The Return, In Three Acts
It’s probably testament to how much I dislike myself that I hate large groups of people who share my interests. Is there anything more annoying than a group of Disney adults? Possibly only musical theatre adults, or people who play Dungeons and Dragons, or non-monogamous queers who smugly tell you they ‘just don’t think they could do monogamy again’.
Most of all, I hate spending time in groups like this, groups of traumatised people. Arranged in a semi-circle around our tutor, we’re here to learn the art of processing our trauma through writing. This workshop marries together my two current obsessions—writing and thinking about trauma. And really a third, talking about myself.
We’re mostly white, middle-aged, presumably middle-class, women. We are asked to describe who we are and what brought us here, to a partner who will relay it back to the class. Each of us dutifully repeat back what we’ve been told about the other, although I am introduced as a psychologist interested in trauma. Which is broadly true, but I worry it makes me seem like a spectator. ‘Don’t worry,’ I want to say, ‘I’m fucked up just like you!’
Next, we watch a slideshow of the tutor’s own traumatic experiences, I assume so we can be assured that he has also, for lack of more eloquent words, gone through some shit. I can already feel myself getting ungenerously frustrated as a few participants ask a series of unrelated questions. “What do you think about the ethics of writing memoir?” “How do we get an agent?” I have a friend here, and we raise our eyebrows at each other—we just want to start writing. Finally, we arrive at the culmination of the slideshow, the framework we will be using to tell our trauma stories—the hero’s journey.
DRAMATIS PERSONNAE
WOMAN ONE: Mid-twenties to early-thirties. Ingenue-type, earnest, talks too much.
WOMAN TWO: Same age as WOMAN ONE. Self-assured.
BACKGROUND CHARACTERS: Assorted individuals, office workers, commuters, a therapist. They’re not so important.
SCENE ONE: THE ORDINARY WORLD
STAGE BLACK. INT. THE APARTMENT
LIGHTS UP.
The Apartment is in disarray. Boxes are stacked against the walls.
We begin to hear the first thrums of our first song, a classic ‘I want’ number.
Woman One ENTERS. She paces through the Apartment. She stops and looks around. A smile breaks across her face.
WOMAN ONE:
(sung) I wish…
In his 1949 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell lays out “the hero’s journey,” a universal storytelling tradition that supposedly exists across cultures. The journey starts in the Ordinary World, before a call to adventure pushes our hero across the threshold into the Special World, a place where the hero undergoes a series of trials and ordeals, finally emerging forever changed.
During the workshop, the hero’s journey is supposed to represent post-traumatic growth. The flipside of post-traumatic stress, post-traumatic growth is the process of emerging wiser, kinder, and stronger after a terrible event. The idea that suffering can lead to personal growth is not a new one, and it’s certainly an attractive one, but I find myself bristling at the concept.
“You can get started,” the instructor says, and immediately I hear the scratching of pens on paper. We’ve been asked to think about our own transitions from the Ordinary World to the Special World. I’m stuck. I try to cast my mind back to the late-twenties version of me that stumbled across the threshold into the Special World.
Really, I was pushed.
SCENE TWO: THE THRESHOLD
INT. THE APARTMENT. LATER.
The two women ENTER. They are both drunk. They stumble into the hallway, giggling.
WOMAN TWO:
You are so hot.
WOMAN ONE:
Wait, we probably shouldn’t…
WOMAN TWO:
(she pulls Woman One towards the bedroom)
Come on!
WOMAN ONE:
Wait!
The bedroom door CLOSES. We can’t see the two women now, but the ORCHESTRA begins to play. We hear a series of crescendoing, discordant chords, culminating in a final, painful blast of sound.
LIGHTS OUT.
I make an honest attempt at the exercise. It’s ironic that as a psychologist, I find my interiority almost impossible to parse. There are long stretches of time in my life that don’t stand out to me at all. I’m only able to retrieve whatever thing I was really into at the time. And for close to a decade in my Ordinary World, I was completely consumed by a love of musical theatre.
There’s something naïve about musical theatre. Musicals follow a comfortingly familiar structure, not unlike the Hero’s Journey; our lead tells us in a sung monologue what they’re searching for (“I Want”), followed by the inciting incident, the eleven o’clock number, the finale. The characters’ emotions are always big, and comprehensible because they sing about them, something that I love, but others tell me is kind of cringe.
My favourite musical is Into the Woods. Years ago, my ex-boyfriend and I would argue about the true meaning of Into the Woods. Truthfully, we argued frequently, but musicals were always a low-stakes way to hash out our vastly different beliefs about the world. He insisted it was literally what it appears to be on the cover—a cute yet dark retelling of several fairy tales including “Rapunzel,” “Cinderella,” and “Jack and the Beanstalk.”
I always maintained, in all my wannabe-English-major confidence, that Into the Woods is really a metaphor for life. The titular woods are, at least. More specifically, the woods are a metaphor for life’s difficult periods that we must traverse every now and then. I could talk for hours about the recurring motif of the ‘woods,” and how the characters move from optimism (“into the woods to get my wish, I don’t care how, the task is set”) to a short-lived happy-ever-after, to resignation (“it's always when you think at last you're through, and then into the woods you go again”).
I don’t love musicals as much, now.
SCENE THREE: THE SPECIAL WORLD
INT. AN OFFICE. THE NEXT DAY.
Woman One ENTERS. She walks as though still half asleep. There’s a buzzing in the air, of office conversation, of fluorescent lights.
BACKGROUND CHARACTER ONE:
You’re here! It’s almost ten! Big night, huh?
WOMAN ONE:
Oh, you know. (she tries to laugh)
BACKGROUND CHARACTER ONE:
Hey, are you feeling alright?
WOMAN ONE:
(she rubs self-consciously at her chin, there is the ghost of a bruise there) Yeah.
Other Background Characters ENTER. Music swells as the ENSEMBLE start to sing. They greet each other, chat about the Christmas party the day before, their weekend plans.
Woman One approaches the front of the stage. She looks out at the audience. She opens her mouth to sing, but nothing comes out.
Post-traumatic growth has been studied since the 1980s, when noteworthy positive changes were seen after trauma in bereaved adults, sexual assault survivors, and veterans.¹ A review of a few dozen studies reported that thirty to seventy per cent of individuals report a positive change after trauma.² The biggest limitation in the research is that it relies almost entirely on retrospective self-report data. That is, it relies on individuals who have experienced trauma reporting on who they were before the event, and how they’ve changed since. It turns out that perceived growth correlates only weakly with actual growth,¹ that is to say, the changes are illusory. A story we tell as a way of making ourselves feel better.
There’s a big part of me that wants to believe uncritically in post-traumatic growth and my own “hero’s journey” to a better me. I want to believe there’s a reason why I went through what I did, and that I emerged through the other side changed for the better.
In some ways, trauma probably did make me into a better person, but in some ways, it also made me worse. Maybe I am more compassionate now. But trauma also made me cynical, less patient, more hard. Ultimately, I’ll never know if I’m a better person now because I never got to meet the other version of myself. It’s also not lost on me that it doesn’t account for people who experienced trauma at an age before they could verbalise it, or people who are never going to emerge from the Special World armed with lessons because they’re living with something permanently traumatising.
Back in class, twenty minutes pass. We’re asked to share our experiences of the writing exercise, but it feels like we’re competing rather than coming together. It’s always like this. Just about every trauma sharing circle I’ve been a part of becomes a competition of who experienced it the worst, because one person went through it younger, or another did it alone, or someone else had it happen over a longer period. It’s like we’re all auditioning to be the main character in the stupidest musical of all time—“look at me, I can tap dance,” “look at me, I can belt a C5,” “look at me, sometimes I lie awake at night wondering if I’ll ever feel normal again.”
I get it. A certain amount of Main Character Syndrome is normal, I think. Who hasn’t sat on a bus watching the rain drizzle down the window, listening to a melancholy song and imagining that we are the main character in a movie? The reason that groups of people with trauma can be so annoying is because we are all trying to heal in a society that wants us to shut up and fix ourselves quickly so we can go back to being productive members of the workforce—capitalism wants us to process our trauma within a tight three-act structure.
With all our jumping up and down, high kicks, leaps, we are just trying to figure out how to make the audience finally witness us. But no one is listening, because we all feel just as traumatised as each other. After all, if I’m the Hero of this story, why should I be stuck listening to someone else?
SCENE FOUR: THE SPECIAL WORLD TWO
EXT. DAYTIME.
LIGHTS FADE UP. The SCENE is already in motion. There is a whirl of activity around Woman One.
WOMAN ONE:
I–
BACKGROUND CHARACTER ONE:
Maybe she just didn’t know how to tell you what she wanted.
WOMAN ONE:
But I–
BACKGROUND CHARACTER TWO:
If she were a man it would have been assault.
WOMAN ONE:
I–
BACKGROUND CHARACTER THREE:
Are you sure it happened like that?
Throughout this scene Woman Two watches from UPSTAGE. At times, she should loom over the scene. No one else seems to notice her, but Woman One is always aware of her presence.
After the workshop, my friend and I hover by our cars, swapping our impressions. She asks me what I wrote about and I make a face.
“I didn’t really follow the exercise,” I say. “I mostly just wrote down all the problems I had with the premise. Didn’t you think it was a bit… fucking ridiculous?”
She laughs, “Yeah, I don’t know. I kind of found it helpful.”
There is a song towards the end of Into the Woods that never fails to bring me to tears. There are only four characters left by this point in the show, beaten down after various betrayals, having watched loved ones die, their homes in ruins. In preceding scenes, they fruitlessly try to find someone to blame for the events of the second act. Finally, they reach a clearing, and a song begins.
Mother cannot guide you
Now you're on your own
Only me beside you
Still, you're not alone
No one is alone, truly
No one is alone
I once tried explaining “No One is Alone” to that same ex-boyfriend. Yes, sometimes people leave us, sometimes people (including ourselves) make mistakes. But the biggest mistake is to assume that we truly are alone. There is a duality to what the song means by this. Not only does it mean that others will always be there for us, but it also highlights what we owe to each other.
I love that Into the Woods, ultimately a subversion of fairy tales and neat little hero’s journeys, ends with this message. The final time we revisit the woods motif, we move away from individualistic wishes to a message of collectivism. The characters acknowledge they might have to travel back to the woods every now and then, but “now there’s you, me, her, and him.”
Experiencing trauma is in itself isolating, and we tend to do treatment alone. One of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder is feeling detached and cut off from the rest of humanity. When I finally sought treatment for my own trauma, I would disappear from my housemates for half an hour every night for weeks, listening to my recorded voice recount my story again and again.
During this process, my pre-existing belief that I am somehow fundamentally different (more annoying, less fun) to others, set apart from the rest of the world, was only confirmed. But that was just the trauma talking. While it feels like I’m unique in my trauma, the truth, unfortunately, is that I’m very much not remotely special. And while that does sting a little, there is a lot of comfort in that.
Months after the writing workshop, or perhaps months before, I sing “No One is Alone” as part of a choir. It’s World AIDS Day, and we’ve been invited to sing for families who have lost loved ones to HIV/AIDS. This community hall feels like a church of sorts. We, the choir members and our audience, are all crying, or trying not to cry, and I have to take my eyes off our tear-brimmed conductor to get through the song. It’s here, surrounded by painstakingly and lovingly stitched quilts, that I truly appreciate the lyrics.
SCENE FIVE: THE ORDINARY WORLD?
LIGHTS UP ON A BARE STAGE.
Woman One MOVES to centre-stage. She opens her mouth as if to sing, but closes it again. As she does this, the Background Characters FILE onto stage, forming a line upstage. Woman One turns to look at them. With a final glance at the AUDIENCE, Woman One MOVES to join the line of Background Characters. They make space for her.
Woman One starts to SMILE faintly, as the CURTAIN falls.
References
1 Joseph, Stephen, and Butler, Lisa D. ‘Positive changes following adversity’. PTSD Research Quarterly, 21.3 (2010).
2 Linley, P. Alex, and Joseph, Stephen. ‘Positive change following trauma and adversity: A review’. Journal of traumatic stress: official publication of the international society for traumatic stress studies, 17.1 (2004): 11-21.
