The Haggadah demands each year

That we see ourselves

As having personally been

Redeemed.

That we each feel as though

With an outstretched arm

And a mighty hand

The Lord our G-d

Took us out of slavery in Egypt

And delivered us to freedom.

Hard-won, hard-fought freedom.

It is supposed to be real and present,

Not just a story to tell each spring.

But here’s the funny thing.

To the traumatized mind,

It is eternally Egypt.

To the traumatized mind,

That fight is more real and present

Than the matzo and the wine.

We take turns around the table

Sharing an oral history lesson

From several millennia ago,

One with many points that

Hit home today.

We celebrate our freedom,

Our exodus from Egypt.

But somewhere,

In the dark recesses of my brain,

I’ve never left.

~~~~

No one talks enough about how hard the traumatized mind has to work to make sense of and maintain functionality in the present. It’s an experience where all senses are on overdrive, but only in reverse. The crucible of your trauma becomes more real than reality. You are haunted by phantoms who have become so present for you, that making your way in the real world feels much more like walking among phantoms instead. Before long, you struggle to find anything to grip that can properly ground you. Before long, you begin to fear you have become a phantom yourself, that no one can or will ever see you properly. You yourself have certainly lost that ability, because you can’t see anything anymore except in the rear view mirror which you mistake for the windshield.

The traumatized mind is an Egyptian desert, its crossing perilous and arduous. Sometimes I fear that I will spend my entire life wandering in it, praying for redemption, dreaming of the Promised Land, but finding only endless pain.

There’s a passage, shared just below, that can be found in the prayer books we use at my temple, and it was the inspiration for my writing today. It struck me as so akin to the lost, stuck feelings that I experience in trying to cope with C-PTSD, and with Passover coming up in just over a week, I’ve been very contemplative about this concept lately. (I’ve also been reading a novel this week set during WWI, which toes the line between historical fiction and fantasy, and explores both PTSD and phantasmagoric experiences in tandem, so I’m sure that’s been a contributing factor to my mindset.)

“Standing on the parted shores of history, we still believe what we were taught before we ever stood at Sinai’s foot: that wherever we go, it is eternally Egypt; that there is a better place, a promised land; that the winding way to that promise passes through the wilderness.” (Michael Walzer, adapted in Mishkan T’filah: A Reform Siddur, CCAR 2009)

Eternally Egypt, indeed.

I don’t want to turn this into a post about finding solutions to this feeling, because right now I think the best solution for me is to give the feeling time and space. However, I would feel remiss if I didn’t share the last bit of the quote from Mishkan T’filah, which I will provide without commentary. Make of it what you will (the best of it that you can, I hope):

“That there is no way to get from here to there, except by joining hands, marching together.”