What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

by Stephanie Foo

I care about how I seem to fuck everything up all the time. I care and I care, and I hate myself for it.

When we say someone is resilient, we mean that they adapt well to conditions of adversity—they are strong, in possession of “emotional toughness.” But how do you measure someone’s emotional toughness, exactly? When scientists and psychologists provide case studies of resilient individuals, they do not showcase a housekeeper who has overcome personal tragedy and now has impressive talents at self-regulation. They write about individuals who survived and became doctors, teachers, therapists, motivational speakers—sparkly members of society. Resilience, according to the establishment, is not a degree of some indeterminable measure of inner peace. Resilience is instead synonymous with success.

I was approaching “wellness” with the same obsessive, perfectionistic tendencies I’d brought to my job. This was no less disordered than being a workaholic, and the pattern had a distinct echo: moments of intense joy through achievement followed by anxiety over finding my next success.

“Gratitude turns what we have into enough.”

So when the hands came, we offered our cheeks. We offered ourselves as conduits for their anguish because they had suffered so we wouldn’t, so we could watch Saturday morning cartoons and eat sugary cereal and go to college and trust the government and never go hungry. We excused all of it, absorbed the slaps and the burns and the canings and converted them into perfect report cards to wipe away our parents’ brutal pasts. We did the work, as they like to say now. We got into good colleges, got internships and postdocs, and eventually moved on to successful, rewarding careers in big cities that paid us enough money to buy high-end audio gear for our modernist apartments. We achieved the American Dream because we had no other choice.

This whole fucking narrative of all of these Asians settling gently into the American dream is bullshit. The facts just don’t add up. You have a community of immigrants and refugees who survived extreme violence—but they don’t believe in mental illness, don’t talk about trauma, don’t allow for feelings or failure, and everyone is just fucking fine? The worst angst here comes from not being able to make an essay sparkle? Come on.

Trauma is mourning the fact that, as an adult, you have to parent yourself. You have to stand in your kitchen, starving, near tears, next to a burnt chicken, and you can’t call your mom to tell her about it, to listen to her tell you that it’s okay, to ask if you can come over for some of her cooking. Instead, you have to pull up your bootstraps and solve the painful puzzle of your life by yourself. What other choice do you have? Nobody else is going to solve it for you.

So this is healing, then, the opposite of the ambiguous dread: fullness. I am full of anger, pain, peace, love, of horrible shards and exquisite beauty, and the lifelong challenge will be to balance all of those things, while keeping them in the circle. Healing is never final. It is never perfection. But along with the losses are the triumphs. I accept the lifelong battle and its limitations now. Even though I must always carry the weight of grief on my back, I have become strong. My legs and shoulders are long, hard bundles of muscle. The burden is lighter than it was. I no longer cower and crawl my way through this world. Now, I hitch my pack up. And as I wait for the beast to come, I dance.