On the Emergency That Doesn’t End

There is a certain kind of wisdom that circulates in jpeg form. That your nervous system is stuck in a past that no longer exists. That the survival skills outlived the emergency. That you are the common denominator. That you just need to regulate, to heal, to put the armor down.

I understand what these ideas are trying to say. I have even found some of them useful, in the way you find useful a map of a country you have never been to yet.

But they assume the emergency ended.

Look around. A significant portion of the people scrolling past those memes are not in peacetime.

They are in the middle of something ongoing — poverty that doesn’t resolve, disability that doesn’t remit, systems that grind rather than support, children with needs the infrastructure wasn’t built for, housing that is one missed payment from gone.

The emergency is not past tense for a lot of us. It is the present continuous tense of our actual lives.

This framework was built for a specific kind of survivor. The one who grew up in chaos but landed somewhere stable. Whose nervous system is still running threat assessments in a neighborhood that no longer requires them. That person is real. Their experience is real. The framework helps them.

But this common “healing space framework” smuggles in an assumption — that survival mode is always a misfiring. That the hypervigilance is always a ghost signal from a war that ended. That if you would just do the work, you could put the armor down and everything would soften.

What if the armor is still load-bearing?

What if your nervous system is not lying to you?

What if it is providing accurate information about current conditions, and the problem is not that you haven’t healed enough to relax, but that the conditions actually require this level of attention?

The work for that person is different. It is not dismantling the survival skills. It is learning which ones are still necessary and which ones are costing more than they’re worth.

It is holding the vigilance lightly enough that it doesn’t eat the joy that exists alongside the difficulty — and there is joy, even here, even now.

It is healing in the middle of the emergency rather than waiting for the emergency to be over first.

That is a different project. It is quieter and slower and less satisfying to render in gold text on a black background. It does not resolve into a lesson. It just continues.

A lot of lives just continue. That is not failure. That is the actual shape of a lot of human experience, particularly for people whose emergencies were never individual pathology but structural reality.

We are not broken people who can’t let go of the past. Some of us are accurately reading the present.

The healing happens anyway, in the margins, between the hard things. Not after them.

It just doesn’t look like the jpeg. And if you’ve never been a native of these depths, your opinion is not useful on how to swim in these waters.

River Saenz Faille

Photo: abandoned asylum in CT by OM