Circus & Trauma Anthology Submission (Patreon)

Hey hey,

So, since I'm a masochist who over-commits to different projects due in equal parts to unmitigated excitement, self-employed-artist hustle fears of doors closing if you don't charge through every single available one, and crushing existential angst that life is short, earlier this summer I boldly pitched myself as a good candidate for submitting a chapter of 4000 to 7000 words to an anthology collection centring around the intersection of circus and trauma.

The editors of that soon-to-be anthology emailed me at the end of October inviting me to submit an early-bird essay by December 15th for consideration. So I've been tearing my hair out writing trying to write this while also wrangling the VacBook's early stages of creation.

I've currently got my draft sitting pretty at 7074 words; I'll go through it with an axe tomorrow and hack away at uselessly frilly phrases and tidy things up.

I wanted to share the final section of what I wrote with you all for some short notice feedback, though, if you feel so inclined ('short notice' because, well, it's due on the 15th lol). This section caps off my review of the start of my circus/contortion career with a wider look at the ways trauma is present, maintained, reinforced, or valued in different artistic industries- the 'romanticization of trauma'. I'm talking about circus arts, but this absolutely applies to most other arts-industry related fields that come to mind.

Small disclaimer, there's about 5,500 words preceding this section where I share some of the life experiences I've gone through, and talk a bit about trauma-based therapy approaches, the neuropsychology of trauma, and fun things like that.  I've grounded my use of words like 'dysregulation' and references to the nervous system and its role in trauma with citations and references in the preceding material. So - there's a paragraph or two in the following that likely will feel a bit odd to read, without the context of the full thing.

There's nothing in here that directly refers to any upsetting events, so I don't think any content/trigger warnings are needed here.


I'd love some feedback on...

• If you think we might create some better flow with swapping any paragraphs around, or if anything feels a bit repetitive or unneeded.
  
• My working title at the moment is "The Flexibility of Trauma". What do you think?
  
• Does the ending feel a bit abrupt? and;
  
• If nothing comes to mind specifically going through this in regards to the structure of the writing (or the title, hehe), I'd love to know if it causes any thoughts or reflections to spring up in your minds.
  
  With deep gratitude & appreciation,
  
  XO

ess


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Deeply traumatized people are some of the most incredible artists I know.

There is a pervasive belief that great art comes from suffering - but it isn’t trauma itself that innately makes someone a better artist, or gives them a deep well to draw from that less traumatized people somehow don’t have. To the contrary, artists that haven't found ways to process the way that trauma is stored in their bodies (e.g. through a somatic/movement practice, like circus) don't often successfully create anything: too much bandwidth is taken up by the dysregulation cycle. So when I say "deeply traumatized people are some of the best artists I know", I'm thinking about my peers who have worked to process their trauma (in a professional setting, through personal work, whatever it may be), because the process of doing so mirrors aspects of the creative process.

Creating art can be painfully boring. We mistake the exciting catharsis of experiencing art that resonates with us, with the process itself. It’s all fun and games with the first spark of an idea: we get that creative rush and ride that high until the first shivers of frustration set in, a roadblock appears, and we begin to doubt ourselves. Getting to the finish line of any creative endeavour requires far more slogging than the popular narratives would lead us to believe.  Getting to a ‘finish’ line where trauma-related nervous system dysregulation no longer dominates our lives is also far more of a slog than we’d like it to be.

My interest in trauma stems more from the ways that humans find ways to be resilient and adaptable, not that the presence of trauma is necessary to create true, deep, or meaningful art.  We don’t need to be fucked up to make great things, or meaningful things. The true, deep talent of an artist is the ability to feel things deeply, and to translate those ineffable things into other ‘languages’ so that other people in the world might connect with it, too. Feeling things deeply might be a precursor to, or byproduct of, trauma - but trauma itself is not the important part.

When we talk about ways to resolve traumatic experiences, one kind of language that we hear often is “overcoming” language: we ‘overcome’ our trauma; we ‘triumph’ over loss. It’s ‘inspirational’ if we are successful. We use words like ‘hero’ and ‘brave’. The other way that we commonly discuss trauma is as an unwelcome tag-along: a monkey on our backs that darkens our bright moments, startles us into hypervigilance at innocuous sounds, warps and distorts our experience of the people and events around us.

What I don’t see being discussed as commonly is a consideration of trauma that builds on an understanding of its fallout in our lives as a tool of self-preservation, like my counsellor suggested to me so many years ago: a consideration of trauma as a phenomenon that can be translated negatively or positively onto the moments of our lives that follow its arrival.

The stereotype of the ‘tortured artist’ is a romantic interpretation of trauma that persists in many artistic industries and communities. While what I’ve shared here is a small piece of how my experiences with trauma factored into the earliest stages of my circus career, there is a vast and ever-expanding way that it is present in my life and my work as an artist, in my professional performing career, and in my research and creation. It would be easy to read the above and draw the not-uncommon conclusion that my ability to create and share my work in the ways that I do are in part from the ‘magic fairy dust’ of my accumulated trauma, suffering, and loss. This, however, could not be further from the way that I actually think about and value the presence of trauma in my life.  

I used to believe that ‘helping myself’ was something that would always come at the expense of my creativity; that whatever deep, dark, self-loathing unpleasantness I nurtured within myself was innately tied to my ability to be a creative, to be an artist. The funny part of it all is, while I did make art and maintain creative practices during my most deeply traumatized years, that work is far from what I consider my best. My work from that period does not have the same meaning, depth, or value that I consider my current work to have.

The ways that the arts romanticize trauma as a badge of honour, or part of the process, or a necessary evil, is detrimental and limiting. It also perpetuates the idea that we need our trauma to create. We cannot change the past, and we cannot change what has happened to any of us. At the risk of sounding trite, what matters is what we do with it.

Romanticizing trauma does little except reinforce damaging falsehoods about the nature of creativity and connection. It reinforces the idea that not taking care of ourselves - starving ourselves, hurting ourselves, hating ourselves - is part and parcel of being an artist. In the world of performing arts, these become compounded in troubling ways once they start interacting with equally damaging industry standards around what physical aesthetics are desirable or necessary (like slender bodies), what behaviours can or should be tolerated from directors, casting agents, or other artists (like demeaning or abusive language, or volatile behaviour). It is tolerated because these are considered the hallmarks of the savant, the genius, or the auteur. It’s bullshit. Performing arts knows that there’s magic in trauma, but the part that we celebrate is the wrong mechanism.

I felt a desperation when I was younger and in the thick of all those experiences that I would never ‘get better’, or ‘get past’ them. There was a panic that this trauma that I had experienced, was experiencing, would continue to experience, was going to ‘ruin’ me and turn me into a different person. And it did. I’m a different person than I would be if none of the above had ever happened to me. But I’m not convinced that that is an inherently bad thing or an inherently good thing. Staying with my trauma and holding onto those narratives as either tragedies or heroically surmounted obstacles is something that kept me trapped in dysregulation and discontent. I don’t try to pretend that the things that have happened to me didn’t happen; I also don’t repeat the narratives to myself anymore hoping to find meaning in them, or a reason why they happened.

Instead, I find value in, and argue for, something that I'll call "trauma neutrality".  Similarly to the evolution of some facets of the the body positivity movement being challenged with calls for ‘body neutrality’, ‘trauma neutrality’ removes the false values that can arise from fixating on it. Instead, thinking of trauma with neutrality might allow us to treat it as a calm, unaligned fact. Instead of rejecting trauma and dissociating from it further, and instead of holding it up on a pedestal and perpetuating our own dysregulation, we could just … let it be.

Learning about trauma and the ways that it might help me make sense of my life experiences and myself didn’t give me the clear answers that I had craved and pursued doggedly through the years. What it did do was help me learn to become capable of living with the uncertainty of it all - and accept that I’d never have clear answers.

Circus arts and contortion provided movement that asked me to connect my body with my brain in a slow, intentional, and methodical way - a somatic practice - and helped me learn that the ‘answer’ isn’t the important part. It’s learning how to live with it, thrive with it, work with it, show it compassion. We might consider the ways that trauma may be translated to serve us and our goals in a way that furthers our ambitions, improves our quality of life and ability to enjoy the small wins, and lets us keep moving. Like everything else in life, it can be employed as a tool. Inadvertently, that’s exactly what I did to find myself where I find myself today in my circus and contortion career.