Katrina Jirik
Kate Jirik received her PhD in 2019 from the University of Minnesota. She is a disability historian, a disability activist, and a poet. She has presented papers on both disability history and current issues regarding disability in professional settings. She serves on the boards of local, state and national committees, bringing to them a lived experience of disability. She gives guest lectures on how to think about disability differently. As a poet, she strives to convey the complicated ethos of disability, from the joys to the sorrows.
Interview Response Poetry:
Connections to Loneliness
In the midst of crowds you stand alone
Encased in a shimmer of invisibility
That forces you to move through
The physical environment without recognition
By any of its inhabitants
Amid, yet apart
Never interacting on the same plane
For you are alone with the wellspring
Of ever present fear
Of retribution, for what
You have no idea
Having learned that connections
Only bring uncertainty and trauma
Ending in the necessity of complete withdrawal
You listen to the voices
Not able to process the sounds
Because they are formed around concepts
That were tainted, poisoned
When your learning was maliciously corrupted
Before you even knew
That you lived isolated in a trauma life
Muted because there are no connections
No vocabulary, no interpersonal anything
That allows you to reach out
Hoping for some sort of recognition
Of your existence
Even if there is no understanding
That you live a trauma life
That shimmer of invisibility
Constrains your ability to reach out
Because as you try to evade the shimmer
It entwines your arm
Using fear to prevent your movement
Your desire for connections
Adding another layer of gossamer steel fabric
Until there seems to be no way out
And the crowd of people has no way
To recognize the shimmer
Holds you in captivity
Maintaining its potent stranglehold
While you struggle to
Protect at least a shred of your humanity
And the connections among people
Are impossible for you to understand
Because the shimmer distorts
The interactions, much like a shattered mirror
Provides no coherent image
So you glean only pieces
Of scattered reflections
You exist only within yourself
Isolated, confused, lonely
With limited understanding of the concepts
Because it is what always has been
You’re ensnared in your present
Because there was no different past
To compare it to, no future to anticipate change
So you exist within the shimmer
Moving hesitantly in the incomprehensible world
Trying to reconstruct the mirror shards
Until you realize that you
No longer have all the pieces
That you are alone
Your only connection is to soul draining aloneness.
Resilience
From Merriam Webster: resilience is an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.
Well, you now understand why the word resilience
Generates such a negative response
Because it has nothing in common
With ongoing trauma
You’re supposed to bounce back
To your pre-existing state
But how do you return to being a fetus?
Resilience assumes there was a before
And then an after
That there is a good thing to return to
That you emerge stronger
That there are no negative consequences
From a simple misfortune or trauma
Ah, but you know differently
Because it wasn’t a simple trauma
The trauma encapsulated your life
It altered your perceptions
|It was never ending
Always maliciously conniving
To keep you in a cage of fear
Consumed by night terrors
And daytime scourges of debilitating memories
There is no prior time
Of goodness and light to return to
Because you can’t remember a beginning
Only the everlasting dungeon of fear
From the APA: strategies to increase your capacity for resilience. 1. Build your connections 2. Foster wellness 3. Find purpose by being proactive 4. Embrace healthy thoughts.
Oh, how can there be
Such a limited understanding
Of life encased in ongoing trauma
That requires more than triage
How can you build connections
When you’ve been taught
That people are untrustworthy
That connections produce overwhelming fear
How do you foster wellness
When you live with disrupted sleep
And anxiety that rules your waking hours
When your purpose is simply
To find a way to maintain a connection to humanity
And thus you are deemed a failure at resilience
Because you cannot manage any
Of the supposedly healthy ways
Of bouncing back from trauma
But maybe it isn’t you who is a failure
Maybe it is the conception of resilience
Perhaps, just perhaps, resilience isn’t the correct idea
For overcoming ongoing trauma
Because you are not resilient
The facile methodology can’t
Teach you the strategies
That return you to the normal world
You are, instead, a survivor
From Oxford Learners Dictionary: a survivor is a person who continues to live, especially despite being nearly killed or experiencing great danger or difficulty
You live with great danger
As you attempt to live in a world
Where fear abounds in
Every breath you take,
Every action, every thought
And yet you still exist
Dreaming of ways to counteract
Or lessen the fear
Of minute possibilities of something
Untainted, even if it is merely
Uninterrupted sleep
You cling to your mantra
I am a survivor, I will survive even this.
Darkness to Dawn
Slowly the sun slides beneath the horizon
The gathering dusk fades into darkness
And a myriad of stars begins to dot the sky
For most of the world
This signals that rest and dreams are approaching
The soft comfort of cozy covers
Keeping you safe
Until you awaken to a new day
But for you, the coming darkness
Is a new beginning to your on-going nightmare
You count the stars
By listing the traumas of the day
And give up when you reach fifty
Because the traumas are like a fifth column
Infiltrating behind your defenses
Waiting to attack you in your dreams
Darkness means you need
To heighten your vigilance
Sleeping lightly to ensure the terror
Can’t slip in on stealthy butterfly wings
Because you don’t want to awaken with pummeling fists
And eerie screams that are
Swallowed by the vast expanse of darkness
Leaving you in terror’s void
And sleep never means peaceful rest
Your mind scrambling to erect defenses
To hide you away
From the vulnerability that comes with deep sleep
To keep you whole against the ravages of dark terror
To insulate you from the twinkling stars
Emitting rabid streams of turmoil and fear
And slowly the darkness fades to dawn