There are many paths to resilience, many routes in finding your way back to a semblance of peace when part of you has been collapsed. The depth of a wound can sometimes be seen visibly, and at other times not, yet the magnitude of such an impact can be so indiscriminately profound that it punctures life both permanently and fundamentally despite its visibility or lack thereof.
I often feel that critical pages in the book of my life were ripped out and burned. Not through a motive of my own, but externally without my consent, and much to my indignation as I would mature to understand the reasons behind why.
It’s a desirable mirage for me to leave those pages behind, to forget about them as easily as those who burned them. As willful as my intent to move forward unscathed, it unfolds that when something catastrophic occurs in objective reality, disintegrating the evidence and hushing those involved doesn’t reverse its occurrence, it protects the interests of those who fear its revelation. In my case, this only proved to exacerbate and prolong its impact on my life by multiples, merely collateral damage.
The chaos of sensitivity to initial conditions cascades the trajectory of any given orbit, and while our decisions and acts of will often interact with this ripple effect at various points in time, the effect remains permeated throughout iterations of our experience, moving through us and around us with an independent momentum all of its own.
While we can ascribe meaning and intent to the origin of this momentum, in time the momentum itself becomes agnostic in nature, neither a force of goodness or evil, just waves of continual matter to be reckoned with and acknowledged as new realities of life.
It’s safe to say that what I experienced was in part a statistical anomaly, a highly unlikely unfolding of events. While it was entangled in psychological ill will, with a stinging and repeated betrayal of human dignity, part of what made it so evasive is also due in part to the role of blind statistical improbability, which contributes to it being equal parts socially vacuous and contextually desolate.
While it wasn't my choice to burn the pages, life was exceedingly clear that the following chapters would occur in rapid succession. They would be embedded in the wake that followed, whether I was developed or mature enough to understand just how much magnitude both the event itself, and the organized denial of its existence maintained.
It’s taken the better part of two decades to fully unpack exactly what that meant for my life, how it would shape me as a person, and how coming to terms to re-write those burned pages would feed my soul at each new stage of life, with each stage getting closer to the wisdom that would have qualified me to handle what happened on October 10th, 2009.
Part of me wishes not to re-write those missing pages, in part because of their sheer medical complexity, of which many legitimate orthopedic doctors have misdiagnosed and struggled (failed) to wrap their head around. . Also in part due to their psychological complexity, the post traumatic stress I experience in making sense of the “community” associated with such events, an emotional charge which has thankfully lessened with time and wisdom. I think, however, the most pertinent of all resistance I feel in re-writing these pages lies in the very likely propensity to be misunderstood, given the unique nuances of the subculture I was involved with, and the alchemy of depraved and mentally ill personalities it took to create such a chaotic string of events that was my life.