A child learning for the first time of an impending divorce of his parents, says, “The hardest thing about the divorce is the loss of my school and my house. I have known this neighborhood my entire life.”
A war begins and a young family is uprooted. Due to the daily escalation of air assaults the mother and children pack up a few belongings and flee their city at nightfall. They say good-bye to their husband and father not knowing if they will see him again. He has been drafted in the army. In a matter of 72 hours everything that was predictable is ripped away from each of them.
Moving is Different from Exile
It is one thing to move. It is crushing to your soul if you are leaving a community you have established. But the dream of the unfolding community on your horizon can provide your heart a measure of solace. This is change. Yes, many people detest change. It is hard but it doesn’t strike the chord of alienation in the same way as exile does.
Each of the moves I have experienced during my 33 years of marriage has stirred up conflict with my husband. Are you sure? Do you really believe in our future plans? Are you sure we won’t be broke in a couple of months and lose everything?
Moving is hard on everyone. I only know a few people that move every two years. This pattern is neither right or wrong. I simply know that my psyche isn’t that fluid or open to change.
I am not sure how some folks are able to do this. Maybe it is a love of discovery. Maybe it is solving the puzzle of fixing up a place. I find moving to be a full time job with a thousand mental rabbit trails to chase.
I wonder if it might be a nomadic ancestry showing though. I find it interesting to think through, but, even frequent moving is not the same thing as exile. This is because of you have a plan that you can control and you have agency about the changes that you initiated.
We feel trauma when we lose agency over our body or our destiny.
A Medical Exile-- My Story
EXILE HAS A DESERT QUALITY
In July of 2021 I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I would have predicted that the days in early July would have been the hardest part of the experience. Actually it wasn’t. Why? Because I believed I had some agency about being on board with all of the treatments that the doctors had planned for me. I felt grateful it was discovered and on board with the treatment plan.
The more intense feelings came up from my depths during the forty days between hearing back from the biopsy and the phone call I received telling me that an operating room had been booked and my surgeons were set to begin the healing journey.
Why? I felt exiled from my familiar way of getting things done on behalf of my future. I felt exiled from a clean bill of health and stuck with the nightmare question of WHEN? I had been assigned a nurse with the title of “Navigator” but she didn’t have the power to set my surgery date! I was powerless.
and. . . .
what if the date is delayed week or months? I kept asking inside, “Are a cluster of catastrophic cells just being given the green light to multiply and spread?”
I wanted to have insight into my lymphatic system and the margins of where the cells had or had not moved.
The person in exile trauma is displaced from their familiar “normal” grounding in life and they deeply crave to be assimilated back into the life they had before. Therapists call this the “pre-injury state.”
When I couldn’t will myself back to the old normal this made my days of not knowing feel more like a water dripping tease of torture.
In the meantime I felt extreme alienation from others. That is a big feature of trauma. I saw healthy people going on about their business everyday and yet I was in a fear hangover most of the time.
Summary from my Story
1. EXILE (like physical traumas) IS SPATIALLY DISORIENTING
Was I lost in the stack of paperwork on a desk or in a scheduling app on a desktop computer? How do you cope with the inability to make long range plans?
2. MANY Exiles Feel Forgotten.
I knew my soul work was to wait and believe that I was cared for and sitting in the palm of God’s hand. It was a daily struggle to fight feeling forgotten and different from others. In the majority of situations people describe feeling cultural alienation.
3. There is shock. As Naomi Shahib Nye says in her poem. “Your future dissolves in a minute.”
4. As caregivers you can learn what kindness is by identifying with the myriad of ways that humans face trauma. We can do our interior work and evolve enough to say with the poet, “It is only kindness that makes any sense anymore.”
Kindness
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes any sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.
“Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye from Ten Poems to Open your Heart,
Exile is never lost/ you carry it with you/ you slip inside a folded labyrinth/ a desert/ it fits in your pocket.