Chapter Three — Wounded

"No man can take six slugs..." -Sheriff Leigh Brackett

When I first set out to write this chapter, I had fully intended on outlining my core wounds in painstaking detail. I was ready to dive into my childhood trauma, my forced relocation as a teenager, and a litany of other experiences that have had a traumatic effect on my mental and emotional health. So that’s what I did. I began clacking away on my keyboard, embarking on a journey that, frankly, I’ve taken so many times in my head...

But this time it didn’t feel right.

I’ve been wounded for a very long time. In looking at the totality of it all with different eyes, however, I think that maybe I’ve been picking at the wounds for so long that I haven’t given them an actual chance to heal. I’ve committed myself to understanding the wounds… to determining who exactly is to blame for them, even if that person is sometimes me. I guess I thought if I could make sense of it all, if I could figure out why it all happened, then that would somehow be the magic remedy to make it all better.

But it hasn’t been.

I think The Shape is often viewed the same way in the milieu of the Halloween franchise. Ever since the first movie, it feels like the story has been more focused on trying to understand his motivations rather than simply dealing with the reality of his presence—to mixed results at the box office.

I think trying to understand evil is a fool’s errand. I’ve spent so much time and brainpower trying to figure out why terrible things happen, and I’ve come absolutely no closer to an answer than when I first began searching so many years ago. At this point, I’m not even sure how much an answer would profit me. If we could totally make sense of the horrible acts that are perpetrated each day, would it stop them from happening? Would it lessen their impact? Would knowing why provide any comfort whatsoever?

I don’t think so.

When it comes to self-awareness, I do think it’s important to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the things that have influenced you—both positively and negatively. But how much further does one need to go? I’m not so sure that meticulously re-living these things in order to understand them is the winning strategy.

If we could know why Michael Myers kills… even when an explanation is given… does it stop him? No. It’s just noise that further confuses the issue at hand—namely the guy coming at you with a bigass butcher knife. You can only look into the devil’s eyes for so long before you’ve let him get too close. And if he’s already wounded you once, all you’ve done by trying to study him is give him the chance to wound you again… this time maybe worse.

I know my wounds too well, and I’ve let them linger too long.

At some point you have to stop trying to understand how they got there and start doing the business of healing them so they don’t get worse. What does the doctor focus more on when you come in with some sort of major injury—how you got it, or what they need to do to fix it? My guess is that it’s the latter.

There’s a point where it almost becomes immaterial how I was wounded. It doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is what I’m going to do to bandage these wounds and see that they close properly.

Then maybe one day down the road I can reflect on the scars.