The Trauma of Silent Tears
One of the worst measures of pain involves the fewest tears shed.
Before June 8, 2023, I had no concept of what being a trauma survivor was. When I awoke the next day, it felt as if I had attempted suicide, even though I had not. Everything changed. I was no longer in denial of trauma. In the months after, I discovered that trauma had carved paths of anguish and fear throughout my life. But it was too late. The damage from it all was permanent. My life will never be the same. I have since learned three painful lessons: Trauma comes in many forms; none are voluntary, and the strain on your mental health is cumulative. Eventually, you will experience a form of crying that no one can see. This is trauma at its worst. This is how autism helped me see trauma for what it is in our lives — real and heartbreaking.
Looking back, my trauma reads like a road map of my path through life. A tornado, a car accident, death, suicide, and neglect. Trauma can happen to you at any time, such as when you are most vulnerable. One of the best examples is during childhood, before you learn how to deal with it. I was younger than ten years old when, in early elementary school, an unfamiliar alarm went off in the school. Everyone was ushered into the small building’s only appreciable hallway. This was not a tornado drill. It was the real thing. I can still remember stopping in my tracks right in the middle of the exposed cafeteria. My eyes were fixated on gazing out the double doors of the school’s main entrance. In the distance, the air was a tan color and fiercely whipped from left to right. I was spellbound by what I saw.
That is, until a teacher left the safety of the hallway, grabbed me by the shoulders, and led me back into the hallway to take cover. Needless to say, I have been through an actual tornado. Although the school was not hit, damage was done that could not be seen.
A year or two later, a fierce windstorm struck late at night while I was at home. My mom had just left for work. My dad was with us. Thankfully, my brother and I had someone there. I was watching a TV movie when the cable was knocked out. Shortly after, the power went out. The fact that the TV went off first left me terrified. The wind was ferocious. I feared that a tornado was nearby at the worst possible time for a young kid — after dark. This ensured I would suffer from ancraophobia (extreme fear of wind or drafts) from that day on.
Less than a decade later, similar anguish and fear would be hoisted upon me again. The year 1997 was terrible. In January, one of my classmates, a soft-spoken and kind person, took his own life. When we found out during school the next day, the announcement was awkward. It led to the dismissal of the entire junior high. I asked a teacher, “If it was me, would everyone be as distraught?” Only five months later, in May of that year, I was riding with my parents as we returned from a fishing trip. Three relatives followed close behind us. Suddenly, my mom shouted, “Look out!” The next thing I knew, the car was stopped. Both airbags had deployed. We had just been in an accident. Thanks to my dad’s reflexes, no one was hurt. I kept to myself how distressed I felt.
The car accident had been part of a deeper trauma that was already set in motion before I was born. At age 20, a maternal uncle of mine was killed in a car accident. I was subsequently named after him. In the years after I was told this by my parents, I unexpectedly began to fixate on the morbid nature of his death. Just six years after the 1997 car accident, I tragically lost two former high school classmates to accidents as well. The first was during my senior year. The second was while I attended college. This made me suffer from dystychiphobia (fear of accidents) before I turned 21. The tension became so great that I feared I would die in a car accident, just like my uncle. I knew it was absurd. My fear still dominated. It was so disturbing that I still suffer from intrusive thought anxiety today.
Just a few years later, my life would take a terrible turn that would nearly cost me my life. Two weeks after graduating college in December 2002, I experienced a sort of meltdown upon leaving a movie theater. The movie itself had triggered me to cry from the death of a character I was very fond of. However, when I got inside my car, my crying not only continued but worsened. Overcome by panic and fear, I was nearly hysterical. I had no path forward in life, and it terrified me to the bone. Now, all this emotion was pouring out. I pleaded for mercy as street traffic passed by only ten feet away. The events of this night would come to a head seven months later in what I refer to as my sleepless night. I unexpectedly attempted suicide. Fortunately, I survived.
The trigger was being rejected by a woman on the dance floor of a club. I was with close friends, celebrating a special occasion. But I had no actual idea what the cause was. How could I? I was only 21 years old and blinded by an inescapable stigma that suicide attempt survivors were bad. There was also no one I could find with the same suicide experience who would understand what I was feeling. So, I told no one except for a few friends I could already trust not to reject me. At the same time, something vital to my future was being neglected. Something that would dwarf everything that came before it. I tried my best to move on, believing that I still had time to get somewhere in life. Little did I know that, in spite of my age, I was already falling too far behind.
As each year went by, my willingness to live would gradually deteriorate. From 2003 to 2016, I worked four temporary jobs, two full-time jobs, and I also attended college for the second time. All of it, every effort, was in vain. Nothing could fix the indecisiveness that I was plagued by. It first began as early as junior high. I was unable to choose a job or career to establish my life as an adult. With every choice I did make, all I felt was emptiness. It was so bizarre that I feared no one would believe me. So, after everyone was asleep, I often begged for mercy as I gazed out of my bedroom window. I cried. Each year, I watched friends pass me by. They got married. They had kids. Each time, I cried from that same window.
I never felt so alone.
It came to a point where I had so little hope that I had to ask myself, “Why cry?” It did me no good. There were no answers to my prayers. There were no wishes granted to falling stars. Despite working hard at jobs, showing up early every day, staying longer whenever help was needed, or working jobs that I had to force myself to choose, nothing changed. Each day was like a revolving door of inner torment. I had never been discouraged from crying. In fact, it was acceptable at home. I had seen my dad cry the morning of my 16th birthday when our dog died. As my aimless life remained the same, it made less sense for me to cry. By October 2014, I finally had enough and organized a plan to end my life. What could I say? I was ready to go.
Believing that the end was near, I wrote out a last will and testament. It never dawned on me that I learned nothing from my suicide attempt a decade earlier. Neither did I learn from the loss of my classmate before that. All that mattered was the pain I felt. It also never occurred to me that I had relapsed. Suicide was too stigmatized to see that it was traumatizing. There were times I drove past a bridge or ravine. Intrusive thoughts would make me wonder what would happen if I swerved. Understanding suicide ideations is difficult if you have never actually experienced them before. Your mind will instinctively rebel. The thought of such painful misery makes no sense. Believe me, it never does. No one wants to endure such mindless suffering. Everyone has their limits.
On April 26th, 2023, my case manager confided that she had a client whose autism diagnosis also involved post-traumatic stress disorder. This was closely tied to her struggling with the same indecisiveness that I had long suffered from. At our next session, my counselor asked me a series of questions. So I asked her, “What did you just do?” She screened me for PTSD. The results were favorable. Through the rest of May, I started feeling this odd sense of urgency, like I was missing something important. I was. It turned out to be the repressed denial I felt as a suicide survivor. I trusted my instincts and explored this as a clue: was I in denial of my late autism diagnosis? Was being autistic traumatizing? Did I actually experience trauma? Nothing could have prepared me for what I found.
The evening of June 8th was calm and quiet. I was writing about an autism presentation I had written the previous year. At the time, I had a strange episode of memory loss. Nothing like it had ever happened to me before. So, it was rather difficult to explain the details in writing. When I finished the paragraph about it, I started to cry. My crying was so sudden and forceful that I felt violated. It was like a volcanic eruption had split my mind open. I reached out to an autistic friend who, thankfully, helped me calm down. It was helpful that she was autistic, too. I found that autistic people often relate to each other more easily because we have the same neurotype. We also frequently bond from living through trauma, including being late-diagnosed as autistic.
To my horror, I could now connect hundreds of clues from that moment of my life, being autistic, and all the way back to my childhood. I kept having difficulty with dating, social skills, and employment decisions. I fell behind my peers. I experienced suicide four times. A couple of months later, I discovered why I had been so afraid I would run out of time. In August 2019, I was diagnosed with a fear of time-related stress called chronophobia. This was caused by not integrating into society soon enough. Mental health experts have been responsible for my well-being since my ADHD diagnosis in 1990 at age eight. Now, I have one massive source of trauma spanning three decades of my life — I am only 42. And yet, autism was the clue that finally revealed trauma for what it actually is: real and heartbreaking.
There is pain. There is suffering. And then there is trauma. Trauma changes your perception of what life is supposed to be and warps it into the grotesque and brittle; your innocence is lost. You can never go back to who you once were. The first thing you want to do is run and hide from it. I know. I tried. Sometime around when that wind storm struck here years ago, during the fall, the wind was gusting pretty hard. Leaves were blowing everywhere. It terrified me. But I could not run. There was no storm to hide from. The wind was generated by a change in air pressure. My grandmother was on the phone with my mom, wondering why I was crying so much. I was not even a teenager yet, and trauma was already changing me from the inside out.
I chose the featured image of this article for one reason. In many cases, trauma survivors fear sharing their stories or are so exhausted that we lack the strength to tell anyone. We are too busy struggling to get by each day. I wanted you to see what trauma can look like in a person’s expression. It is called silent tears. No one may ever see them. You might hide them out of shame, fear, gaslighting, stigma, abuse, and more. But trauma survivors can often recognize the signs of trauma in other people. Just ask women and minorities. They suffer from serious traumas unique to their life experiences. When we look into a mirror, this is often what we see staring back at us: a naked expression of feeling utterly worn out. Now, when I cry, it is rare and forceful because my autistic mind does not understand what good it will do. Everyone has their limits.
I would like to take this opportunity to dedicate this article to trauma survivors. No matter who or where you are, no matter what your trauma is, whether you have admitted to yourself the pain you suffer from yet or not, we know our own. You are not alone.
