A person is like an iceberg.

A person is like an iceberg. What we often see is exactly what they want to show us. And nothing more. We may think we have looked deep, that we know their story, even that we understand them. No, we do not. We do not understand as long as our understanding is a mere mathematical deduction. Because a person is not an equation. Or a concept. They are made of layers and layers of muchness and littleness.

Despite all her fascinating muchness, Alice too had her littleness, no?

Sidetracking a tad bit, I like the concept of “they” as a pronoun. Not only does it save me the complexity of using the right pronoun, it also ties in with my firm belief that a person is hardly ever quite linear, or quite a single personality. “They” is a very meaningful pronoun.

So about a person and the iceberg and their muchness and littleness –

A miniscule percentage of us are blessed with the privilege of healing from our traumas. A great number under the bell curve do not even realise that they are walking around with their trauma responses hanging from their sleeves and pockets and buckles. Hanging like discarded metal bits, like old pots and pans around a dreadful scarecrow standing in the middle of a vast quiet green field. Every time the breeze plays a wanton game, the scarecrow makes annoying noises, all its pots and pans and clutter clattering and ruining the quiet of the verdant picture. Yes, a good number of hurt humans live like that. Without even knowing that they make ugly noises and spoil the peace around them.

But a bell curve is a huge umbrella and when all these scarecrows are contributing to a common cacophony, gradually they cannot recognise the noise of their own pots or pans. That moment of reckoning has usually quietly passed. And that is that.

There is yet another percentage. The ones I think of as Alices. The ones who aren’t healed yet but are enlightened enough to know that they carry some tattered jackets and rough clumsy luggage. And they know that there are rabbit holes.

They know that this life is a trip up and down those rabbit holes. They know about the cabbages and kings. They have known potions and cakes and littleness and muchness and a watch that reads Now.

A person is like an iceberg. When we are good readers and intelligent listeners, we are deluded to think that we understand things easily. Intelligence is a bit of a player. It sometimes deceives us; the ironies of the brain! None of us are spared this deception. I’m guilty of it too. Mea culpa! I often think I understand me. I am very intentional about being in touch with myself. I am one of the most metacognitive people I have met in my limited life. And yet I sometimes see that I do not understand or recognise myself. And as much as I may think I know someone, there are times when I recognise that I do not understand them too. Layers and layers of muchness and littleness.

A person is like an iceberg. You don’t know me. You may think that you know my story, ergo you know me. No, you do not. You know only the stories I have let you know. You do not know whether I carry rough clumsy bags up and down a rabbit hole – a hole inside which I am suddenly too big to pass through, or too small to not fall. When Alice is really big, she needs to be afraid because she cannot see what is obvious and next to her. She is anxious because she knows that everything in this hole is strange, no matter how many times she goes up and down this wretched hole. When she is tiny, she is driven by Fight or Flight to survive. And she might be in a state, feeling everything in extreme intensity, even the air around her because she is now tiny and this space is weighing heavy on her. An ant she ignored yesterday when she was a regular Alice, will look like an enormous monster today and she must squash it because goodness, please understand, she is little now and afraid and sometimes her action is just instinct and she has not even recognised that she is afraid. Welcome to Trauma Response.

Trauma response is not something we will “understand” outside the semantics of the textbook. Even for a practising psychologist, it is a listing of symptoms under DSM 5 (is it 5 or 7, idk!) The doctor knows the vocabulary Alice might use. But not the feelng. Not the blindness, or the claustrophobia, or the breakouts, or the tight fist, or the skewed vision, or the exaggerated sensitivity. Or the sudden “load shedding” , the shut down of the metacognition Alice is so proud of.

We do not know anyone enough. Not even ourselves. At least the scarecrows will make ugly noises. It keeps them safe.

The Alices though. The Alices are pretty and smart and successful. They are articulate and conduct themselves with grace and elegance. Most often, when they go up and down that damned rabbit hole, Alice is by herself; no one has seen her awkward weird exaggerated enraged atrocious behaviour. In the rabbit hole trip, most others were on their own journeys and did not bother much about Alice. They all agreed that “we are all crazy here”.

They agreed on muchness. And littleness. And yet they did not see. Some knew a big Alice. Some knew a small Alice. No one know the Alice who was, the Alice within. They did not know that she had seen a rabbit with a watch. Or that she had become many people since morning.

We are all human. We don’t know anyone enough. A person is like an iceberg; you don’t know what an extremely huge block of buried ice they float on. I can be a terrible iceberg and hurt you. Maybe you are also not that great an iceberg, you know! You come with muchness and littleness. I too come with muchness and littleness. What Alice’s family did not know was that Alice was triggered. But Alice too did not know it. During the seemingly interminable trip through the maze we simplify as the rabbit hole, Alice was just doing “the next thing” , following “the next direction”, never the wiser that she was triggered.

But nobody, especially her family, knew she was triggered. Because every Alice is an iceberg and trauma response takes a life of its own. All we can do is agree on the muchness and the littleness.

Of Alices and icebergs.