Perspective

Recently, I discovered that one of my coworkers, who is an immigrant to this country, had survived the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. I am trying to protect their identity a bit, but they described life as a teenager being besieged in their home city for months in 1992 without running water, or reliable food supply. After the war was over, they came to the US with a mere $50, a college degree, and no idea what to do next. Thankfully, my coworker was able to get on their feet, establish their career here, and now have a growing family.

However, what’s interesting is that if my coworker had never confided their past, I would never have guessed. By all appearances they were just another career adult. I’ve had a coworker who grew up in Palestinian refugee camps in the Middle East, but again, it’s not obvious in a professional work setting and they only confided in me much later in our friendship.

It underscores how many people around you, who by all accounts seem like normal, functional adults, may be carrying terrible traumas in their lives. It is not always wars, natural disasters, and ethnic conflicts either; it can also be personal, domestic traumas, emotional scarring that fades with time, but never fully disappears. It is said that 1 out of 4 women in the US, possibly more, have been abused and that means that out of all the women I work with, correspond with, or hang out with, one out of four, maybe even one out of three of them may be carrying out terrible scars from their past.

And of course, it’s not limited to women, either. It’s not hard to scratch the surface and find men who have also suffered terrible traumas, abuse, etc., and carry this with them for the rest of their lives. I remember my best friend in grade school suffering terrible, physical abuse from his father. He grew into a pretty unhappy teen and eventually the family moved away. I didn’t comprehend any of this until too late, and lost touch with him before we could talk about it together. I’ve always regretted that.

Being an adult is hard enough as it is, but also carrying around terrible traumas makes it even harder because you can never fully erase them. You can move on, find happiness, and still grow as a human being, but the scar will always be there.

My coworker who survived the Yugoslav wars, for their part, told us that they decided not to focus on the past and instead focus on the here and now: kids, career, helping others in the same field, and so on. They joke among other survivors that they still get a bit twitchy sometimes due to their traumatic past. Yet at the same time, they don’t want to be weighed down by it either. They want to move on and look toward the future.

In learning to understand others, I think it’s important to consider painful past they may have had. It doesn’t always excuse the behavior, but it does provide some perspective.