Trauma Ordinariness: Tracing the Everyday Experience of Trauma trough Two Encounters, Four Memoirs

Abstract

This thesis researches and reconceptualizes trauma through starting from my own, lived experience of trauma. It reconsiders and rewrites trauma according to my lived reality. In doing this, I move away from the hegemonic theorization of trauma; one of disruption, one of catastrophe. I move away from trauma as the catastrophic because I do not live a catastrophic life. My trauma affects me deeply, but I am not destroyed by it. I am able to live my ordinary life. My trauma has become ordinary. I came up with the term “trauma ordinariness” in order to describe this.

Up until now trauma has (as good as) exclusively been conceptualized as the catastrophic. And the catastrophic is untranslatable, unrepresentable. Trauma as the catastrophic stops me from staying where I am situated. It stops me from staying with my ordinary life. This thesis, then, aims to counter the dominant narrative of trauma, a narra- tive based on pathologization, and to reconsider and rethink trauma through focusing on ordinary life. An ordinary life that is marked by ordinary feelings. But the experience of trauma is not simply the product of ordinary life, of ordi- nary feelings. Even when you carry your trauma with you, at any time, at any place, it does not always show itself. Trauma does show itself, however, in moments that are ordi- nary, yet overwhelming. It is in these moments of trauma ordinariness, then, that the trac- es of trauma are to be found. In writing memoirs based on encounters with someone close to me, memoirs called “the Tales of Trauma Ordinariness”, I trace the remains of my trauma. My trauma that makes me feel “bad”, my trauma that makes me feel “different”. Four feelings are traced from the Tales of Trauma Ordinariness. Four feelings: envy, anxiety, uncomfortableness, fear. Four feelings, that, all in their own way, confronted me with what I felt and how I dealt with these feelings. But my story about trauma does not stop here. It is not just my story. I am not alone in what I feel and how I deal with it. I am part of socio-cultural structures. Structures of privilege. Structures of marginalization. With this thesis I refuse to comply with these mechanisms. With this thesis I question these mechanisms.