Seventeen Forever: the Summer of a Wedding, a Funeral, and a Trauma Bond

I spent my college summers on or near campus so I didn't have to go home and I went into debt doing it. The summer between my sophomore and junior year of college, saw three pretty significant events in my life in about the span of 3 months. In May of that year, right around the time school was letting out, my mom died. Around the same time, I'd fallen in love for the very first time, was getting my heart broken for the very first time, and was neck deep in a trauma bond stronger than anything I've experienced before or since. I was also celebrating a wedding not too long after my birthday. I was invited halfway across the country to a wedding for two friends, whose first date I accidentally crashed, due to another foundational experience in my life earlier that year. “We’re one mistake from being together but let's not ask why it's not right” (Metro Station, Seventeen Forever). This summer was unquestionably a catalyst that drove me to transfer colleges and move halfway across the country. It's been almost 18 years and I think about the four people significantly intertwined with the wedding, the funeral, and the trauma bond every day. I haven't seen most of them since then. These events changed the course of my educational trajectory and inadvertently the beginning of my career. They also changed my view of the world. 

The funeral was for my mother, my mom died in May in the week after Mother's Day. My sister and I didn't really have any money so it took a little while to put together the memorial service, by then, school was out for the summer and I was focusing my attention on three things. Losing my mom to a drug overdose that I was trying to skirt around in my Evangelical Christian Community at the time. I was very open about the fact my mom died, just not the how, you had to be in my inner circle for that. Even then, I didn't say a lot. I was also otherwise emotionally preoccupied because I'd fallen in love with a beautiful young woman who was attending my college earlier that spring. In hindsight I've learned a number of things about grief, I was blind to most of the red flags of the relationship, including the ones I brought to it. Grief like losing a parent is a really heavy thing to drop on a developing relationship and I would choose differently on a lot of things knowing the weight of the pain that I carried for a long time. 

It was a weird summer. That relationship imploded, probably after it should have, and it broke me. Having that happen at the same time as losing my mother was most definitely a coincidence, but the impact of that shaped so much of my life to come, and still has lingering flashbacks to this day. Amidst all of the emotional turmoil, two of my closest friends at the time were tying the knot and I was in their wedding. That's a bittersweet story because in my obliviousness I crashed their first date, which is ironically part of why I wound up in the wedding party, we lost touch over the years, and like a lot of things in life things didn't go the fairy tail route. But those two were the first ones to come sit with me as I sat on the floor of my apartment after my mom died weeping. 

I remember sitting in that apartment on the kitchen floor weeping my soul out because of the anguish of losing my mom, losing my mom to a drug overdose, and also knowing that our relationship had been heavily burdened up to that point. I was grieving in every sense of the word. That summer the words of Metro Station’s “Seventeen Forever” quickly made it to the top three most played songs in my iTunes top 25. Along with a cover of “Tears in Heaven” by Declan, and my early performances at church of Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah.” My first love introduced me to all three of those songs. My cover of Tears in Heaven was heavily influenced by the Declan version. Every time I hear those songs, I am 24 years old again in that summer of love and sorrow. 

It's difficult to say what influences my day-to-day life more, disability, childhood trauma, or adult trauma. I decided to intertwine these three events in this one summer into a single piece when I came across a photo of me trying on the wedding suit. Here's the thing about me and suits, that's the only one I've ever liked being in, which works out pretty well because due to the poverty issues I talked about in an earlier piece, it's the only one I had for a really long time. What caught my attention in the photo was the space I was standing in. My summer apartment on the college campus, the apartment where I grieved my mother the most, the apartment where I grieved a broken heart, the apartment where I trauma bonded with my first love over our stories, the apartment where I was angry and resentful of my love not working out while I was celebrating the Summer of Love for two of my closest friends. As I stand there in the suit, it's the space that stands out to me, it's the pain hiding behind my eyes that stands out to me, and it's the fact that you can hide behind the mask of a suit to look really good when your whole world is imploding upon you. 

The crumbling of what could have been with the relationship happened between my mother's funeral and my friend's wedding. Those events were the bookends of a first love and a first broken heart. I was oblivious to a lot of things at that point in my life. I was oblivious to the fact that my friends were on a date and I wasn't invited, oops. I was oblivious to the fact that I wasn't really in a relationship and I thought I was. I was oblivious to the power of trauma bonding because I didn't even know what that was at the time. I was oblivious to the ways I needed to love myself instead of hoping somebody else would do it for me. I was oblivious to unavailability. I was also oblivious to my own part in the pain. That's probably the area I've grown the most over the past 18 years. I recognize that I could have made some different choices at that time that would have lessened my pain as well as not caused any. I was still very much a codependent caretaker by nature and I couldn't get out of my own way. I didn't see that for a really long time, it took me probably almost a decade to figure that out. My heart was broken but I wasn't a blameless victim. I've spent most of the last decade of my life claiming self ownership, taking responsibility for my side of the street, and learning to recognize where I need to take care of me instead of taking care of you. Unfortunately when I was 24, I didn't have the slightest clue about any of that. Guaranteed, I hurt a lot of people including myself with my complex trauma reactions and responses to situations because I was oblivious to myself. People tell you, whether with words or not, whether or not you mean something to them. There's no point in a chase that's not on equal footing. 

That summer wounded me in ways I am still recognizing all these years later. Here's the thing about that though, all four of the people I've referenced in this post are gone from my life. My mom died and that's when she left, even though she'll always be in my heart. My first love told me by not being available that they weren't ready for the type of love and commitment I thought we had at the time, but I didn't listen. Now, all these years later I just hope they're living a better life than we did at the time. Those friends of mine, they're also gone too. That's four people who meant the absolute world to me who haven't been in my life in a very long time. I think about each of them and that summer at least once a day. The anger from the losses is gone and the gratitude is present. I wouldn't be who I am without any of those four people. They each taught me something, they taught me something about love, they taught me something about relationships, they taught me something about the temporality of life, and they taught me something about myself. 

As painful as the summer of age 24 into age 25 was, I wouldn't change any of it – at least I don't think so. There's certain things I wish I could have handled better. I wish I'd felt more comfortable being open about how my mom died but I was so afraid of the judgment around the overdose. I wish I'd had a better understanding of the role of codependence in my life so that I could have let my love go instead of fighting to hold on. Some of those fights got really ugly and nobody won. I tried to be the good guy and sometimes in doing so I was actually the bad guy. That's the thing about trauma, when you're not aware of it, you can function like a tornado with the best of intentions. That was me a tornado with the best of intentions who thought I was the good guy. I was a hurting soul in need of love and didn't know how to love myself, especially amongst all the loss and grief that came in such a short period of time. There's no rule book for how to handle that kind of stuff and I know that I could have done better but I did the best I could with what I had at the time. I have to be gracious to myself because when I look back I'm like why did you do that? I did that because I didn't know what else to do, I hadn't spent years of my life at that point working on healing, working on emotional intelligence, working on recognizing the impacts of complex trauma, I didn't even know that there was a term for the way that I behaved in close relationships. I didn't know any of that and at that time I thought I knew everything. I also thought that was going to be the hardest summer in my life, little did I know it would just be one of them. 

To be continued someday, maybe.