Trauma never goes away completely, it changes perhaps, softens some with time, but never completely goes away.
People like head trauma. They love knockouts. The crowd is silent, silent, silent. . . and then a knockout happens, and everyone goes native. There would be far fewer knockouts without the gloves.
At the Third Wave Foundation, we were asking questions like, "How can we get more voters registered who support our issues?" or "How do we want to give away of money so that it has the greatest impact?" But, the poems were involved in questions of feeling whole, negotiating sexual trauma, and speaking to what has been lost forever. I've always been a person who feels most energized when I am both creating art and working toward social change, but I often have difficulty talking about the two in the same breath.
Emergency rooms are closed, many hospital wards are as well leaving people who are sick with heart disease, trauma, pregnancy complications, pneumonia, malaria and all the everyday health emergencies with nowhere to go.
When our response to all trauma is to call the police, then that gets us into a cycle of perpetuating trauma. Mental health trauma is different from somebody breaking into a store. Those are not the same things, and our response has to be different.
