Advanced Essay #2: "Boo"

trau·ma

/ˈtroumə,ˈtrômə/

noun

1. a deeply distressing or disturbing experience.

Traumatic experiences are person-dependent. Something that is traumatic to one person might not be traumatic to another. It can be anything from your bullying story to breaking up with your first love to your parents divorce . Whatever it is, it sticks with you. It stays in the back of your mind, shaping your moves and thoughts. They shape you into the you that you see daily.

“Alright Michaela, the floor is yours,” my teacher announced

As the words flew from my mouth and from my mind, I could feel their eyes on me. I didn’t want to look up to meet their gaze. The gaze that would soon send me out of the school day in tears day after day. I finish the presentation. I am reassured with the claps.

“Boo!” I hear faintly from the back of the classroom.

There goes the reassurance, so short lived. Why did they have to do that? I did nothing to them. Why me? The faint and quiet “Boo” felt like the weight of the world on top of me. It hurt as nothing had before. It hurt me deep inside and I didn’t know why.

This was the first time I ever felt like this. I was scared to be in front of my classmates. I was scared of my classmates. That presentation back in 7th grade seemed to set a tone to the rest of my doing when it came to school. I became nervous and untrusting in myself. Yes, it has changed a bit in past years due to gaining more confidence in speaking to an audience but the feeling of being judged stays crawling up my spine as I stand in front of any traditional classroom setting. I hate this feeling. It comes back even if I don’t expect it. I feel my hands shake. I hear my voice trembling in my ears. The faint “boo” makes an appearance in my mind every now and then. I do try and fight that awful noise telling me I am not worth the presentation but it is quite hard sometimes.

Even short, quick words like these ,can be very effective in impacting how you feel about your identity. They stick with you. Catcalling is something many women will handle throughout their life. For some, it may be more traumatic than it is for others. Burtman said, in a New York Times article titled, My Body Doesn’t Belong to You, “...once I turned 16, my body no longer belonged to me but to the world at large and to certain men who drove their cars past it” (Burtman, 2017). Traumatic experiences can very easily affect how someone views themselves. In the example of catcalling, women can begin to feel that they are only worth the words they hear on the streets, words from mouths of people they don’t know. The words they hear on the streets are brought up during self-reflection. Self-reflection is not always dwelling on trauma, but thinking about them in a more positive light. Reflecting can flip those words around; That “ayo Ma, let me tap that”, can turn into words of self-love. “You’re beautiful”  Self-reflection is very much key to true self-love and being able to face traumatic experiences again. You ultimately know you better than others do, but that does not mean they can’t help you. You need to know all kinds of ways to help yourself out of a rut. Others are able to give you those ideas. Others can be used to bounce around your own ideas. It is very important to most people. I say most because something that works for you might not work for someone else, just like something traumatic for you might not be traumatic for someone else.

In the book Between the World and Me, Coates is trying to convey the importance of race and identity. He talks about living in his own skin and telling us what it is like to live through experiences that were truly created by race. He says, “In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after” (120). This quote says that the things that affect your identity most are experiences. Many different things can make an experience traumatic. For Coates, traumatic experiences that happened because of his race left a great impact on his character. They affected how he viewed himself in comparison to others. They left a lasting impact on his identity.

Many things we know and experience in life can have an affect on our identity. A traumatic experiences can be one of those things that effects you greatly. Though it is traumatic it doesn’t mean it has to have a negative lasting impact on your self identity. Through self reflection and reflecting with others you can change how that experience affects you. Traumatic experiences are different for all that go through them but in the end, the impact is the same.