Muscle Memory
It was the day after the election, and I was sobbing uncontrollably into my girlfriend’s shoulder as she held me. We had been walking through her living room when my emotions erupted, and had she not held me in that moment, I would have doubled over on the floor. The election results were — are — absolutely devastating, but that’s not why I was crying. Not in that moment, anyway. The idea that the majority of the electorate had affirmatively chosen to return Trump to the presidency was a reality that had only begun to truly assert itself upon us, our bewilderment and anxiety still to congealing into grief, fear, and a stinging sense of betrayal. My feelings about this cruel pivot in history isn’t what caused my meltdown in that moment, though it surely primed my nervous system for it.
Earlier that afternoon, my girlfriend Kristina and I were going about the day’s business in a kind of stunned reverie, sadness and tension permeating everything we did and said. Her mother had come over to help with some work in the yard. Kristina lives on an enormous plot of farmland, and she has big ambitions for what she might do with it. Only having lived there for about a year now, there is still a lot of work to be done, and just about all of it is going to be done by her and her family. Oh, and me too of course, here and there.
That day’s bit of drudgery was to move some logs from one part of the yard and into another. I don’t think I was told why, and it didn’t matter. I’m just there to help. Anyway, I’m an indoor cat with little experience or interest in, as the kids say, “touching grass,” but these did not seem to qualify as “logs” to me. They were about ten feet long and ten inches thick, which, to my mind, makes them not logs but trees. Trees that happened to be laying on the ground. In any case, they were very long logs, and they were also, well, waterlogged, so they were also very, very heavy. Now, Kristina and I are both capable of hauling heavy things around, but neither of us are what you’d call “buff.” Her mother is probably made of stronger stuff than both of us, but she’s in her 70s.
All three of us were a little taken aback by how heavy these damn things were, but we were determined. We made a valiant effort to move the first “log,” managing to carry it about 20 feet to its new location (again, I have no idea why), but as we lowered it to its resting place, I got a stab of pain in my back and we had to let the thing go more suddenly than we intended, which was fine.
I was not fine, though. The pain in my back wasn’t debilitating, but the suddenness of it exacerbated my already foul and tender emotional state. Backing away from the dropped log (tree), another shock of pain, this time in my right knee. Ever since my long bout with covid in early 2023, my knees have never been the same, and they often zap me with some sort of nerve pinch in the most benign of ambulatory circumstances, rendering me suddenly unable to walk. Yes, it really sucks!
And it sucked here too. My back pulled, a log dropped, and my knee buckling, I was doing all I could to keep my wits about me.
Kristina’s mom, absolutely trying to make me feel better about it all, said something like, “Well, we’re more used to this kind of work,” meaning that it makes sense to her that I’d more easily get hurt than her or Kristina, who both do this kind of stuff all the time — by choice!
But that’s not how I took it in that moment. I already felt embarrassed, and I took her mom’s gentle comment as a sort of attack, like she was pointing out what a sissy I am.
I didn’t respond to it that way, but I did limp back to the house in what probably appeared to be a hurried huff. But it wasn’t a huff. I couldn’t have expressed it in words at the time, but I was experiencing a kind of panic. I went inside the house and Kristina’s dog, having been left out of the all the fun the humans were obviously having outside, was desperate for attention and scampered into my path and fussed underfoot. It was too much for me and I yelled, in a crescendo, “Stop, stop, stop, stop, STOP!!!” I collapsed into a chair and sat with my heart pounding and my eyes as wide as dinner plates.
Kristina, with incredible patience and tenderness, sat with me and offered me love and comfort as best she could. I couldn’t look her in the eye or speak in anything more than curt single syllables. For what it’s worth, I used those syllables to convey that I sincerely appreciated what she was doing for me, that I was deeply sorry for being in this state, and that I was unable to make eye contact. I was, essentially, trapped, a temporary prisoner of my nervous system now in full fight-or-flight. She heard me and she understood.
Once I thought my emotions had sufficiently settled (they hadn’t), I got up from the chair and we walked into the living room. It was there that I explained to Kristina a part of what I thought had triggered me into what I now know was an attack of post-traumatic stress.
Late one night a little over 14 years ago, I was getting off the Metro stop at the Stadium-Armory station in Washington, D.C. I had recently quit my day job in political communications in order to try being a stay-at-home daddy to my son who was about 11 months old at the time. Instead of working a 9-to-5 in an office, I’d work nights and weekends at a retail store in Arlington. I had just finished my second day of training at the store and was returning home to my apartment where I lived with my wife at the time and our son.
It was probably 11:30 or so at night. I bounded up the stairs from the station and out into the open air, where a group of what I assume were teenagers were laughing and being rowdy. This was not uncommon, but they made me uncomfortable in the way that I always am when around a group of people who are loudly laughing about something to which I am not privy.
I started my walk home, just a couple of blocks from the stop, and about a quarter of the way there, I heard the sounds of very fast footfalls behind me. Before I could even think about what was happening, I had been struck extremely hard by something (a bat?) in the back of the head and I fell face first on the ground.
I was kicked and punched and beaten, over and over. My assailants demanded my wallet and phone without giving me the chance to produce them. When I tried to rise to give them what they wanted, they knocked me down again, stomping, kicking, hitting me with something. Eventually, my phone, wallet, and keys slid out of my pants pocket, and when they realized this, they grabbed my things and ran, leaving me on the ground.
After some period of time that I can’t remember, I managed to stand up. My glasses were gone and it was night, so I could barely see, but I did my best. I was so dizzy from the beatings that when I first tried to walk I veered and collapsed into someone’s fence. I righted myself and walked home. I pounded on our door, leaving streaks of blood. My wife, Jessica, opened the door and saw my battered face, and would later tell me what a trauma that sight alone had been, that I looked like I had come from a horror movie.
I have written about this event in more detail here. And obviously, I survived, though I certainly wasn’t confident of that at the time. I recovered at home, with Jessica’s diligent and tender care. Mostly I was shown incredible kindness, even by relative strangers — a local secular humanist group I had once spoken to sent a care package.
When relatives visited, though, I recall an awkwardness I couldn’t put my finger on. Looking back, it was almost like they were little afraid of me, like I might infect them with a mugging virus or something.
And then at least two men in our family said something like this to me: Well, if you knew some martial arts or had some self defense training, this might not have happened.
You can imagine how I took that.
If I hadn’t been such a coward, I could have dealt with my attackers. If I hadn’t been such a sissy, I could have fought back. But I’m small and weak, not enough of a man, and it was my own fault.
And I carried that, right along with the rest of the trauma of that night.
I had many years of therapy, and we took all of this head-on. Those men were really just making themselves feel better, my therapist assured me. They were projecting their own fear onto me, because they need to believe it can’t happen to them. I understood. I thought I had dealt with this. I thought I had moved on.
But that humiliation, that shame, was still deep inside me, packed as dense as a neutron star.
This is also about the election.
I had been cautiously optimistic about a Harris victory, but I knew that it was essentially a coin flip as to who would win. Fearing a second Trump presidency, I had been lightly researching what it was like in other countries with authoritarian governments. What kind of day-to-day life could we expect?
After the election, I asked my friend, the writer Emily Hauser, about this, correctly suspecting she’d have some insight. I asked her what she knew about life in autocracies, whether they still get to lead creative lives and enjoy art, whether they get to go out and be with friends, whether they can make newsletters and blogs and social media. “Can they live somewhat normally or is it all Stasi and Mad Forest Iliescu and internment camps?”
“On the one hand, yes, people keep making art and sharing useful information,” she replied. “On the other hand, people do those things but also know the constraints they’re working under and gradually (or in Russia’s case, all along) do those things within the framework of those constraints.”
“I also think it’s a good idea to remember that when Putin took over Russia, it was after the only decade in which the people in that region had anything remotely like democracy or the kinds of civil freedoms that you and I are used to,” she said. “They had no expectations or muscle memory of anything else, whereas we do. We won’t be Russia on January 21, if only for that reason. The question is how well Americans will use those muscle memories and that knowledge.”
This was quite enlightening for me, and even a little encouraging. (Not encouraging for Russians, mind you.)
Regardless of the actual realities of our relative liberties at any given time, Americans feel like they are a free people. We are used to at least being under the impression that we are free to live our lives and speak our minds as we wish. Put aside, for now, how some groups enjoy rights not enjoyed by another group, or how we are led to believe we are entirely masters of our own destinies when this is, generously, a major exaggeration. Be they MAGA-hat wearing Trump cultists or latte-sipping coastal elites, Americans identify as free. They live their lives and conduct their interactions with the rest of society as free people. If they do not perceive themselves to be free, they aspire and fight to be free. That’s our muscle memory. That gives me some hope, that as the right-wing vice tightens, that muscle will twitch and flex and resist.
Unlike me, on that night fourteen years ago, we will at least be able to see it coming.
In Kristina’s living room, on November 6, 2024, I told her that I knew I was overreacting to everything. I told her that her mom’s benign comment, about how I’m not used to this kind of farm work, had sort of reminded me of those admonitions from the men who told me I should have been able to fend off my attackers all those years ago. I was only about halfway through with the sentence explaining all of this when my emotions erupted, and Kristina had to catch me as I cried into her shoulder.
“They came up from behind me!” I shouted in between sobs. “They ran up behind me and hit me in the back of the head! They knocked me to the ground before I knew they were there!” Tears flowing, gasping for air as I cried, I was pleading with the world to forgive me, to excuse me for being beaten to a pulp on the street. I was trying to exorcise fourteen years of shame.
As I was being beaten to the ground on that awful night fourteen years ago, along with the extraordinary pain, I experienced feelings I knew quite well: the feeling of being small, revolting, unhuman. I felt the way I did throughout all the years of bullying and harassment I endured in middle and high school, the feeling I carry with me well into adulthood. I felt like the universe had caught me trying to pass myself off as normal, as a regular human, and now I was going to be punished. Again. When I was a kid, it was vicious mockery and public humiliation and as much physical violence as a bully could get away with. Three decades later, it was a merciless beating from two assailants whose faces I would never see. It was, in a way, familiar.
Donald Trump is a bully. He is the ur-bully, leading a movement fueled by cruelty. He and the Republican Party and the rightwing movement have vomited avalanches of lies and misinformation into the public consciousness, but there is one thing that neither Trump nor his followers have misled anyone about: that they are eager to use their power to hurt people, to take those who are already marginalized and in pain and shove their faces into the dirt. This is no mystery. This is no hidden agenda. This is their chief selling point, and the country is buying.
A majority of the electorate has not just sided with the bullies, like the onlookers who laugh as one kid mocks and beats up a smaller kid. My fellow Americans have declared that this is who we are. This is what they aspire to. The cruelty, as they say, is the point.
It is no wonder then, in the shock of this national betrayal, that this old wound of mine might reopen. My muscle memory is of living in a world dominated by those who actively sought my humiliation, who were fueled by my pain. That mugging fourteen years ago, though likely just another arbitrary criminal act of violence that could have happened to almost anyone, nonetheless felt — feels — like one more instantiation of that world. The election of Donald Trump by a firm majority of voters feels like that too.
My survival strategy, as a terrified kid in school and as an adult in the wider world, has been to shrink, to blend, and above all, to mask. That’s also my muscle memory.
I’ve also been doing the work, as they say. I’ve been training other muscles, striving to write and believe a new narrative for myself about who I am. Even though I entirely fell apart in Kristina’s arms, sobbing and arguing with phantoms, that act itself was a kind of unmasking, an exercising of new muscles. Because I wasn’t pretending to be okay. I wasn’t going along to get along. I wasn’t conceding to my own diminishment.
I was being exquisitely vulnerable, insisting on the truth, and being who and whatever I was in that moment, devastation and all. That, in itself, felt a little like being free.
That’s a memory too.
