It’s not just the hernia that’s back. It’s also the trauma.

As also happened in my dream last night, the people I encounter in waking life — whether from the sidewalk or on a screen — these people continue to do things, normal things, things like going to the park. Trauma paralyzes me. I’m talking less about physically inertia and more about feeling emotionally sedentary.

I waited for surgery. Then I waited to be healed. I thought I would wait days. That turned to weeks. Months. Not a year later, I’m waiting all over again. Waiting for the trauma to pass without any clear sense of when that will be.

Let me acknowledge that many human beings at this very moment are enduring greater physical calamities than the reoccurrence of a hernia. In many ways, I’m lucky. For but one example at the ready, in a drama I watched last night while trying to think about something other than what I was feeling, a character suffered a repeated heart (and died). I’m at home, not in a hospital. I know I will be able to pay the medical bills — not everyone can. The list of things to be grateful for is long.

Yet all I can do is attempt to process my experience — try to arrive at my truth — and, no matter how it hits others’ ears, trauma is not too strong a term. (Some of the trauma overlaps with aspects of my life circumstances that have nothing to do with the hernia surgery and repair.)

I know the opportunity before me is to find a new path to a new way of being. I come to the page with the hope that this act, the writing, more than most other things, I can think of, will help me do that.