I am scared. So scared. I want to be unshackled from it. I want to be able to see the storm before it hits. I want to steer safely from it rather than be forced to skim the salvage from the aftermath.

For most children, the only bridge falling down is in London. For mine, it hits a lot closer to home. That red car was Daddy’s.

A short-story memoir I wrote while attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1990s. The topic delves into the most significant trauma my family endured prior to the bridge collapse, my mother’s rape. It touches on many of the same elements that I and others have experienced with trauma and PTSD, and the hope and beauty that can eventually bud from the experience.

I definitely feel I’m at a crossroads. There is a sea of untracked snow in front of me, waiting for my imprint. I welcome that and want to seize new opportunities, armed with the insights I have acquired along with the battle scars of the past few years.

I realized that the mirror maze was a metaphor for what real life has been like for me with PTSD: the frustration, the propensity to freeze and the fact that the major obstacle in all of this is me.  My counselor and I have been trying to get to the root of things for a very long time, and we have been using Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) to help get me to the maze’s end. The goal of EMDR is to create new adaptive coping strategies to replace the former ones broken by trauma.

Cope keeps one in his or her current situation. Change brings about, well, change. I’ve done a lot of coping in my life, but I’ve recently realized it has prevented a lot of change from happening.

My relative and I found mutual agreement on the following: our family is bizarre, we are the fruit of our family, and that spoiled experiences do not necessarily yield spoiled fruit. The discussion for me was juicy – not in that I found any delight in the traumas of family members but in that peeling back the layers and deconstructing the family dynamic some truths seemed to unfold.

I have realized that black and white is as much a myth as Middle East peace. It’s all gray. We float through relativism. Absolute truth is a quest diverted by the gray.

I have two choices: I can do nothing, and continue to cope as I always have and sacrifice close relationships in exchange for comfortability in distance. Or, I can “get uncomfortable,” so to speak, and start unweaving love and trauma.

I wasn’t going to let it get to me. In fact, I had hardly even thought about it for most of the day until I had to plan my route from Andover to Oakdale in evening rush hour traffic to retrieve my souvenir from the 35W Bridge collapse. It would be just another errand, a stop at the bank, a gallon of milk from Kwik Trip. But it wasn’t.

Infrequent ruptures aren’t limited to volcanic landscapes. They happen to PTSD survivors as well. Instead of magma, we protrude a sudden rush of emotion like a bursting Yellowstone geyser.

My father’s Thermos normally accompanied a cigarette, and as a child I surmised that these were props used by men. If you were going to be a man, you needed a Thermos.

One thing I have noticed lately is that the more I talk about mental health disorders and counseling, the more people around me open up about their own issues.

As someone who has dealt with several traumas it’s no wonder that the dam burst for me and my coping strategies when the bridge plummeted. It’s been a long climb, recovering from a massive brain injury, processing the whole event and relearning how to cope.