Trauma and Sweatshirts
Trigger Warning: PTSD, Accident, Violence
I got a sweatshirt in the mail today.
It was delivered in a suitcase packed with a bunch of other clothing—about half my wardrobe. I’d left it all in Jerusalem when I came hastily back to America in March; I only brought the other half with me because I expected to return in a month. The pandemic stymied those plans, so for the past four months I’ve been missing half my belongings. I got them back today after using a special delivery service to send them back home to Chicago.
It was a relief to have the rest of my clothes back so I could stop cycling through the same seven T-shirts every week, but the sweatshirt I had to think about. I’d already been nervous for the previous week about what my reaction to seeing it would be. When I took a look in my suitcase today, it filled me with a sense of dread. Of foreboding. There was a feeling of gravity that occupied the room, weird and dark, that slipped in from what felt like another world, another time.
On December 22nd, 2019—the first night of Hanukkah—I was taking a bus to an engagement party of two friends that left from Jerusalem at about 6 PM. Near Ben Gurion airport, it crashed into a bus stop, whose concrete ceiling detached and smashed into the front-right of the bus, killing four people. I spent the next several minutes with two women at the front of the bus, and I took off both of the shirts I was wearing (a T-shirt and a button-down) to stop their bleeding. When I got off the bus, I grabbed the sweatshirt I had left at my seat in the back to cover myself. Because it was the only piece of clothing I wore that night that wasn’t covered in blood, it was also the only piece of clothing I kept. It was and is my only link to the accident.
Let me explain. Memory is the key element of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Trauma is an inability to process a memory or series of memories because it is too horrific, grotesque, violent, or simply big for the brain to fully apprehend. So instead of the memory becoming, precisely, a memory—a flowing river of images and sensations that you can observe safely from a distance, like a movie—it becomes a relived episode, an event that will not rest in the past and that will continually replay itself. The severity of these moments of replay—flashbacks—can vary depending on the prior sensitivities of the person and of the nature of the trauma. Some people have flashbacks as they’re typically and dramatically depicted in mainstream media, where they genuinely believe they’re back in Afghanistan, or their abusive childhood home. Others have sensory flashbacks, where they don’t lose their sense of time and place but they re-experience sounds and smells from the event. As for me, when I get them, I get emotional flashbacks: My emotional state mirrors what it was the night of the accident and I relive the very same (or, after certain forms of therapy, decreased level of) unprocessed horror, bewilderment, panic.
All of that is a pretty scientific understanding of memory’s relationship with trauma, but here’s what it feelslike. To me, it feels like the realm of the accident was literally not of this world. Because my brain was, until undergoing a special form of therapy, incapable of integrating my memories of the bus into my normal stream of memory, it felt like the place of the accident itself wasn’t integrated with the rest of reality. Like it was its own Place, with a capital ‘P,’ alien, outside, governed by different laws of reality or more probably by none at all. In that sense my experience of the trauma was almost mystical. In fact, I have seen people use the same term to describe their experience in EMDR therapy—stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, and it uses physiological processes and conversational tactics to help people integrate traumatic memories. The reintegration of memories neurologically actually feels like a reintegration of another reality into this one, like the darkness of a netherworld gets little by little cast away and enters the world we’re in everyday.
This way of thinking about trauma also helps explain why I find writing about it so cathartic (as well as challenging), and why I welcomed the opportunity to write about my experience here on this blog. What happened to me feels like it occurred in an Outside Place, with no law or meaning, but language is governed by meaning, sequence, grammar, storytelling. Writing in a very real way is a kind of therapy, one that creates a space for the chaotic to enter the everyday world, even a little bit.
As for my sweatshirt, it’s become a kind of mystical object. Like a child’s blankie kept into adulthood, it’s a relic from an otherworldly moment, and despite the nature of profound suffering and disintegration of this particular moment, it’s also defining and essential. On the one hand I want to forget and on the other I want nothing less. That’s the weird thing about memory. It gets tied up with questions of identity (in a very real way who we are might be nothing more than the conglomerate of our memories and how we feel about them), and when it comes to a topic so intense people will have a whole slew of responses. Some people are filled with regret and want nothing more than to eliminate memory, and some people cling to it toxically. As for me, I believe memory should be integrated—the past should stay in the past, and when it’s infiltrating the present, something’s wrong; but it should also stay in the past. It shouldn’t be ignored or swept away, it should take its seat as a meaningful determinant of who you are.
So I kept the sweatshirt.
Gavi Kutliroff lives in New York City, where he's looking for jobs in social work (he'll update this bio as soon as he's hired). A recent graduate of Brandeis University, he's also a musician, a poet, a Wikipedia enthusiast, and an avid fan of indie coming-of-age films. He believes in the value of a public, open discourse about mental health and in the power of writing and communication to help people understand each other and themselves.
