Looking back on 2024, I decided to make a list of all my wins, big and small. But lists like that are tedious to make and irrelevant to anyone other than me. The fact that I got into the grad school of my choice after figuring out what I want to do with my life was my biggest win, but existentially this is uninteresting to anyone but me. The fact that I fixed my toilet using a YouTube tutorial is especially uninteresting, even to me. A win, but boring.
Instead I will describe one win that may be of interest to those of you who are struggling, healing, or unaware of your own constellation of complex traumas.
***
It was a beautiful day in October. October 2024 was unseasonable warm thanks to climate change. My kids didn’t have to wear their jackets over their Halloween costumes last year. Climate change is really nice in the short term, especially if you live in my part of the world.
I drove to Whole Foods to return something I’d bought from Amazon. I don’t shop at Whole Foods, mind you, because poor people don’t shop at Whole Foods. They never get past the Amazon return station when they walk into the store. They will drive 12 more minutes to Walmart where their wallets belong.
When I pressed the ignition button to turn off the car, the lights on the dashboard began to blink wildly, all the lights, blinking like a nightmare Christmas show in October. I know nothing about cars other than how to drive it, but this seemed very wrong. I was alarmed. I tried to restart the car and again the crazy light show. No sound of the motor turning on.
My alarm system was now fully online.
As I sat there in my car wondering what new hell was this, I recalled seeing the change oil signal coming on every day for the past 3 weeks. The week before I had booked an appointment at the local dealership to get an oil change and I was due there next week. Could this have something to do with the oil not being changed in time?
Of course it does, I guffawed impatiently. I had ignored the car’s signals, proceeded to drag my feet to get my truck fresh oil, and now I was stuck at a Whole Foods parking lot. My inner critic was pissed. Hell. I was pissed.
So I did what any woman who no longer has a husband or friends in the area does in this situation: she turns to ChatGPT, her online handyman, guru, copyeditor, Google. ChatGPT is available at my beck and call. I can carry him in my pocket. He’s never busy. He’s never impatient. None of my questions are stupid to ChatGPT.
I needed to avoid calling a tow company because I didn’t have money for this sort of shit. My monthly budget was and continues to be extremely tight. So I asked ChatGPT, My car has stalled. I think it needs oil. What should I do?
I decided to head over to the grocery store near Whole Foods. Giant is like Safeway, Trader Joe’s, or Loblaws (if you’re Canadian). A little fancier than Market Basket. It’s for people who are too poor for Whole Foods and too well off to drive that extra 12 minutes to Walmart or Aldi. I knew Giant sold oil for small motorized vehicles. Whole Foods does not sell motor oil, btw, because they don’t believe in it.
Anyway, I had purchased some oil for my John Deere from Giant several month before. I was hoping they had car motor oil as well. So I headed over there by foot.
Now, I live in one of those upper middle class towns where sidewalks aren’t ubiquitous. This is because the rich people who own the homes don’t want sidewalks creeping onto their property line. Besides, they don’t walk. They have cars that they drive everywhere. Why would they need to have their tax dollars get spent on sidewalks they’re never going to use? I’m sure they had second thoughts about this antisocial position during the pandemic, and then quickly returned to their individualistic ways of thinking once the mask mandates were lifted.
The point is, the only people who walk around here are poor people who can’t afford a car.
I often see this woman waiting for the bus in front of the country club I drive by on the way to pick up my kid from school. She stands on the grassy area by the road where there is no curb, no bench for her to sit on while she waits, no concrete sidewalk to put down her backpack, no shelter against bad weather. Not even a bus stop sign! She obviously commutes by bus to work at this country club, a place whose members want to pretend there is no bus stop in front of their hang out spot, no people who need to ride buses. I bet they believe bussing is something that only happens in other parts of the world. I always feel bad for her as I drive by. I also think, thank god I have a car.
My point is that I was suddenly one of these people who had to walk to get to where they wanted to go. I felt conspicuous. I felt judged. I bet that woman feels judged. Who gives a fuck what they think? said my inner critic. You need motor oil.
Once at the grocery store, I was presented with many grades of motor oil, which meant nothing to me other than that they had different prices. I ChatGPT’d which grade of oil my Silverado needed, ignored ChatGPT’s advice, and bought 2 quarts of the cheapest bottles. I had the wherewithal to slip into the bathroom at the grocery store and grab a giant wad of toilet paper for the dip stick before I left. I had learned about the dipstick when I changed the oil and filter on the John Deere mentioned above.
Now, the proper procedure to adding oil to your oil tank is to find the dip stick, pull it out, check the current oil level, and add fresh oil in conservative amounts, checking the level regularly with each addition so that you don’t over fill it. Overfilling is bad for some reason.
After getting the hood up, I couldn’t immediately locate the dip stick. How could the dipstick be hidden? said my inner critic. That makes no sense. Well, it’s not here.
I stood there, staring into my car, peripherally aware of Whole Food shoppers parking their well oiled machines or returning to their well oiled machines with their insanely expensive groceries. I imagined they were looking at this frumpy, middle aged, Asian woman in their parking lot with the hood of her truck exposing its useless guts to the world. OMG, they thought. She drives a gas guzzler. She’s destroying the planet. This weather is so awesome and it’s all her fault.
And of course like anyone who sees someone having car trouble on the side of the road or see someone pulled over by the police, they all thought the same thing as they soundlessly drove away in their Teslas: Thank God I’m not her!
Without being able to locate the dipstick, I decided to dump both bottles into the oil tank. And just as I stood there tipping the second container as its contents glugged into my car, I spotted the bright yellow dipstick handle.
I overfilled the oil tank. Not too much, but a little bit. But what is a little bit? I don’t know. Too late now. Moving on!
At this point, I should have ChatGPT’d my next steps, but I didn’t, because I was in a state of mind that made me impulsive and short sighted. Instead, I needed to do something, so I pushed the ignition button again. And again. And nothing happened except that damnable light show every time.
I sat there breathing shallow breaths through my mouth wondering if this was when I was supposed to start screaming, or cry, or pound the steering wheel, or mutter angrily as I stomped around the car, or call my mother. Out in the parking lot of Whole Foods, the grocery store equivalent to health inducing crystals, meditation, mindfulness, and hemp clothing, maybe this was when and where I was supposed to freak out.
But before doing that, I decided to talk to ChatGPT. Let the oil settle for 5 minutes before turning the ignition, they said. They had some further instructions, but I didn’t read on because I was having a hard time reading words. My eyeballs were fidgety. So, I set a timer on my phone and sat there waiting, shaking my leg, looking at the timer. As soon as the timer rang, I pressed the ignition button again. Nothing.
I let out a loud gutteral sigh. What the fuck? Why isn’t this working? I remembered seeing more words from ChatGPT that I hadn’t read. So, I went back to them and I read on. Reset the oil level on the car’s computer manually. What the fuck? You mean the car doesn’t know that I slightly overfilled the oil tank? Isn’t there a sensor for these things? I have to tell the car’s brain that it’s oil tank is full? What the fuck kind of brain is that? Totally detached from its guts?
I suddenly felt sympathy for the car.
Fine. Let’s do this. How the hell do I do this? YouTube it! I YouTubed detailed instructions for manually resetting the oil change information on a Silverado. Done.
Then I tried pressing ignition again. And to my relief–a kind of relief that I cannot adequately describe in words except to say that it was like when the forever falling through the darkest of holes finally stops and I wake up from that nightmare on a solid bed–it started.
***
What I recall most vividly from this experience was how my whole body started shaking, especially my hands, when I saw the light show disappear and heard the motor turn over and hum again. I had been in such a state of fear–fear that I may have seized the motor, fear of having to spend time to look for a car to buy, fear of missing classes and having to catch up somehow until I could get a car, fear that I would have to buy another car with money I didn’t have, fear of the future charges to my credit card, fear of the interest rates that would bury me and tank my credit score, fear of not having enough to pay my mortgage and bills, fear becoming homeless and starving and losing my kids.
For me with my history and complex trauma, this oil problem became an existential crisis in my mind and in my body.
I had been in this state of fear the whole time I was troubleshooting my car situation. It reached a level of fear that surpassed all reason, achieving an intensity that lasted over an hour. Something that only someone who was having a trauma response could experience. The strange and surprising part was I had been only vaguely aware of the discomfort while trying to get my car started. I dissociated. Well enough that I could think enough to follow ChatGPT’s directions.
Only once the car started and the threat to my existence had passed, did I become aware of my body as it released all the energy that had built up in my system to fight or flee this terrifying situation. I only noticed how tense my body had been once it began to shake loose.
It was just the way Peter Levine described it in his book, Waking the Tiger, about how mammals react after fight/flight situations. Sitting in the cab of my truck, I shook. My hands shook. My arms shook. I could feel my back muscles balling up and popping, pushing against the backrest. Even the muscles on my face were twitching. I didn’t tell myself to snap out of it. I didn’t force the shaking to stop. I didn’t rush out of the parking lot. I had learned enough from Levine’s book about how trauma happens, to not interfere with my shaking, but allow my body to come to homeostasis. It knew what to do.
So this is what it feels like, I remember thinking after the shaking subsided.
The whole thing was a powerfully informative first hand experience of what could have been a potentially retraumatizing experience. Instead I managed to guide it away from becoming a reinforcing trauma and into a healing experience.
***
The 3 things I learned:
One, I’m far more capable of problem solving car problems than I realized. The smartphone gives me access to so much car care information in the palm of my hand. The answers I need can likely be found on my own and performed on my own. With help from ChatGPT. It’s so liberating, especially as a single woman with a car. AI is a feminist ally.
Two, the repeated financial abuse perpetrated by my ex for the past year and a half has traumatized me. My brain has become rigid in the response I have to anything that upsets or could upset my budget. My mind and body races down the paths emotional and physical responses that reflect catastrophic financial nightmares, even when it’s not the case. Because once I calmed down, the possibility of losing a car and having to go into debt by getting a car loan for a Corolla isn’t catastrophic. It’s a set back, but manageable in due time. There was no reality in believing that I would become homeless or starve. That was the level of crisis my trauma response took me. But it’s not real.
Three, the release of the fight/flight energy takes longer than I expected. It depends, of course, on the level of activation a person experiences. If you give yourself the time and space to see through the whole cycle of fear response, you build resilience to the next time something happens to trigger that same trauma response. You’re reaction is a little less intense and your recovery is quicker. I learned this when my battery died the following month and I fixed that on my own, too. I was much calmer, I could think more clearly so that I could take in the YouTube instructions more readily. Far less frantic.
Yeah. The oil-change-car-stall incident was my biggest win/breakthrough moment of 2024.
***
Looking forward to 2025, I want more than anything to sign my divorce papers. That’s it. Everything else I feel I can control or problem solve with ChapGPT.
I want my ex officially removed from me–physically, emotionally, and legally. I get that we have children together so he will be a satellite in my life, probably forever, but I want that satellite to be as distant as possible, so distant that he may one day skip out of orbit and float away into the abyss. And related to this, I am looking forward to returning to signing all my documents with my given name, Lee. Hairee Lee was always so much better than Hairee Hayden. The latter never looked right or sounded or felt right. I’m looking forward to getting my name right again.
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