whereas if you are hunting bear, your mind might choose excited anticipation.

 

This odd reversal of cause and effect offers a ray of hope. Because where we used to think something like fear was instinctive, beyond our control and thus almost impossible to fight, we now see it’s a contextual choice, albeit a lightning fast one. So, if you can change your experience database with a given situation, you may be able to change your emotions. Especially in situations where your mind might be conflating the stimuli from two different events, as was the case above.

 

All of which made intuitive sense to me as I pulled apart my experiences. I have a healthy respect for storms but do not yet fear them in and of themselves. I tend to see them as challenges, something to be survived (which might change with one more tornado interaction).

 

But interactions with my immediate family, and all their hidden traps and sliding doors, offer almost nothing but pain, so latching onto a set of emotions to keep them at a distance makes perfect sense. Confusing and conflating the two because of temporal coincidence does not. Ultimately changing either set of emotional responses requires changing that experiential database, or at least expanding and weighting the average by immediacy. Or at least separating them into neutral corners. As with bickering children, that is difficult but at least doable.

 

For me, that has been an ongoing process. Which started with remembering that I don’t have to do it anymore. My father has been dead for nearly a decade. My mother for just over a year. With each passing day, any of her machinations and bad decisions become more and more remote in their ability to affect me. And my sister, well, she’s a couple thousand miles away and running silent. She may be family but I don’t owe her and she doesn’t owe me. That equilibrium has existed since I was at least twenty, and perhaps as young as ten. I don’t see it changing, as for decades of constant updating, the experiential database has barely budged. Trust is a factor there, and trust, once broken, is extremely difficult to regain.

 

And so that thought of not having to do it anymore brings an immense wave of peace when I focus on it. That isn’t always in the middle of whatever reaction I am having, which just like the conflation of family trauma and storms often involves many sometimes-interlinked factors that need to be understood, acknowledged and pulled apart. Things like duty, responsibility, and my role as a man, a brother, a son, as well as self-preservation, physically (which has been an issue at times), mentally, emotionally and existentially (as in the way I’ve structured and live my life). All overlapped with memories as a child.

 

When I was in my 30s, I remember reading a set of science fiction novels that had an alien race whose memories were physiologically set in wax, which meant they were unstable and unreadable for a short period of time after an event occurred, as well as able to be erased and written over discretely. That was an interesting concept to me.

 

All memory of trauma, especially childhood memory, is somewhat unstable and even sketchy by design. The point of such memories is not objective, intellectual accuracy but compelling, actionable emotion. When the adrenaline and other hormones hit your blood, if the memory it triggers is sufficiently negative, especially existentially critical, your mind doesn’t want to dwell on parsing it; it wants you to react right away. Fight, flee, or freeze.

 

In 99% of the cases from which that trigger mechanism evolved, that is the exact right move for Darwinian survival. Let’s not intellectualize the motives of that predator lurking in the jungle by the river into some sort of empathetic context. “Fucking tiger! Don’t get out of the boat! Never get out of the boat!”

 

But in the complexities and vagaries of modern human society, that remaining 1% of evolutionary cases has increasingly taken over and now drives more and more of the strains upon our collective mental health. Including PTSD.

 

The thing about trauma (the T in PTSD) is that your mind gives you very little time to think about it while you are in the midst of it. It is only with time and reflection that any of it begins to make sense, kind of like the memory of the aliens in those books. And that only with the security that comes with enough distance, either physical or temporal, to allow you to feel safe enough to reengage that threat, if only through playing it out as a simulation, often by going over events again and again in your mind as you try to understand what actions, proactive or reactive, might have changed the outcome.

 

But in situations where you were powerless, or even just where you felt powerless, it is easy to get stuck in that churning reimagining, like a GIF constantly looping on your Facebook feed. Because there were no good options, nothing obvious or even subtle would have changed the outcome. Sometimes there were no real options at all. And sometimes you have to take on faith that just by surviving the encounter, you took the best or only actions you could have taken.

 

And yet, sometimes, with an investment of time and patience, you can pull apart the event from the trigger by reviewing events with a critical eye to understand them, not relive them. If you are very careful and very clever, you can sometimes defuse the trigger by reprogramming it. For many people, that requires professional guidance or at least advice. Don’t be afraid to use it.

 

In my case, it required recognition. I still don’t want to go through another Irma again. Next time, my wife and I will likely pack up the cats and leave. Or maybe move to somewhere that gets few storms (but perhaps more balanced seasons). Or maybe both at once. But that doesn’t mean I won’t watch the basin this season to see what impending storm might come up. Just when it does, I will try to treat it for what it is, not what it became associated with.

 

And by learning that, perhaps I will survive.

 

 

© 2021 Edward P. Morgan III