A Trauma-Less 2025

For those of us who have deep concern, and on some days panic, over the results of the recent election and the continuation of democracy in the U.S. – and that should be everyone even though it is clearly not – 2024 was a traumatizing year.

Or retraumatizing, if you’re like me and most of my friends.

But not one without hope.

Counterintuitive, though those two thoughts might be.

Trauma has gotten a knee jerk eye roll response in recent years. As if an emotional response to a distressing event that causes you to feel unsafe, frightened or overwhelmed is an unreasonable one, or means a person is weak.

Or, heaven forbid, too woke.

It is neither. All it means is that you’ve had a personal reaction to a personal experience. Not everyone is traumatized in the same way or by the same thing. We might be able to agree on basic rules of extreme awfulness, nee trauma, that might occur but there can never be exact common ground on the effects it has on any one individual in its aftermath.

Similar as the human experience may be, we are ALL different. For me, the key has always been to accept the differences and try to find common ground in our shared humanness.

Easier said than done for me these days.

And most especially during the last two closing months of this year.

Ironically, this is where hope comes in.

And NO, not the Pollyanna/Kumbaya false hope you get from a random catch phrase on a social media post or Notesfromachair blog (Note: Though I suppose that could be a springboard to something…or even anything…positive). But the endurance, survival and likeminded human perseverance, and in turn victories, of those who have travelled this road before.

On Friday night I watched two end of the year Oscar contender films – A Real Pain and The Brutalist. Yes, it was a double feature of Holocaust-themed movie screeners this weekend because that’s the kind of gay, nice Jewish boy at heart type of guy living in 2024 that I am.

One of my dearest friends in the world, whose death several years ago still tears at my soul, grew up with Holocaust survivor parents and at one time shared with me that the thing about the Holocaust is that you can never compete with it. Meaning, to be a descendent of that traumatic tribe meant that it was likely not a thing, an event, or even moment in your life can ever be possibly as bad as what those people experienced.

That’s one of the reasons the subject comes up over and over and over again in art, in politics, in random discussions and, generally, in life. It’s a benchmark for evil, for badness and for the worst.

But the flip side of that is that it’s also an example of the best, the brightest, the strongest, the most clever and, when all else fails, the luckiest. A version of what can happen when rational thought makes one believe everything is stacked against you and there is NO winning.

Even survival could not be winning.

Except, of course, when it is.

A Real Pain poses the question of what parts and kinds of lives the descendants owe to the survivors. No spoilers at all ahead but the basic, deceptively simple story is of two male cousins – played to perfection by Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg, the latter of whom wrote and directed — who go to Poland to visit the home of their recently-deceased survivor grandmother. They grew up together but these days couldn’t be more drastically different. Yet, like so many of us, they are surprisingly, and very humanly, similar. It’s just that they’ve processed their lives, responsibilities and individual DNA leanings quite differently.

The film is funny, uncomfortable, a bit off and unceasingly, perhaps even a bit dis-satisfyingly, true. Which is what gives one hope while watching it. Somehow you get the idea that those existential questions that have periodically crept into your psyche and haunted you, equally do so to others who are similarly just getting by in those moments.

And you don’t need to have any familial relation to the BIG trauma to grab onto the small shards of hope offered to anyone trying to see some small rays of possibilities into 2025. Everyone is always grasping for straws through the big, the small and everywhere in between. We all are. And many of us manage to get through it, albeit in our own ways and with our costs.

I so wish my dear friend were here to see. And discuss.

As for The Brutalist, it is a more sweeping, epic look at a survivor’s life in America, a brilliant and very flawed architect and how he makes his way, and his mark, through the 1940s, 1950s and beyond as an unsavory yet revered, othered yet in-demand, disrespected yet, at times, surface-ly respected, IMMIGRANT.

Stating its “sweepiness” and “epic-ocity” is technically true but in all honesty it is equally false. It is, in fact, quite familiar a story of today in terms of tolerance, fame, trauma, American exceptionalism/non-exceptionalism and, most of all, love. Of many kinds.

But more than anything of oneself and why that particular emotion is so difficult for any one of us given our varied sets of experiences, nee traumas.

Let’s not say anything more than that except to marvel both at Adrien Brody’s key central performance and how a film can simultaneously be so obtuse and yet so ultimately crystal clear all at the same time. With his famed and boldly prominent nose (Note: The ONLY stereotypical Jewish calling card I happened not to get), not to mention his thick European accent and intense intellectual swagger, this character’s “otherness” in that period of time enters the room practically before he does.

What would make him charismatic and riveting today are merely passing social oddities in the United States during the time that he lived. Much in the way particular features today define people as exotic others within their individual ethnicities in 2024. As I joked with one of my trans students privately (Note: Who would not mind me sharing this), it’s the luck of the draw who gets THE golden ticket of otherness every five years.

Too often in America, Black people had it, only to drop to the #2 spot, and then get it tossed back to them. Gay men had it for a while in the 80s. Non-white skinned immigrants had it from 2016-2020, only to drop down a tad and get it back again during election season. Though this year the Trans community seems to have captured the top spot beside them, for however long that lasts. Hopefully not four years.

None of it means anything, except that it means everything.

Which explains why in the world of The Brutalist it’s not so much that Mr. Brody’s famed and fictional architect survived the Holocaust but how he lived to make it through America in such an admirably flawed and particularly prominent way, that intrigued me.

And gave me hope into 2025.

Though who am I except a gay, Jewish man, of a certain age, with a small nose.

Happy New Year everyone.

And remember to laugh.

Violet Orlandi – “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”

02.21.21

by notesfromachair

History Repeats and… It’s a Sin

HBO Max’s It’s A Sin is a new five-part limited series about a group of gay men and their friends in Great Britain who lived and sometimes died during the HIV/AIDS crisis from 1981-1991. It is a critical hit and a must see.

Nevertheless, as a gay man who lived through it in the US, but didn’t die, it was the last thing I wanted to see or be reminded of during these pandemic days.

And yet…it was the first thing I began watching the very moment it dropped here in the States this week.

Why?

Well, many reasons. But the best that I could come up with is this begrudgingly timeless quote from an author long ago.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

—William Faulkner, 1940

Writer extraordinaire William Faulkner first gave us those words in a short story he published in Harper’s in 1940.

They have since been quoted many times, most recently by both Barack Obama and Peggy Noonan in an attempt to address the issue of racism in the late aughts, and will no doubt be referred to many more times over.

Perhaps you prefer it in one of these standard internet formats

As a writer for none other than the Hindustan Times explained to us just three years ago, Faulkner’s words remain particularly prophetic because the past inevitably seeps into our present, informs it, even has a bearing on our future. The past cannot be wished away; neither can it be denied.

I would add this is the case no matter how expert we are at pretending and no matter how determined we are to move forward. The past, and its lessons, will ALWAYS resurface, whether you want to recognize them or not, and at times and in places you least expect it.

To not acknowledge it, learn from it, and at times live with it as you go on, is to be doomed – as too many countless others have warned – to repeat it.

How cliché. And yet, how undeniably true.

Take it from someone who is alive and well and just qualified to receive a Covid-19 vaccine.

Denial is a big part of It’s A Sin, but so is celebration and joyousness. Watching it reminded me that despite all my protestations to the contrary, those times were not solely tragic and funereal, colored forever in doom, gloom and sores of every type imaginable.

In fact and to its credit, none of the characters in this series are any ONE thing, and that goes not only for the young friends in their twenties at the prime of their lives but those middle-aged, older and even younger.

They are all a result of how they’ve allowed their experiences to shape them, the ways in which they choose to forge ahead or remain stagnant, and the harshness with which they treat not only others, but themselves.

How they existed and what they did back then is particularly resonant because of the harrowing drama of those times.

But as we all now sit in our homes (Note: Or wander freely), masked or maskless, hopeful, scared or bitter deep into our very cores for the future, it’s hard not to see our times as still yet another variance of their times.

Every decade has its costs and its joys and, if we’re lucky enough, we get to live through each to the next and adjust accordingly.

No one is saying denial doesn’t work in limited doses. I, for one, would have never sat down and written an original screenplay many decades ago that got bought and made had I accepted the true odds of that ever happening to a novice like me writing about the subject matter I chose to write about at that time.

Indeed, sometimes the only way forward is to defiantly block the facts in order to springboard you into defying the odds.

We humans all do this to some success and to some extent. However, experience also tells you (note: okay, ME) that this can’t be your ONLY strategy. Inventing your own reality means you also may be blind to the crumbling of the world around you with the thought your alternative world and your alternative facts will protect you.

Sadly, it’s not so. Not in the AIDS era of the 1980s, not in the latest pandemic era of the 2020s. Not even in the Deep South 1940 of Faulkner’s times.

The key is to be observant enough to acknowledge the cracks and take action before the crumbling starts. Patch it, consult an expert about re-cementing or entirely knock down the walls you think you smartly built before it’s too late.

All this construction has me longing for HGTV

Yeah, right, who wants to do that? But in doing so you might even let in those ideas or persons you banished to the outside and find out for sure if you were right or wrong about them all along. Imagine if you realized you were ignorant, selfish, misguided or had even misjudged while you still had time to do something about it?

This was the story of those five Londoners and their families in It’s A Sin just as it is the story of our survival in the midst of the worldwide pandemic we are now continuing to barely live through.

Any type of pandemic, much like any armed insurrection, is not any one person’s fault. Even if the worst, most xenophobic tropes were true and it was proven that a Chinese lab mistakenly unleashed CoVid-19 to the world and purposefully covered it up, that still couldn’t be blamed for the degree of medical severity we are now experiencing.

The politicization of masks, choosing economics and widely opening back up too soon over quarantining, turning our backs on our most vulnerable (note: essential workers, the poor, the non-Whites) and willingly letting them die early on and perhaps inadvertently become super spreaders through no fault of their own; a decided lack of interest in recent years of top international leaders to operate as a true global community and closely work together to ensure our mutual survival – arguably ALL explain the basic shutdown of the world as we once knew it.

Meaning, a virus, is a virus, is a virus. And people, are people, and continue to be, people.

All the homophobia, limited thinking and personal wall building and/or destroying won’t change the facts or the outcome once the stark realities of life has its way with you. Or us.

History is, at its best, a colorful kaleidoscope. But it isn’t always reliably pretty.

What it is is reliably prescient.

“History Repeating” – Shirley Bassey

Check out the Chair’s newest project, Pod From a Chair , now available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!

https://open.spotify.com/show/0RZiBJNbiYqRpp8LrzcWkm

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: survival

A Trauma-Less 2025

History Repeats and… It’s a Sin