the nature of nurture

On one of my last freedom days I head to Tryon Creek, a favorite spot in the woods. It's one of those places where you can forget urban surroundings. Forested ravines, covered in plants I can't name, drop sharply to the creek. I've been meaning to hike all week and the sun is so seductive. Can't stay inside one minute longer, so I leave the piles of paperwork and bills covering my floor. They've waited six weeks. They can hold for another day. Right?

The trails feel shorter without my girls, shorter than I remember. I've never been out here on my own. It's always been with the kids or with the dog or with the whole family. Never alone. I realize, not a revelation just an awareness, that I never go out into the woods alone. Even when I lived on 100 acres of rain forest, trails right out the door, I always walked with my dog, or Scott, or not at all.

But today I'm feeling easy about the whole thing. Comfortable by myself. Happy to be alone out here. Wow. I sit by the creek and wonder this: can upbringing coupled with temperament create trauma, trauma symptoms, without any remarkable, horrendous thing having occurred?

My startle reflex runs on hyper drive and has for as far back as I remember. I'm jumpy, skittish. The ever present something close on my heels, just behind the tree, poised to jump out and grab me. I am fear.

My parents, they're fearful people. In our house the glass was not just half-empty, it was cracked and leaking slowly. These are people who navigate life based on what could go wrong. Nevermind minor snafus. I'm talking about not being allowed to drive a couple miles across a suburban Ohio town to a friend's house at night because the car could break down. What if the car breaks down and you are alone on the road? Anyone could get you. And, I'm 17. For my mom and dad the world is a sensationalized news story waiting to happen.

In my early 20s I find the road. Before every trip I can count on the same two questions from my mom: "Why would you even want to go to that Godforsaken place?" and "What if some dies while your are gone? Because god forbid some one should die, in this religion they'd be in the ground before we figured out how to reach you." So, my stewards are people who decide based on "god forbid someone should die." That's just my mom. My dad is pacing the driveway, compulsively checking his watch, every time I visit from college three hours away in Columbus. I learn to tell him I'm leaving an hour later than I am, to save him the anxiety of me being on time, or god forbid, 10 minutes late.

But I don't escape their fears. I look in every window before climbing into the car at night. At five, I'm terrified of crossing the 20-foot gap to get to Hallie's house next door. In high school, I'm still locking my second-floor bedroom windows so no-one can scale the bricks and climb in. I lay in bed imagining super powers that let me disappear inside the mattress to hide. I Think about the girl a few streets over who was pulled out of her window(ground story), and found by her brother, dead in the woods, the next morning. Raped and beaten. That's the detail I catch. But that's not the whole story. She wasn't pulled out the window by a stranger. She climbed out to finish an argument with her psycho ex-boyfriend. He robbed a store and wanted her on the run with him. Details.

That's the thing about an ADD mind. Deficit is a misnomer. It's an over abundance of attention. Attention to everything all at once, all the time. It should be called Faulty Filter Disorder. An ADD mind takes the most stimulating detail, often the most frightening, and locks in. Fuck context.

When Scott and I are in our mid-20s and visiting my parents in Arizona, we tell them we're going out to hike in the desert. No destination. We need to get out of the city, out of their house, for the afternoon. It's a sanity thing. My mom panics. Says she doesn't like us just going off into the desert. People get lost out there all the time. Just the other day a woman was on her way to visit her daughter when her car broke down. She tried to cut less-than-a-mile across the desert to the daughter's house and she was lost out there for days. DAYS.

My sister laughs when I tell her this story. "That woman had alzheimers!" she tells me. Details. And all my mom heard was lost in the desert. DANGER, Wil Robbins, DANGER.

For better or for worse, our families leave us covered with marks. By nature and nurture, I am of these people.

So I sit by the creek wondering. Is it possible for this cocktail to leave me with every PTSD symptom? To fully mimick surviving trauma, without having come any closer to it than the evening news?