Invisible wounds, shattered dreams and post-traumatic growth.

This Thursday, February 4th, will mark the 6th month anniversary of the Beirut Blast. For thousands, time stood still on this fateful day. For thousands, it is still August 4th at 6:07.
 
In Lebanon, we recognize the sounds of war. We can tell if a jet is cruising high above or is a missile or a drone. We know because our parents taught us to recognize these sounds and make sense of them to better cope with them. On August 4th, though, we witnessed something different. The detonation of 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate produced a massive explosion that devastated Beirut's port and all the surrounding areas. Nearly 200 people died, 6,500 were injured, and around 300,000 were displaced.

I was in the mountains when it happened. Sitting in the garden, overlooking the view towards the Beirut port, we first heard a rumbling, and the earth shook slightly. Jets, my mother said, and continued her crossword puzzle. In a split second, the mushroom cloud overtook my field of vision. I’m unsure if I first saw, heard, or felt the explosion. The house shook to its core, and I worried glass might shatter inside where my nieces played. I grabbed my phone and looked at mum. She was already calling my sister. I called my brother’s wife. No answer. I couldn’t stop looking at the fucking cloud. Was it nuclear? Was it war? Was it negligence? I turned to Twitter for answers. The timeline was filled with utter panic. Conflicting information flying about. My phone was blowing up with messages. R u ok? 4 letters to condense the panic. 4 letters because there wasn’t enough time to check on everyone we knew. 

Once again, we entered a state of collective trauma. We entered a state of shock. Some people think what has not happened in 15 years of civil war has happened in three seconds. This comes on top of the country's economic crisis, political instability, and COVID-19 pandemic and has taken a toll on the mental health of many people who feel insecure, depressed, and anxious.

In the first few days after the explosion, before we had time to process the magnitude of this ferocious incident, people had already started sweeping up glass debris and healing all kinds of wounds. Perhaps though more perniciously, no one tended to the invisible wounds caused by trauma. There was a whirlwind of efforts to start reconstruction immediately. Everyone was busy replacing glass, mending doors, painting walls, and refurbishing furniture. 

For a month, I sat in the mountains taking care of the kids while my siblings tended to our broken homes. I remember the next day after the explosion, seated under a tree with my 8-year-old niece and asking her what track we should listen to. She suggested playing the song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." I distracted myself from the agony by playing that song multiple times a day. I mostly sat in the hammock, trying to process what had just happened. 

In an attempt to self-medicate, I started smoking pot again. This lasted a couple of months, leading my psychiatrist to up my antipsychotics again. I needed to numb the pain and be in a secondary state to handle the surrounding environment. Perhaps even more absurdly, I wanted to be in physical and mental denial. I felt guilty that I had not been injured while others suffered immensely or lost their lives. I felt ashamed that I could shelter myself in the mountains while others were busy rebuilding their shattered homes. It was survivor’s guilt, and my psychologist assessed it to be mild and manageable. How else could we have coped?

While I initially had an unquenchable thirst for information and devoured every media, medium, and feed I could get, I soon learned that watching a tree could benefit my mental health. I eventually got my hands on the pictures of the devastation in our family home. We could have been severely injured and disfigured by the explosion. Just the image, the possibility of being there, was haunting. 

However harrowing these thoughts could be, we stoically and bravely went about our business. While the immediate scars are starting to heal, thanks to extraordinary efforts on the ground, the deep, visible, and invisible wounds in a country experiencing multiple emergencies will require sustained empathy, love, and kindness. 

When we struggle and life has pushed us into a corner, we go into survival mode and find skills and strengths we never knew we had. This allows us to grow and be more resilient in life.

Kintsugi is a centuries-old Japanese art of fixing cracked pottery. Rather than hide the cracks, the technique involves rejoining the broken pieces with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. The whole pottery looks as beautiful as ever when put back together, even while owning its broken history.

I’m wondering whether we will have a second life at this time in history. When put back together, will we recover with dignity and grace? Science suggests that we will not only heal but also demonstrate the immense human capacity for resiliency and growth.

Resilience is the ability of people who have experienced a highly life-threatening or traumatic event to maintain relatively stable, healthy psychological and physical functioning levels.
In fact, many who experience trauma show incredible resilience and thrive in the aftermath of the traumatic event. 

Studies show that most trauma survivors do not develop PTSD; many even report growth from their experience. Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun coined the term “posttraumatic growth” to capture this phenomenon, defining it as the positive psychological change experienced due to the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances.

These seven areas of growth have been reported to spring from adversity:

• Greater appreciation of life
• Greater appreciation and strengthening of close relationships
• Increased compassion and altruism
• The identification of new possibilities or a purpose in life
• Greater awareness and utilization of personal strengths
• Enhanced spiritual development
• Creative growth

We tend to rely on a particular set of beliefs and assumptions about the benevolence and controllability of the world. Traumatic events typically shatter that worldview as we become shaken from our ordinary perceptions and are left to rebuild ourselves and our worlds.

As Viktor Frankl put it, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

Times are difficult right now, and it may seem so far away before we can become whole again. Nevertheless, the latest research on posttraumatic growth offers hope that we will become stronger, more creative, and with a more profound sense of meaning than we ever had before.

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