surviving the storm
The truth is my parents were survivors of war. My mom witnessed her family members being killed and raped during Somalia’s civil war. My dad was held at gunpoint. It wasn’t safe for either of them. So they fled. They fled and migrated all the way to the US. My parents lost everything. Their homes were demolished. Their families are scattered all over the world. Their Somali identity has no meaning. The country that they were once proud of is now in shambles. The realities of losing everything you once knew and the unbelievable grief and pain that comes from never seeing your country thriving and seeing your people living freely are so unbelievably traumatic.
Me being a child of survivors of war and that pain and grief being passed on to me. That trauma being passed on to me. I can feel that pain in my bones. I can feel the grief within me. My mom has nightmares of those times. My dad similarly. Not being able to live comfortably in a foreign land, unable to come back to the place you once called home, is agonizing. It’s a feeling I would never wish on anyone.
The reality behind all of it is that through colonialization and capitalism, our traumas have lived like a block for us to become our best selves and make it so that we pass on that trauma for future generations. My parents have accumulated so much trauma from that war that it has become s a living part of who they are. It shows in everything they do and in how they interact with us. I know somehow my mom wants nothing more than to raise us in Somalia. However, we all know that she was forced to migrate to a whole new country where she doesn’t know anything. The reality is forced migration is violence. It is a violence that was inflicted by western powers coming into a country and doing whatever it can to destabilize a country so much more than the people of the said country have no other choice than to flee and migrate somewhere else where they can get the same resources and education that the West stole from them.
The reality is my parents never thought that the civil war was going to happen. That it was going to ruin their lives and that they were going to be forced to live with that trauma for the rest of their lives. When you experience a trauma such as war, watching your loved ones get killed right in front of you, knowing that some soldier had sexually assaulted your sister, that trauma lives within you. It can be stored in your body in many ways and cause your parasympathetic nervous system to go into overdrive. For many people, it causes an intense fear that something’s going to happen to them. They have flashbacks of what they have seen, or they have nightmares of those nights of watching their loved one die right in front of them. It puts their body into flight or fight mode, where the body is in an intense state of survival as if it has something that it needs to run away from or fight. The mind can shut off to protect itself. The body can stand stagnant and work as if you are just a mere living corpse. In other cases, what happened during that time can be depressing and can cause an overwhelming feeling of guilt because you were one of the lucky ones. You were able to escape while so many didn’t. You have family members who have been murdered, but you managed to escape, and that guilt will never give you a chance to breathe. Not even for a second. As a result, it can cause an immense wave of depression where getting out of bed can be a difficult task. But you have to be brave. Brave enough for your family. So you carry on. As if nothing is wrong. In reality, you are hurting in silence, and no one even knows. They can’t know. You were able to escape. You are free. You are in America. Make us proud and work every day to achieve the American dream. But are you free? If those nights make you weep yourself to sleep every night, are you really free? Besides all the trauma you experienced back home, feeling the racial trauma of being a black person, or better yet, a black African person is adding a nice little layer to the already traumatic cake. Living in a black neighborhood, you hear gunshots outside your window, only to be brought back to the nights you watched your loved one getting murdered. You start bawling as the vivid memories come back in a rush. You feel your body tense up, only to have a panic attack seconds after. The thing is, there is a grief you experience as well. Of knowing you're not going to be seeing your family anytime soon. Of feeling like you have to leave a huge part of who you are to a world that has never accepted you. The fact that you are grieving not seeing your family anymore, or the family you lost, or even your culture behind it is unbelievably painful. They say anxiety and depression go hand in hand. It is very much true. A lot of us deal with both waves of these mental illnesses off and on every day. Some of us can’t have one without the other, and some of us are dealing with both even if we didn’t know it. A video about trauma on a child’s development talks about how many of us as kids are in homeostasis where our bodies are functioning. But when we experience trauma, it rewires our brain, and it either puts us into flight or fight mode or an in a depressive episode. It can cause our bodies to defend themselves or want to hide from society and get out. Kids aren’t taught to regulate their bodies and work on healthy coping mechanisms or even know how to deal with it, which causes them to deal with it even more. When it comes to the trauma of forced migration, escaping from war, and coming to a new country having to be able to relearn a whole new language, get accustomed to the culture, etc. while also feeling the implications of being racially different, those two mental illnesses can occur and has occurred for so many refugees and migrants who had to deal with forced migration. A lot of us cope with what we had to experience by forced assimilation, by feeling like, to succeed in any capacity here in this country, you have to adopt the American ways and leave your identity back where you came from. In some cases, this even means having a colonized mentality where you are nicer to the white people in your community than anyone else who seems far lesser than you. It means distancing yourself farther and farther away from the black struggle.
“Im not black, I am Somali”
Sound familiar? Another way we also cope with all that we experienced is by hanging so tight to the bounds of religion because religion is the only thing I believe that gives us, in some ways, the peace that we are looking for. The peace that our brains and this world refuse to give us. But in many ways, this can give us the perception that we are okay while so many are suffering as a result. The thing is, religion can give you so much. But you will still feel those panic attacks. You will still have those thoughts of hopelessness and despair. It is not an end be-all solution without understanding how those nights you spent weeping of the unbelievable grief you experience losing your loved ones can impact your brain chemistry and the homeostasis of your parasympathetic nervous system. It won’t do anything without understanding how those traumatic moments live and breathe within you.
The thing is, forced migration is violence and trauma that so many survivors of war have been dealing with for years. I remember my mom finding ways to distract herself from the anxiety-inducing thoughts whenever she remembers her mom, who she hasn’t seen for 30 years. I remember my dad not wanting to hear the word Galkacyo because that one word brings him a whole world of pain. The trauma my parents experienced watching firsthand lose everything they ever cared about, only to migrate to a country that never truly welcomed them in, is something that so many migrants who faced forced migration have to go through.
There is a war going on in my country. In all the years I have
lived in this body, there has been no peace. My mother still
has hope in her heart, she keeps a suitcase packed just in
case. This whole life we have been waiting for our flight to be
called. In the recurring dream I board a plane to Mogadishu.
Every passenger on the plane is my mother, my mother in
the seat beside me reading a crime novel, my mother in an
ill-fitting uniform serving drinks, my mother as the pilot,
winking, tipping his cap. When the plane starts to fall out
the sky I wake up.— Warsan Shire
The reality is that even in those moments, our parents never knew how to ask for help. They never knew how to. They developed coping strategies like what I said before to get through what they are going through without understanding that it will only cause further harm to them and those around them in so many ways. Your body holds trauma in many ways, and trauma ends up changing your DNA as well. When it comes to the violence of forced migration and war, it has a way of changing your brain chemistry and the homeostasis of your parasympathetic nervous system that, if not given ways to regulate, heal, and move on from it, can end up killing you as a result. Furthermore, when all you have ever known is war, you re-create that environment for those around you. So in a way, for many children of these survivors, it means that they end up experiencing a war in their own home. It means the sexual assault that those in their families have been through, the violence that they have gone through will continue happening for their children.
It means those same habits still keep happening. It means that the harmful coping mechanisms, the restless nights, the moments where the unbalancing of your brain chemistry and the disruption of your parasympathetic nervous system will continue because it is passed on from your own parents. When you haven’t taken the time to heal from that trauma, that trauma will live inside you until you decide otherwise. You will re-create those violent moments in your own home and with those around you. The cycle will continue.
Until someone in your family decides to break that cycle and so happens that it is always the children of these survivors of war, for some families, it is always the eldest daughter of the family. I was that person for my family. I was the one who decided that I was tired of carrying a trauma that I never asked to carry. I migrated along with my family when I was 6 years old to a whole new country that has never welcomed me in. Where my blackness and my faith were always at security, where it pushed me into boxes I never wanted to be in. Where I felt silenced, alone, lost, inhibited in being everything that I ever wanted to be, and I felt scared. As a result, causing me into a deep bout of depression that had a huge grey cloud over my head, unable to budge, only to have debilitating anxiety a couple of years later. I was a people pleaser, unable to say no, have adequate boundaries, so incredibly hypervigilant, and I ended developing empathetic traits. These traits were trauma responses to the violence I experienced due to forced migration, my parent’s divorce, moving every two years, and living under the white gaze for so much of my childhood. My anxiety and depression were by-products of everything that my parents went through and more. My mental illness felt like a prison that I was trying everything that I could do to break out of, and my trauma acted like a corrections officer, holding me down every chance it got. It got so bad to the point where I knew if I didn’t get help, it would kill me. People always talk about how your mental health plays a huge part in how healthy you are. My mental health affected me so badly to the point where I was having stomach issues. I knew I needed help, which is what I did. I started therapy then got diagnosed with moderate to severe anxiety shortly a while after. I was the first in my family to start therapy. To seek help when my parents never did. I am the first one in my family to break that cycle. Our parents have given up everything they ever knew due to the immeasurable pain that comes with knowing that the place they have called home for so many years will no longer exist; the trauma they experienced is a trauma they never knew how to hold. But for so many of these children of these survivors and me, we knew that the first step to getting better and moving forward is admitting that you need help. Taking that first step will require bravery and courage because you are doing something that your parent’s never learned how to do. The thing is, so many folks fall into this cycle of feeling like no one understands them. That no one gets it. If you are dealing with a mental illness and carrying a pain that you never wanted to carry, I want you to know you are never alone. Taking that first step is scary, but I promise once you do, you’ll never want to look back. No one should ever struggle alone, and no one deserves to suffer in silence. So much of our parents did. But the reality is, we don’t have to. We can break that cycle. I know we can.
When you are healing and are learning how to regulate your own emotions, your nervous system, and more, that feeling becomes addicting. In a real way, I was tired of merely surviving because I knew staying in survival mode would kill me but moving towards my own healing, I knew it would save me.
You are breaking the same cycle that has lived in your family for years. The same cycle that has caused that trauma to breathe inside of you. Your ancestors and your whole bloodline will thank you for it. We don’t have to perpetuate the same things our parents did, and we don’t have to continue the same cycle of harm and trauma. We can heal that pain that has lived inside of us and ultimately break a cycle that has kept us down for many years. We can create new coping strategies, new forms of healing, and reimagining a family where we are thriving, not merely surviving. Where we are living healthy, happy, and safe.
Whenever I think about it, I remember how much it caused me so much pride because I realize who I am doing it for. I know my ancestors would be so proud of me. But the bravery it took me to admit that I needed help and all the stuff that I learned in the process is what inspires me to write about it because if it weren’t for all the trauma that my parents went through—I wouldn't have.
w/ all love
N.A
