The cyclical nature of just about everything is a concept that I’ve become more and more preoccupied with throughout the years. And I’ve been thinking about it a lot especially lately as my current WIP uses it as a backdrop for everything that happens.

And, yes, I’m still working on the same story I was nearly done with several weeks ago. I started last weekend thinking I would finish it because I had only two chapters left. Then I wrote three chapters and I still somehow have two chapters left. So, this weekend? For real this time?

Maybe.

I had a thought earlier this week that if and when I write my memoirs, the title will likely have something to do with the cyclical nature of all things and how that is both a blessing and a curse. Ouroboros might be an apt title. Or Spirals. Every End Is a Start. Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end?

At this point, I feel like I’m creating a collection in my head of phrases and images that could fit that theme.

I love the Ouroboros myth (metaphor? ideation?), but at least in my learning of it, it’s only ever a destructive thing, and I want to focus on both sides of the repetition in life. Then again, maybe it’s still an apt title, because I saw only the negative side of it for a long time. And my main reason for wanting to write my own memoirs is to write about intergenerational trauma.

Like the serpent devours itself from the tail up, unaware that there can be no good ending to this situation, it often seems like generation trauma is an all-devouring and inescapable curse. Worse yet, the longer you live, the more you see the cycles going back through the generations. You start to see the cycle repeat in the new generations, and that can be debilitating.

Because your own experience with trauma is so emotionally charged, when you see anything even remotely tied to it happen again, it can feel like you’ve failed at breaking the cycle entirely. It’s easy to get disheartened by all the things you have no power to change.

Today, I was thinking about that concept of spirals, feeling out how fitting it might be for such a topic. And it got me thinking. Spirals can be very different, depending on how you draw them. If we view them as a 3D object, then looking at them from the top down, they look very small, very orderly. They might even look like a single circle if they’re layered perfectly on top of one another. And when hand drawn, two spirals are ever quite the same.

I think generational trauma is like this. It only looks the same from one person to the next if viewed from one specific angle. But the truth is that it will never look exactly the same for two different people. So while the “gist” of the trauma may be the same, the experience will never be.

Because the truth is even if the trauma has been passed down from forefather or foremother to child for generations, it’ll never be identical for any two people. You may have had no choice in this thing that was given to you, but you do have a choice in what you do with it. How you handle it. 

Each generation will have its own version of the experience. They will have their own perspectives and their own support systems and their own coping mechanisms. They will handle things differently.

And you can’t do anything about how other people handle it. That’s the hardest part for me to accept. You can’t make others make better choices. You can’t make them break the cycle. You can only make your own decisions and try to support others. But what they do is ultimately up to them.

To bring this back to the cyclical nature of life, the key point I want to hone in on here is even more specific. Because, yes, most things in life seem to repeat. Seasons. Traumas. History. But even when things repeat, they’re never exact the same.

I don’t have an exact name right now for this specific concept, but there is one place that I keep going back to because it captures it so well. This is, of all things, a song from the cartoon Adventure Time:

The child in the song leaves a toy outside and is delighted to find that it stayed “exactly” where she left it. But then she realizes that the toy was not exactly as she left it. Even though the toy had stayed in the same place, unmoving and unacting, it was still different when she came to retrieve it.

So too is generational trauma ever-evolving. And even when it feels like we’re not progressing at all, we might find ourselves changed.

Just because you can’t fix every part of your own trauma doesn’t mean you haven’t succeeded. 

Everything stays. But it still changes. 

Ever so slightly. 

Daily and nightly. 

In little ways. 

Everything stays.