No one wants trauma in their lives. We don’t want a spouse to die suddenly. We don’t want cancer diagnoses. We don’t want to be the victim of an armed robbery or a serious car accident. Yet, we know that life is filled with perils, and throughout our journey some are likely to come our way, no matter our efforts to dodge them. What we hope is that when trauma crosses our path, we have the wherewithal to learn the life lessons it can teach us and move on. That is what we hear from 13-year-old Eitan Pessin.
Eitan Pessin is a student the Gordon School in East Providence, Rhode Island.
I’ve seen many tragic stories on the news, but never did I imagine that I would be one of them.
I believe in Kintsugi. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of fixing broken pottery by filling in the cracks with gold. Kintsugi is about fortifying something that is weak, and making it better than it was to begin with, and that can be applied to life. I learned this on a cold winter day, when a gas leak was ignited, imploding the walls of my bathroom.
It started with a loud ‘boom!’ that resonated through my home, and commotion ensued. I was ushered out by my dad into the frigid snow, which seeped into my thin socks as I gripped the hand of a woman I had met only twenty minutes earlier, as if it were a lifeline. I sobbed, thinking of my poor stuffed animals, and the class guinea pig I had taken home for the weekend. I could smell smoke in the crisp winter air, and hear the bawling of my confused brothers. I remember seeing the phone in my dad’s hand, already calling 911, and then the blaring fire truck sirens, as they raced down my usually empty street, a typhoon of noise and change.
The following year was equally hard, as construction was done, walls were painted, plus countless setbacks, including a robbery and water damage. I was in third grade, my brothers in kindergarten and first. I’ve seen drawings I did that year, and they’re filled with anger and sadness. At the time, my mom was recovering from brain surgery, leaving my dad to mostly single-parent three traumatized young children. That year was probably one of the most arduous of my life, and will hopefully always be.
But now, four years later, the entire ordeal is over and done with, and I come home to a safer house and bathroom daily. My life has (mostly) returned to normal, with few problems beyond my normal, teenage, everyday life crises.
I believe that trauma makes you stronger. I stuck that year out, and have come out tougher. It taught me how to deal with trauma, with change, with life not going my way. It’s like a scab; it’s gross, but eventually it heals over, making stronger skin. In the words of Kelly Clarkson, “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.”
