Beneath the Mask: An Ongoing Need for Healing
“They laugh to conceal their crying / They shuffle through their dreams / They stepped ‘n fetched a country / And wrote the blues in screams”
— Maya Angelou, “The Mask”
As someone who has both experienced and inflicted trauma on others, I spend a great deal of thought and heart-energy on the subject of trauma-healing. Yet I still wear a mask. I still need to heal.
Between Juneteenth and the Fourth of July sit the dual lies of liberation and equality. Slavery is still a Constitutional practice exercised in jails and prisons across the country. Incarcerated people are compelled to work for the State by force or coercion. For example, if you don’t work, you risk losing a decent housing assignment or being thrown in segregation; you can’t earn good time toward early release.
“All men are created equal” is written in the same document that left women without rights, nonbinary folks invisible, and Black bodies worth three-fifths of a man. Inequality is built into this nation’s founding laws and institutions.
But our suffering must be reined in, stifled, controlled. If we allow our trauma to be made visible through uncontrollable tears or screams of healing rage, we risk violent suppression. The consequences can be financial, through loss of employment; emotional, through abandonment by those who are strangers to this depth of pain and thus incapable of witnessing it; or physical, through confinement or lashing out in “self-defense.”
Fearing those consequences, we repress ourselves, which hinders our healing. Whether the traumas are racial, gendered or sexual; direct, vicarious or intergenerational, they lie waiting in the depths of our psyche and can be unleashed by any number of triggers, great or slight.
For me, it was a statement in the middle of a sentence on page 17 of Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score that sent me off the deep end in the middle of the night: multiple rounds of body-shaking sobs that left me, after about two hours, utterly still, sweaty and shirtless on the concrete floor of my cell.
It reads as follows: “… traumatized people have a tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them.”
Even flipping back to that page to get that quote started to bring back the tears. Yes, I was abused as a child, suffered through the school and foster systems, was assaulted in different ways as a teenager, and experienced various other traumas in my life, many connected to the policing and prison system. But it wasn’t any of those that crushed me.
It was the realization that I do this: I superimpose the trauma I caused and experienced onto the world around me. I see everything through the lens of this trauma. I am constantly trying to make right what can never be made right. My relentless commitment to accountability, supporting reparative action and helping others heal is all driven by my ongoing inability to right the greatest wrong of my life. The task is impossible from inside this system, yet I have no acceptable option but to try.
I’ve become hyper-sensitive to the special connectedness that binds people who carry trauma in their bodies. The enslaved father in Texas, the brutalized mother in Arkansas, the violated daughter in Canada, and the impoverished Coloured sister in South Africa: we are all connected. We have all, at some point, “lost the capacity to let [our] minds play,” as van der Kolk wrote on the same page. In that moment of breaking, I felt it all, but most acutely, I felt the devastation I brought into the lives of innocent people who had done me no harm and against whom I held no ill will.
Yet, when I awoke the next morning, I carried on as though it was business as usual. While spaces of mutual support and aid exist, we still live in a society that tends to meet vulnerability with apathy. We see suffering and avert our gaze. We see trauma-rooted rage as threatening and tears as weakness.
So, the next time someone tells you they’re doing “fine,” or “OK,” follow up and ask if they’d like to share more. Challenge yourself to actually care. Even if they choose not to tell you more, at least they’ll know somebody in this world cares enough to want to know the answer. Sometimes that’s enough to help someone make it through their latest round of darkness.
Those of us who are forced to endure the lies of liberation and equality will thank you. And, if you have been robbed of your capacity to allow your mind to play, I am with you. May we walk together in healing into a world that no longer requires masks.
Leo Hylton is a PhD student at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, currently incarcerated at Maine State Prison. His education and work are focused on Social Justice Advocacy and Activism, with a vision toward an abolitionist future. You can reach him at: Leo Hylton #70199, 807 Cushing Rd., Warren, ME 04864, or leoshininglightonhumanity@gmail.com.
