Counting Crows

Pass me a bottle, Mr. Jones.

Adam Duritz

Our creative writing professor was intense and earnest. She had crazy hair and wore enormous sweaters, even by 80’s standards. Serious Hermione energy. She wanted us to be great. Most of us were decidedly not. She wanted us to be as excited as she was about poetry and prose, which was very, very excited. Most of the students were just meeting an English requirement. 

One of my classmates, Travis, was a skater boy before skater boys were a thing. He was perpetually high. He had shoulder-length, wavy blonde hair, and was always tanned. A New England Jeff Spicoli. He was cute, in a cartoony kind of way- but I was uninterested. Plus, he was really nice. I had a type and nice wasn’t it.

I usually loved the class, but that morning I was crushingly hung over. I wanted it to end so I could drown my misery in french fries, ibuprofen, and Pepsi until it was time to go out again that night. 

Reading your work aloud was a class requirement and I did not love it. The dude-bros who sat in a cluster by the window would confidently and enthusiastically give feedback. They were always opinionated and seldom helpful. That day someone read a haiku they’d written about death, replete with heavy-handed symbolism borrowed from Poe’s recycling bin. Travis, sprawling half out of his chair in the back of the room, chimed in with, “Duuuuuuude. Crows SUCK.”

I don’t know why it struck me as hilarious, but I laughed despite my headache. It seemed such a weird thing to have deep feelings about, an odd little molehill for everyone’s favorite stoner to die on.

The truth is, I’ve always liked crows. I’m a sucker for a belligerent bird. Growing up with the surname I had, it was practically a given. Crows seem like punks. They’re ridiculously smart. They have regional dialects, even though they all sound like they’re from Boston. They steal shit. They have funerals for each other. They create and use tools.

They even hold grudges. 

It’s true. It’s that kind of truth that makes me fall even more in love with this gorgeous, absurd world of ours.

About sixteen years ago, researchers at the University of Washington conducted an experiment in which they captured and tagged seven crows. Those tasked with capturing the birds wore caveman masks while the others wore “neutral” masks. During the tagging process, other crows in the area protested by circling, swooping, and cawing aggressively. I’d give anything to have been on campus that day.

Afterward, researchers would periodically wear the masks (both caveman and neutral) on campus. Their experiences varied wildly. Those wearing the neutral masks were generally left alone–I mean, I’m sure some rando crow yelled at them, because … crows. Those wearing the caveman masks, however, were dive-bombed and harassed, even ten years later, and even by crow fledglings. Baby crows, when confronted with the masks of the perpetrators of their ancestors, became distressed.

They lived in reaction to a story long over, a story they never lived.

Crows holding grudges is a great tagline–total click bait–but in reality, friends, that is intergenerational trauma.

Dr. Gabor Maté, a world-renowned expert on trauma once said, 

“Trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside of you as a result of what happens to you.”

Did you know that a fetus with ovaries contains every egg cell it will ever have? That means while my mother lived in my grandmother’s body, so did I. A genetic nesting doll. Stories within stories within stories. My grandmother’s traumatic childhood in Ireland is not apart from me, it is a part of me. We cannot tease out who we become from whence we came.

It’s believed that severe trauma changes us at a cellular level. The field of epigenetics considers how behaviors and the environment influence the way your genes work, and there have been studies done examining the impact of major traumatic experiences such as the Holocaust and famine on future generations. Children of mothers with post-traumatic stress disorder during pregnancy have higher cortisol levels than other children. If trauma is an internal reaction to an external event, then the symbiotic nature of pregnancy means that in utero, the fetus experiences a version of the same stress, fear, and anxiety their mother does. Before they ever draw breath they are receiving messages about what awaits them, which means some of us enter the world terrified.

Unaddressed trauma shows up in different ways. Sometimes we repeat the exact cycle we swore we’d avoid, and sometimes we overcorrect into something equally dysfunctional because we mistakenly believe the antidote to one extreme is the opposite extreme. The behavioral pendulum swings wide rather than settling in the middle. 

I often hear people who grew up in family systems riddled with addiction and dysfunction say, “I always told myself I wasn’t going to be like my dad,” or, “My mom was a raging alcoholic and I swore I would never do that to my kids.” I hear those things, of course, in meetings of recovering alcoholics because trauma is not interested in your intentions. Traumatized mothers and fathers can only do the best they can with what they have, and depending on whether or not they’ve done the work–and had the access, resources, and support they needed to do it–those things are either tools or weapons. A hammer is a hammer is a hammer, whether you use it to build or bludgeon. 

When we look at genograms (diagrams that depict familial relationships along with medical and mental health histories) it’s no wonder that given the genetic and environmental components of substance use disorder, we see the unwelcome threads of addiction and mental health jaggedly stitching together one traumatized generation after another, like a jacked-up heirloom quilt.

In the documentary Cracked Up, actor and comedian Darrell Hammond explores his childhood abuse and complex PTSD. He struggled for years with severe mental health and addiction, at various points being told he was schizophrenic and ‘manic depressive.’ Eventually, a therapist specializing in trauma told him,”You’ve got an undiagnosed story.“

How many of us are walking around with stories we’ve inherited–perhaps stories we’re not even aware of-like some latent disease lying dormant until something triggers them? Yes, some of the stories that make alcohol and drugs feel like solutions are the ones we’ve lived, and some of them are codified in our marrow. This ancestral trauma, these ghost stories, may be the reason some of us seem to be born thirsty.

We inherit stories of harm and communal trauma. They inform the way we move through the world, the people we allow to co-author our lives, the way we parent, and what we believe. But here’s the thing: if addiction and trauma are intergenerational, then healing can be, too. You’ve heard the adage, hurt people hurt people, right? Well, maybe healed people heal people. When we choose to heal, when we cast off old stories and bravely decide to do the work to heal, our stories take a turn toward redemption and we can change the narrative for future generations.

Despite my premature awareness of the brutal realities of life, I was determined to hold onto the idea of Santa. I’ve always had a yearning to believe. My insistence on magic and meaning was an act of defiance. I remember being “too old” to believe but still lying in my bed on Christmas Eve straining to hear the sleigh bells. 

At recess in elementary school, my friend Ellen and I would cast spells and there was some small part of me that truly thought they were real-that I might have special powers. The fact that Tommy did not turn into a frog after refusing to be my boyfriend would seem to indicate otherwise, but I was undeterred. I was always looking for proof of wonders beyond what I could see. It’s probably good that the Harry Potter books didn’t exist when I was little or I’d still be waiting for my letter from Hogwarts and running headlong into walls on the MBTA.

Believe in me
Help me believe in anything
‘Cause I wanna be someone who believes.

Adam Duritz

Sitting in mass as a kid I would get a thrill when I heard the bells that rang right before the consecration. In the Catholic Church, consecration is a purification ritual that casts off the secular use for something and dedicates it to a sacred purpose. Turning bread and wine into Jesus seemed pretty magical, and the fact that there was a supernatural soundtrack was thrilling. I remember trying to catch my fellow parishioners’ eyes as if to say, “You hear it too, right?” I wondered at their lack of wonder. I was still sure about God then, but happy to have the proof. When I realized it was altar boys ringing the bells, I was crushed.

I spent so much time desperately hunting for signs of more. More than this. And at the age of eleven, when I discovered drinking, it felt like a miracle. It felt like more. Sitting in my kitchen as the alcohol hit my bloodstream, it unlocked something. My skinny shoulders dropped. I could breathe easier. My need to be constantly vigilant seemed to dissipate. It blurred the sharp edges of an inherently dangerous world. The stars shone brighter. Music sounded better. The night air smelled sweeter. I felt connected to everything and everyone.

Things seemed imbued with deeper meaning, more significance. Everything, everything, everything felt like a sign.

Belief is different than trust or faith. I believed in God, but I had faith in alcohol. I trusted it. I trusted it in a way I never trusted another human being. I knew what to expect from it. I knew the relief it would bring. Even the pain it brought was predictable, and when you’ve lived the kinds of stories I’d lived, predictability is easily mistaken for safety.

That desire for something beyond the world I was experiencing was rooted in trauma and scarcity. I found the notion that my life–this existence of fear and lack and pain–might be all there was, to be simply unacceptable. That inability to accept things as they were was fertile ground for not just my alcoholism, but also my creativity, and my insatiable hunger for beauty. It is not a coincidence that so many artists and creatives struggle with addiction. 

For me, the work of sobriety is a commitment to stay wholly present for the day I’m in, to feel everything as it is, and have faith that there is enough. No time travel, no numbing or amplifying, no believing in scarcity. And because I am willing to accept things as they are, I see signs and magic everywhere. 

In the story of my life, giving up alcohol is not the epilogue, it’s the foreword. Abstinence just put the pen in my hand. All it did was give me the opportunity to do the work necessary to understand the story I’ve already lived differently, and to write a truer one moving forward. Recovery has taken what was broken and made it beautiful. A little editing. A little rewrite. A little consecration.

On an early summer day a few weeks back, Shane, Scout, and I went for a hike. Afterward, he took her paddle boarding and I sat by the water’s edge, reading in the dappled, late afternoon sun. There was a canoe in the shallows with far too many people in it, and the children were giggling and shrieking. The warm breeze sent their peals of laughter skittering across the pond like bells urging us to pay attention to the magic. I looked around to see if anyone else realized we were at Church. 

Near the parking lot, to the left of the boat launch, I spotted a fellow parishioner–an enormous crow fiddling with a six-pack ring. The plastic wasn’t food, obviously, and didn’t seem to serve any practical purpose other than amusement–because crows play. The crow picked it up, flung it, and then cocked its head, quizzically. People walked past, dragging kayaks and corralling kids and dogs, and the crow glared balefully at them, unfazed. 

It hopped up onto the trailhead sign, like it owned the place. See? Punk. We looked at each other companionably. One crow is said to symbolize death, but I didn’t feel any dread at the sight of it perched alone, blue-black and iridescent in the sun. Moments later, it flew into the canopy of trees and I closed my eyes, grateful for the abundance of the exact moment I was in. I felt connected to everything.

Crows are thought to symbolize guidance, transformation, bravery, opportunity, fate, and rebirth. Depending on the number of saucy corvids you encounter, you might be doomed, or having a girl, or getting married. For example, some believe nine crows appearing together signifies love, contentment, and actualization after a difficult chapter. Seeing nine crows is also said to be an indicator that it’s time to move on from old patterns and situations that no longer serve you.

Huh. That feels like a sign.

I woke up this morning with a clear head and an unashamed heart on day 3288. 

Nine years sober.

It’s a really beautiful story.

Who could ask for anything more?