“I have trauma”, he said, while looking me straight in the eye. I anxiously shifted my legs and touched my ankle, as if it held a magic key to slow down the pace at which this conversation was moving. What I feared was about to happen: an emotional purge.

While my brain hurts trying to figure out how to engage in smalltalk - the other extreme where people immediately tell all their emotional baggage, always makes me a bit claustrophobic. Not because I don’t care. But because I fear that the lack of social awareness and boundaries with a stranger, easily spell emotional turbulence, should this go any further.

I have not shown this person that I am trustworthy or reliable yet. So this is not “special information”, because we trust each other. This is too much information too soon, perhaps he does this to everyone, or perhaps it is a strategy to bond fast.

In any case, I feel like I want to run, fast.

Instead I try to mimic that “yes, life is traumatic for us all at times”. Perhaps an awful response that downplays his trauma. I have no clue, what he has gone through, and now here I am trying to make him feel better by acknowledging trauma as a human condition - and that it’s okay. Who am I to tell him that what he has gone through is okay. I sigh and lean back. I just wanted a coffee, this is all too much, I think to myself. Is there just one reasonable, sane person left in this world. I catch my own reflection in the window - no, there are, in fact, no normal people left. I look over at him again and offer a hesitant smile, “so where were we…” And he continues on. On a quest to seek alignment, depth and reliability, perhaps. As we all crave. The problem is, we can’t force connection by sharing all our vulnerabilities up front with strangers. And when we crave a mate, we risk mistaking familiarity for connection.

We trauma-bond.

We share the pain we’ve gone through. This is past-sentence oriented - and if we want to create a future, we need to move beyond our pain. We need to stop looking for people, who can recognize our pain. We need to choose to completely transform into another form.

Like a caterpillar into a butterfly.

Not that the caterpillar is not an amazing, chubby little creation, but there comes a point, when it must fly away and find another butterfly, it cannot stay on the ground with the other caterpillars anymore. Imagine how scary it must be to suddenly be forced to fly, and you have always wriggled your way around on the ground. If you don’t fly now, someone is gonna eat you - and so is life. You cannot continue to stay at a level, which you have outgrown - it is not your place anymore.

You must transform into another form.

One which has yet to exist. One which feels wobbly. One where the future has yet to arrive. And the emotional vacuum we feel in the interim - we need to learn how to be with it. Most of us can’t - so we end up going back to exes or people who recognize our pain. And we stay stuck in old memories rather than creating new. What if we can transform into another person, where the pain no longer defines us. We have not forgotten it, but it is not our story anymore. We are so much more - and thus we must let go and walk, where we have never gone before. And we will need to walk alone in the beginning. And we will need to deal with the fear when nighttime falls. And when we feel that we are all alone, we must choose to be okay. We will be okay. This too shall pass. And the sun rises again, as it has done for eons.