Unimaginable things

I’m on the plane back from Erbil, Kurdistan to Milan, watching Good Fortune with Seth Rogen and Keanu Reeves, and I ended up sobbing in the airplane bathroom.

I haven’t seen many films that actually show the compounding reality of American financial instability and bad luck the way this one did - in the brutal, systemic way it actually happens for so many people including myself until I escaped the system at 23. One thing goes wrong, then another, then another, until survival itself becomes exhausting. My own story is so shocking, it’s not one for Instagram, but even then so many Americans I know live in a system that is built for their suffering.

The character has a degree, works constantly, sleeps in his car, gets fined, towed, trapped in systems designed to punish people for already struggling. Even getting out of the hole requires money you don’t have. That part hit me deeply because so much of my own trauma was not just personal. It was systemic. It was years of compounded instability between 15 and 24 that genuinely changed my nervous system and my perception of safety.

People often talk about trauma as though it only exists in relationships or singular events, but long-term financial insecurity, instability, chronic stress, survival mode, and watching the adults around you collapse under pressure does something profound to a person. Especially when you’re young and your brain and identity are still forming.

Watching it made me think about how it’s no wonder I held onto financial safety wherever I could find it for so long. No wonder my nervous system equated security with survival at all costs. When you’ve lived through enough chaos, sleeping in your car and not having food to eat, the fear of ever ending up back there again can shape the choices you make for your entire life.

I’ve experienced extraordinary things since leaving America. And I’ve only been back once since 2013. Beautiful places, incredible opportunities, people, experiences I never could have imagined when I was younger. But trauma doesn’t work like a balance sheet. Your nervous system always remembers the years where life felt genuinely unsafe more than it remembers the beauty that came after. It’s the animal part of our brain chemistry.

I think people underestimate how much prolonged instability changes someone. Not just emotionally, but biologically, spiritually, existentially. It changes what safety feels like, what love should feel like. It changes what your body prepares for, even years later.

Anyway. Just thoughts from somewhere between Kurdistan and Milan.