Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. If you are confused as to why you are getting this newsletter today, on a Sunday, instead of on the normal Tuesday—it’s because I felt like publishing this early! That’s all. I like being my own boss and breaking the rules every once in awhile. If you like this essay, you can support this newsletter by sharing it on your social media! Or join our paid subscriber community, which continually blows me away with their collective wisdom and solidarity.
A note about all the movies I am referencing in this essay—without writers and actors and all the supporting roles, we wouldn’t have the movies. I stand in solidarity with the strikes, and I hope you do too. For a great Substack centered around current issues of labor and class struggle unionism (which I think is the way of the future and of progress) I recommend following Josh Hill, and read this post first.
Barbenheimer
“The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness . . . Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried.”
--Dr. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery
Trauma separates us and it also brings us closer together. When thinking about c-ptsd, or trauma from diffuse origins (instead of one dramatic event like a hospitalization or assault), all the symptoms appear to isolate the individual: mental health issues like anxiety, depression, and flashbacks; patterns of isolation and hyper vigilance, encouraging the survivor to disconnect from the community and worlds they no longer feel safe in. And yet, paradoxically, these symptoms appear in trauma survivors from all walks of life, every race and class and gender and sexuality. People who served in Vietnam and refugees forced to flee their country and women who experienced sexual assault and children neglected and abused by their caregivers: all of them are connected by the ways in which trauma shows up in their bodies, whether we like to acknowledge this commonality or not.
We don’t spend a lot of time connecting our trauma histories to one another, which is a shame. Because while our individual experiences of abuse, oppression, and trauma might differ from one another, they can also serve as ways of connecting ourselves to our communities, and to humanity as a whole. But our society seems hellbent on keeping survivors of trauma at odds with one another, or preferably—not understanding themselves as traumatized at all. Perhaps this is because once we start to view ourselves as people impacted by the violence of our world, we might start to stand in solidarity with other survivors—and decide to change the whole damn system so it doesn’t hurt others the way it hurt us.
“The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma1.”
When I first heard about Barbenheimer--the trend of seeing both Oppenheimer and the Barbie movie on the same day/weekend, I was hooked. Two movies about quintessentially American experiences! I knew I was going to dress up. I knew I was going to make mementos. I knew I was probably going to be way too into it. And I was right!
But before I saw Oppenheimer, my sisters organized an outing to see the new Indiana Jones movie as a way of bonding over our shared childhood memories of being obsessed with “Indy.” Tromping around a mall with my sisters last Sunday to get to the theater, I started talking about nuclear weapons and what they make me think about. I spun slowly around the center of the mall, white glistening floors and the echoes of people excitedly talking to each other bouncing off the walls. What if we were born into the most evil country in the entire history of the human race? I said. What if all of this is a distraction from the reality that our country has harmed more people than we could ever actually imagine, but everything is calculated to distract us from that reality? Doesn’t that make you feel like you could almost lose your mind?
My sisters stared at me, as they often do. They love me but they couldn’t follow the threads of my existential angst. They have learned to let my rants go in one ear and out the other, and I dropped the subject, cognizant that a bustling mall on Sunday evening wasn’t the place for me to contemplate reality versus illusion. We saw the movie about Indiana Jones as a way to relieve our childhood2, and it ended up depressing me terribly. It was yet again a movie all about how Nazis are the only real bad guys and old white American men are still good, with a few token women (and people of color) thrown in for good measure. It hurt my stomach, and my mind was still swimming with thoughts of ideology and propaganda. I tried to pretend like the nostalgia was nice, but in all honesty nothing can touch those original Indiana Jones movies for actually touching on some deep subjects3.
I saw Oppenheimer on Thursday night. I was worried if my mental health was up to it—I have been up to my eyeballs writing about terrible men and how their views have impacted millions of people (myself included) and was worried I might have an internal autistic meltdown / existential crisis related to nuclear weapons and the United States. When I was heavily researching my book on radical catholic/anarchist/journalist Dorothy Day in 2020, I became a teensy bit obsessed with the ethical ramifications of nuclear weapons. While I had never thought too much about Oppenheimer the man himself, I had spent quite a few hours thinking about what it meant to grow up being told America (and white, conservative Christians) were the pinnacle of humanity, when our history of profound violence and enthusiasm about oppressing and killing others spoke otherwise. I had a lifetime behind me of swallowing cognitive dissonance, of trying to make bad things good in my brain, and I was, frankly, feeling mentally tired.
I ended up not having an existential crisis while watching Oppenheimer on Thursday, partly because the movie doesn’t dwell very much at all about the existential questions surrounding the creation of a weapon of mass destruction. It was mostly a movie about a rather inscrutable man4. The central story seems to be about his personal moral quandary, but because the movie spends less than zero seconds showing us the actual devastation wrought by the bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I found the framing of the story off-putting. I guess Cillian Murphy’s sad, watery eyes were supposed to be enough, and we were supposed to feel incredibly bad for him for losing security clearance? I guess I just don’t find that to be the most compelling stakes of the whole story, but that is just me personally5!
I think Oppenheimer—the real person, and to an extent the one portrayed in this film—is such a fascinating example of moral injury. He himself was Jewish and had obvious investment in making sure the Nazi’s didn’t create the atomic bomb first. But he also had to have known what his creation would have been used for—both in the horrific deaths of so many civilians in Japan, but also kicking off the Cold War and the arms race that we still grapple with to this day. The movie invites us into his personal anguish, at least a bit—but everything, everything, is couched in the highly rarefied worlds of academia and government hierarchy. That is to say, all of these moral and existential issues related to weapons of mass destruction are filtered through the lens of (mostly all white) men who are in power or who want power. And that is the part I have a problem with. I want to learn about the bomb from the people who were impacted by it, the survivors of America’s display of power and death. And until those stories are told and listened to, especially by those of us who live in the US, the trauma will continue to repeat itself, over and over again.
“to study psychological trauma is to come face to face both with human vulnerability in the natural world and with the capacity for evil in human nature . . . it is very easy to take the side of the perpetrator. All he asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.”
Dorothy Day hated the atomic bomb. She already was on the government’s shit list because in 1942 she had taken a bus to the West Coast to see for herself about these “internment” camps created for Japanese-American citizens. She wrote for her monthly paper The Catholic Worker : “I saw a bit of Germany on the west coast. I saw some of the concentration camps where the Japanese, men, women and children are being held before they are resettled in the Owens Valley or some other place barren, windswept, inaccessible.” J. Edgar Hoover did not like this comparison to the German camps at all, and Dorothy Day got a file opened up for her as a person of interest—a person to be arrested, in fact, should the war-time effort demand it. Her file got further added to when she wrote a scathing essay on how “jubilant” president Truman was about dropping the two bombs in Japan. She wrote:
Mr. Truman was jubilant. President Truman. True man; what a strange name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as true God and true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother of the Japanese, jubilating as he did. He went from table to table on the cruiser which was bringing him home from the Big Three conference, telling the great news; “jubilant” the newspapers said. Jubilate Deo. We have killed 318,000 Japanese.
That is, we hope we have killed them, the Associated Press, on page one, column one of the Herald Tribune, says. The effect is hoped for, not known. It is to be hoped they are vaporized, our Japanese brothers – scattered, men, women and babies, to the four winds, over the seven seas. Perhaps we will breathe their dust into our nostrils, feel them in the fog of New York on our faces, feel them in the rain on the hills of Easton.
Jubilate Deo. President Truman was jubilant. We have created. We have created destruction. We have created a new element, called Pluto. Nature had nothing to do with it.
Dorothy was doing trauma work. Dorothy was naming what actually happened—the violence against men women and babies who were living their lives an ocean away. She was naming the violence in the elation her president felt at being the one to order the bombs dropped. She was naming the violence of living in a country that demanded she cheer when what she wanted to do was sob. A country that forced celebration when what was needed was grief. She was writing to the people she had met in the concentration camps in Oregon and California. She was writing to the people in Japan. She was writing to everyone who had been told since birth that America was the best country in the world—full of brave, good-hearted souls who were always the heroes and never the villains—but who had been horribly harmed by the hierarchies and machinations of a well-oiled militarized white supremacist patriarchal capitalist machine. The bomb, and the US’s almost relentless insistence on how necessary it was, became something of an obsession for Dorothy and the entire Catholic Worker community for decades. And I think it was because for people who paid attention, the reality of the bomb—and America not hesitating for a second to use it—was a horror so great, they couldn’t bear to look away.
“The fundamental stages of recovery are establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma story, and restoring connection between survivors and their community.”
Barbie is not about the atomic bomb, not really. But it is a movie about unspoken trauma all the same. The trauma of the patriarchy is the central conceit of the movie, and it handles it with a surprising amount of nuance for a movie sponsored by Mattel. I kept thinking it was going to annoy me with a shallow version of white feminism, but instead I laughed until tears streamed down my eyes and then I actually started crying for good. It tackles the all-consuming issue of the patriarchy, and how it feels to operate under this system without ever being allowed to name it as harmful. It is a movie, I think, about how naming the complexities of the human experience under oppressive systems can actually bring us closer together. Naming the trauma of the patriarchy will not lead to a war of the Kens versus the Barbies—it will actually allow everyone to be who they are outside of the frameworks created by people who don’t want the world to change.
I didn’t relate to any of the characters (except maybe “weird Barbie” and also stereotypical Barbie when she was having an existential crisis). But that really wasn’t the point—the point was that everyone in this movie was struggling to name how society as it is ordered has harmed them—and how they still find the capacity to want and even to love being human. To marvel at the reality of being alive: the good, the bad, and the revolutions and changes that are bound to come. It does its best work by making hilarious fun of the patriarchy, over and over and over again. And then pointing to the real humanity of people who have lived full lives despite being surrounded by systems that inflect trauma.
On Friday I dressed in the one pink shift dress I have, painted my nails the color of bubblegum, and put on two pink beaded bracelets that said “existential crisis” on them. I wore white sneakers and snuck Cheetos into the theater, and I watched a movie about Barbie surrounded by other people dressed in fantastic outfits and giddy at the prospect of experiencing this event together. I luxuriated in feeling connected to the other people in the theater in a way I never have. Is this my version of a marvel movie experience? I wondered. Me with my super short hair and non-binary gender and the reality that I never once played with barbies6—I still felt connected. I laughed startlingly loud, and so did other people. I cried and sniffled, and so did other people. I was overwhelmed, and then inspired, and then was tickled—ahem—pink. I really liked watching a fun and visually interesting movie about how hard it is to operate in a patriarchal society with a theater full of people who know this reality in our bones and yet we aren’t supposed to say it. I liked it because I could feel something in the air, in the crowd that was studded with pink and purple. We are slowly, collectively, waking up to the reality that not talking about our trauma only serves those who perpetuated it.
I hope Oppenheimer troubles the waters of our imaginations when it comes to seeing the United States as heroic. I hope Barbie helps so many people talk honestly and openly about the patriarchy and the violence inherent in it. I hope weird and imperfect and ambitious movies by wonderfully complex human beings continue to be made. I hope we realize we have so much to learn from people who have experienced trauma and who have done the powerful work of naming it aloud. America is absolutely bursting with such folks, and yet power / the perpetrators of violence have predictable patterns of discrediting the ones who speak the truth of their pain out loud. The more we can notice these patterns and call them for what they are, the more we can learn from survivors of every kind of trauma. How would the US military change, for instance, if it took the trauma of their war veterans seriously? How would the economics of the West Coast be impacted if the Japanese-Americans given reparations that adequately made up for all the money/businesses/homes lost? How would Christian churches change if they actually listened to the people who had been hurt and abused both by people in the pews but also the violent, patriarchal, white supremacist theology found within? It’s hard for me to even think about such questions, because it makes me ache for a world that doesn’t actually exist. A dream world, one where the country and people I was born into actually took the stories of survivors seriously7.
Lately I’ve been thinking about how Dorothy Day kept fighting the ideological violence of the United States until she died at age 81. She supported strikes, she supported civil rights, she constantly decried so many of the moral injuries Americans were supposed to swallow with a smile. And, after Oppenheimer created the bomb, it became a central point of her ethics to resist nuclear weapons and the normalization of them. In 1955 she decided to make a stand when New York City announced mandatory civil defense drills to prepare citizens for possible nuclear weapon attacks8. Dorothy, along with 26 other protestors, refused to take cover during the first drill in 1955, sitting out in the open on park benches. She refused to normalize a violent society, she refused to act like there was no other option but to accept the reality of nuclear weapons being unleashed on her city. She ended up being arrested five times all together, protesting the drills from 1955-1959. Each year, more people joined the protests, to the point where NYC finally decided to drop the mandatory drills in 19629.
From nuclear weapons to racism to the patriarchy to unchecked greed in a capitalistic society, there are so many elements pressuring us to conform or be quiet about the pain we and others have experienced. But there is so much to be gained by making our pain public: we find solidarity with others, instead of isolation. We find the strength to find new and creative ways to resist. We allow the threads of oppression to point us to patterns, and to illuminate the reality that another world is possible. We sit on park benches and refuse to prepare for war. We watch movies about Barbie and cry as we hold all the contradictions in our bodies and our spirits. We allow our eyes to fill with tears and we start to question if we ever really were the good guys. We cheer and support people striking against the big bosses. We slowly, slowly, find our way towards others who question the dominant narratives. We clutch each other, through books and movies and internet newsletters. We allow our pain to transform us, and connect us to each other. We speak the truth about the world we live in, and what it has done to us. Because we are humans, not dolls in the hands of an all-knowing god or seemingly all-powerful men.
We are human beings, and we are connected by our pain. And only by listening to it, can we ever hope for it to get better.
If you made it this far, congrats! You read my stream-of-conciousness essay. I’m curious if you have seen Oppenheimer and/or Barbie, and your thoughts about the movies!
All quotes are from the first few chapters of Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman, M.D.
In evangelical land, you were allowed to watch Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark and/or Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, because both of them were operating under the assumptions that the Bible was REAL: both the ark of the covenant and the chalice Jesus drank out of had REAL POWER and therefore conformed to our worldview. The Temple of Doom, weirdly enough, was NOT allowed. It involved sorcery and witchcraft. I know. I know!
Weirdly enough, one of the original Indiana Jones movies I watched all the time as a kid actually was about the race to create atomic bombs and a glorified view of American history. In Indiana Jones and the Ark of the Covenant, the ark is a stand-in for atomic power. The Ark of the Covenant had the power to destroy the world through the power of God and both the US and the Nazis were racing to be the one in control of that power. I heard a great podcast about this, which you can listen to here. This is also a really great essay about the atomic bomb metaphor in Indiana Jones plus a lot more!
As I was leaving the theater and proclaiming to my two friends I didn’t understand all of it, a male employee of the said theater took a moment to explain to me that ALL Christopher Nolan movies can be hard to understand, and that I might need to watch it a few times to really get it. Thank you, Mr. Movie Man, it must be my little socialized as female brain that found it confusing, and not the lack of a clear direction about the character of Oppenheimer himself!
Oppenheimer the movie wasn’t bad, but I felt like it had some glaring omissions! It did make me want to read the book upon which the script was based, called American Prometheus, so there’s that! I haven’t quite entered the “reads biographies of famous people” stage of middle age YET, however.
I never owned a Barbie but I dreamed about chewing on her shoes. I feel like I actually got to do that one or two times and it was pure, neurodivergent bliss.
One thing that happens is that if we ask a certain kind of question it means we must keep asking them—reparations not just for Japanese-Americans, of course but for Black and indigenous peoples it is also required. I feel like these threads do not often get pulled because if you pull on one you must pull on the others. They are all connected, you see—and this is too much for most people to bear. And so we silence the questions, and in order to do that we must silence or internally discredit the survivors.
It’s hard not to make comparisons to school shooting drills and how it can and does normalize/prepare us for violence. My own children have developed severe anxiety thanks to these drills, but I was told by the school they were having “outsized reactions” and that kids don’t understand the full meaning of those drills. When of course many of them do, and are anguished and anxious at a world where the adults don’t seem to notice how fucked up it all is. I dream of a world where students organize and refuse to participate in school shooting drills, as a testimony to the world they want to live in.
You can read more about the protests against the nuclear arms race here. Many Catholic workers still regularly protest nuclear programs and are still getting arrested/sent to prison for it. Dorothy Day’s granddaughter Martha Hennessy recently several months in prison for her anti-nuclear power demonstration she was a part of. I had the opportunity to meet Martha last November and she is a delightful, deeply inspiring person.
"Outsized reactions" to shooting drills just reminded me that as a 3rd grader I had to be sent to sit in the hallway during the bus safety video because I had what we did not yet call "panic attacks" at the screech of tires and parental screams at the off-screen experience of a bus hitting a kid who didn't look before they crossed. There were 3 of these videos in succession for different ages of similarly doomed children. No one else reacted like I did.
I just saw Barbie today (no plans to see Oppenheimer, partially because 3 hours and partially because as a New Mexican, I have heard it does not accurately reflect the damage to my home state either. Obvs, Japan has it worse, but the test bomb still harmed New Mexicans the white guys in charge considered less than human).
LOVED Barbie, and to me it was so powerful in the choice to break out of our sheltered, fake, white, middle-class, cishet Christian bubbles and FEEL our emotions, face injustice, make peace with death and loss, choose to become "real" and awake to the reality, messy and terrible and beautiful and full. Our good intentions might be misinterpreted or out of context and we might cry and feel sadness, self-consciousness, and dishonored, but it's worth it. We can reconnect with our purpose and authenticity (and with Creator, for those of us so inclined), to find out what we really feel and desire and need, which isn't always the perfect body, house, love story, or friends. Sometimes it's the journey of finding out who we really are without all that that leads us to true, real, awakened growth and deep joy.