Member-only story
Choices — Exchange the Cart
I went to Walmart yesterday for a few things. I had a bad day at work, and my trauma was showing, but I kept it to myself. Trauma survivors are good at that — pretending we’re ok when we’re not. I walked into the store in a fog with my mental list of things to get, determined to fight the want to stay home under the covers binging Netflix, like I had done the hour before. I will go. I will fight. I will not let the past win today. I forgot my shopping bags, as NJ is now a bring-your-own-bag state, this added to my discord. Goddamn trauma-induced sloggy brain. I grabbed a shopping cart and started to push. The cart pulled to one side, how annoying, but I continued to push. I grabbed what I needed, fighting the cart’s want to steer me in the opposite direction I wanted to go. Damn cart. I checked out and went home.
Earlier in the day, my stepdaughter requested oatmeal raisin cookies, — her favorite, hence the visit to Walmart instead of stewing in my funk. Baking relaxes me, so I welcomed the opportunity. However, when I got back home, I realized we were out of eggs. I like organic, free-range eggs, on both principle and taste, but there was no way I was driving the extra mile to the grocery store for the eggs, so back to Walmart I went. I grabbed a cart. This one rolled and then hesitated, rolled and hesitated. I struggled against the push and pull of the cart while I picked up the eggs and a few other things I realized I needed. Suddenly it hit me, right there in the middle of the Walmart aisle, I had a choice. I could simply put the cart back and grab a working one — one I didn’t have to nurse or cajole or suffer annoyance with. I looked over to the cart corral, spotting at least 50 other carts that probably worked just fine.
It was at that moment I understood the link between the cart and my trauma. The cart reminded me of how trauma survivors can encounter difficulty in the midst of wrestling with negative feelings. We tend to want to survive, plow through, make it work, our vision clouded to other options. The idea of replacing the aggravating cart hadn’t crossed my mind as a choice. It had been a day of thinking and acknowledging how past trauma has left me askew. As a result of childhood trauma, my mind is literally wired differently. I’ve worked hard to find workarounds for those differences, and at the age of 53, I rarely get lost in trauma anymore. I used to find myself misplaced in it for weeks at a time, now it’s a rare day when my body reacts like I’m a 7-year-old girl without options.
I relay this story as a reminder to the trauma survivors who have pushed the squeaky, broken cart instead of simply exchanging it — we have choices.
