A former partner used to give me a hard time about series spoilers. He would accuse me of having Googled episode endings or reading ahead on long-running shows. At first, it was a joke, but over time, I could see it made him angry, like I was somehow cheating on our shared TV binge.
But the honest truth is that I wasn’t looking ahead. I wasn’t reading up on spoilers. I wasn’t Googling episodes. I just had undiagnosed (at that time) ADHD and excellent pattern recognition.
I could watch a show and guess future plot points. I’m a writer, and it’s a helpful skill. But it wasn’t helpful in a relationship that thought I wasn’t being fair to our shared experience of watching some now-forgettable show.
Life with Pattern Recognition
Pattern recognition is mostly a cool trick. But lately, it doesn’t feel that way. I’m watching the simmering boil of the manosphere, the rise in general bigotry, and the fall of truth, science, and education to people’s opinions.
No matter how innocuous a post, I’m seeing grown men lash out with violent words and threats of violent actions. I’m seeing an undercurrent of hate and a rise of ugliness that people once fought against (and will have to fight against again if they don’t want to drown in it). My children come home and tell of someone using the ableist “R” word or someone using a racist term I haven’t heard in many, many years. I know their parents are from my generation or a closely adjacent one, and it makes me sad that these parents grew older without ever growing up.
It’s a little scary because I’m not just seeing the current damage this is doing. I’m seeing the long-term ramifications of a society that refuses to fact-check anyone and treats facts as if they’re fiction if they don’t align with some preconceived idea. I’m watching people who buy into this hook, line, and sinker grow up to raise children to believe the same. While there’s hope for this future generation, we’re going to need a bigger boat.
Past Trauma and the Trauma We’re Handing Down to the Future
My generation was raised on trauma, and yet, many people can’t see the signs. We hear it every time someone defends spanking because “they turned out just fine.” Adults who think it’s okay to hit children did not, in fact, turn out just fine. They turned out damaged by their own upbringing, and they’ve carried that damage forward to the next generation by not seeing or stopping the cycle.
That’s one example, and it’s hardly the only one. As a trained trauma therapist and a former trauma client, it’s become easy for me to recognize trauma when I see it in the wild. In the parent spanking their child in the big box store. In the entitled Karen screeching for a manager over some small infraction. In the employee who sees every single good idea as an attack on their competence or authority.
There’s a quote: “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical,” and once we’ve learned to see the signs, it’s obvious.
I had signs of my owns, signs I couldn’t see before trauma therapy. Afterward, it became obvious. I could see how I had spent so many years with a disregulated nervous system that I attributed to other issues. With my nervous system regulated, I no longer reacted to the things that once sent me spiraling. It also grew my compassion for people still stuck in that spiral and, often, unable to see it or the damage it creates around them.
Undoing This Damage Won’t Be Quick or Simple
The current damage being done won’t heal quickly or be reversed easily. We’re seeing children raised on fear, hate, and entitlement like never before. We’re seeing entire groups of people championing war, violence, and greed. And we’re not just creating trauma at home. We’re creating it abroad with every act of violence caused by our country.
That ability to see far-reaching patterns is more of a chilling curse than a true gift these days. Because I can see violence and hate multiplying, terrorism rising, and people growing up to hate Americans for what our government has done or endorsed or refused to stand against. There is the trauma done at home with the rise in fundamentalist teachings rearing its ugly, cultish head, but there’s also the ripple effect of those teachings and the actions taken on a global scale as a result of them.
Considering that most adults are walking around with their unhealed trauma showing to anyone trained to see it, it’s a frightening thought to see the impact of that multiplying exponentially over time. If they don’t know they’re hurting, how can they heal? And what hope do future generations have to combat these terrible times?
There’s a Generation Rising with Hope for Better Days Ahead
Strangely, I see another path ahead, another pattern forming. I’m seeing young activists and advocates rising. I see a generation of people coming up who are capable of critical thinking even when the world is shouting about fake news. They are the hope for the future. They are the children who will see the trauma and tackle their healing. They’ll break the cycle because they know it’s the only way to ever create true change.
When the world feels ugly, I do what Mr. Fred Rogers once told us to do: I look for the helpers. I look for the people building community instead of spreading despair. I turn to the individuals who are determined to build a better world even when this one seems to be burning down around us.
It gives me hope. As long as there are people willing to speak up for truth and justice, there’s light in the darkness. There’s a better way forward.
We are the Future Now
There are a lot of people like me with keen powers of pattern recognition, but it’s not enough to see the patterns and give up as if anything we do is fighting for a lost cause. We have to take individual responsibility for our own impact in the world rather than just expecting everyone else to do what we are unwilling to do ourselves. We become the ripple effect the world is waiting for by insisting on a new way of living and being and breathing and loving in this world. A kinder way. A way that considers the ramifications of our actions and takes responsibility for them.
Even with all the patterns I’m seeing that frighten me, I see hopeful ones, too, beyond the youth of the coming generations. I also see women who reach their middle and later years and start to truly unlearn all of society’s useless lessons. We, because I am one of them, become ungovernable, ruled by what we know is right and not what society tells us we should or shouldn’t do. We become fierce and fucking furious, feral and fabulous. We aren’t relegating ourselves to the sidelines or letting anyone else tell us we’re past our prime. We’re too busy living full, interesting lives and, so much of the time, fighting for a better world.
We’re growing regenerative gardens and teaching people to care for the Earth. We’re reducing our carbon impact and becoming conscious consumers. Many of us are even becoming intentional creators, moving into the arts or crafts or other fascinating areas of interest. We aren’t fading. We’re ripening into who we always knew we could be and dreaming of a world that could bloom just as beautifully, too, if more people cared to tend it.
A Future, Predicted
I watch the world, and I recognize the patterns. I’m not looking for spoilers. I’m not trying to read into astrological predictions or see the future in trending forecasts. We once thought the future would be hoverboards and flying cars, not Biff as President and the emboldening of cults and hate groups. I can’t say what’s going to happen next, but I can see patterns forming. I know what could be. I try my best to lean into the hope and not the fear.
Because fear is the problem, isn’t it? It’s what fuels the hate, whether it’s for a race of people we don’t understand or a spider we’ve never seen before. If we can hate something, we can devalue it. If we can devalue it, we can harm it and absolve ourselves of that harm. We can even convince ourselves it was the right thing to do. We see people who live like this all the time.
But there’s a flipside, too. There are the people who see someone or something they don’t understand. They don’t lash out in hate. They sit with their discomfort. They decide to become curious. They expand their knowledge. They honor living beings, even if they are different. They hold space for those differences, maybe even come to appreciate them over time. When we see people like this, we remember to hope.
We can choose fear or curiosity. We can pass down trauma just as it was given to us, or we can heal and do things differently. We can create a better world than the one we got or we can live it all the worse off for our presence. We get to choose. Some days, that fills me with despair.
But then, I see a child hold open the door for someone to walk through it. I see an act of kindness extended to someone who clearly needed it. I see people building community and planting gardens and making the world a little better every day. And I am filled with hope.
So, I add to that hope. I pour into it. I am reminded to hold open the door and to extend compassion and to put a random act of kindness into the world. I am inspired to build the community and plant the garden and share something that makes life brighter and better than it was a moment before. I am the ripple, and you are the ripple, and when things are hard, we have to remember that this matters.
The future isn’t written already. We are writing it. For all the pain I see being put into the world, I remember that there’s healing rippling outward, too. May it be enough.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Ksenia Yakovleva on Unsplash
