bombs in bottles
This tweet has lived rent-free in my mind since the day it dropped:
The rotating cow mental image still makes me giggle. But I let this tweet hang around because, in a sense, it does pay rent: The more I think about it, the more useful it becomes.
In the original draft of this post, this was where I started quoting Viktor Frankl and Bessel van der Kolk. Instead, try this: picture the space in your mind. Just sit with it for a second. Close your eyes, if that helps.
Maybe there's a cow in there. Maybe it's rotating. Maybe there are many cows, or no cows; many rotations or no rotations. Maybe you are aggressively imagining an octopus because fuck your sterns and fuck your prows, I won't imagine your fuckin' cows.
Whichever response you're having, it's valid. Because it's yours. That space in your mind is *yours.* And within that space, the police cannot stop you.
This - to return to Citation Land - is what Viktor Frankl was getting at in "Man's Search for Meaning." During his time in a WWII concentration camp, Frankl realized that the one thing over which we have control is the space in our minds - the space that exists between a stimulus and our response. Occupying that space, enlarging it, making it his, helped Frankl survive the camps. He had indeed found a place the cops could not touch him.
Similarly, In "The Body Keeps the Score," Bessel van der Kolk writes that "trauma" is not something that can be quantified, and there is no "minimum trauma level" that triggers the development of PTSD. Thus comparing combat to child abuse, say, is pointless.
Rather, the factor that most influences whether someone will develop post-traumatic stress symptoms is whether the person experiences a *loss of control* during a traumatic event. Thus two siblings can grow up in the same abusive household, but only one is plagued by flashbacks in later life; two soldiers can face the same threat, but only one ends up with a PTSD diagnosis. The experience of control, or lack thereof, influences whether the brain records that event as traumatic or simply as intensively stressful.
To me, the rotating cow has come to symbolize that control, and also that sense of freedom. I have learned the hard way there is little "control" in a world full of external forces - people, animals, weather, ICE, physics.
In the space inside my skull, though, I can exert control. Those few cubic inches are mine. I can expand the gap between stimulus and response. I can step into that gap and choose my response, whether or not I could predict or control the stimulus. I can rotate infinite cows in infinite space.
And the cops cannot stop me.
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