Noah Kahan & Mental Health Analogies

I spent this past Sunday with my family, they live about an hour and a half away from me currently since I’m at school. Usually on my drive down and back I listen to music, this time I was listening mostly to Noah Kahan’s new album: The Great Divide.

One song on this album has a particular lyric that I guess I was in the right headspace to process because it struck me with an entire analogy for trauma that we carry.

In “Dashboard“, there’s a line: Look at you go, crossin’ state lines with your shadow; Tryna run away, change your zip code.

Now, it feels relevant to mention I also started reading The Trauma of Everyday Life by Mark Epstein (no, not THAT Epstein). Mark talks a lot about Buddhism in his book and the teachings from it. One thing that struck me is something that the Buddha said: “I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering” and Mark remarks (heh) that that sounds like TWO things, but it’s not.

You see, suffering and trauma don’t just go away, there’s no closet corner dark and deep enough to keep the things we shove there at bay forever.

This is where the analogy comes in! Trauma is like your shadow (I suspect this is how Noah used it in the lyric as well), it follows you around your whole life no matter how hard you try to get rid of it. Now, this can be a negative thing, but Buddha teaches that you have to work THROUGH your trauma to reach ‘enlightenment’, not against it.

Trauma, much like a shadow, can be what you make of it. You can use it to make shadow puppets, to shield someone from bright light, bring joy where someone may need it. Our shadows can also get in the way, like if you’re working on something small or repairing something in an awkward dark space. But YOU are in control of what you make your shadow into.

I’m no stranger to trauma, my college best friend and then apartment roommate was murdered in our apartment and my family and I found him. Six months after that I got into a car accident with two semi-trucks on the turnpike because a driver had fallen asleep, over-corrected, and flipped over. Luckily I hit the tires of the truck and made it out with a spinal fracture, two sprained ankles, and a broken pinky. (And admittedly a lot of trauma around driving on the highway and next to semis).

And truthfully, that trauma ate me for breakfast for a very long time. I’m in therapy and I have been since before that happened so I turned out okay! But prior to starting my master’s I had no idea how much research there is around trauma. I’m such an intellectual person that reading the research that there’s scientific reasoning to back up is all I need to incorporate it into my life.

It’s also part of why I am trying to start my journey with Atheopaganism. See, rituals done on a regular basis have the same power to heal as EMDR, just over longer periods of time. I know I would benefit from EMDR, but it’s a big scary process that my autism can’t comprehend and it involves a lot of FEELING with my body does not like.

I’m hoping that with practice creating and doing rituals it will help EMDR feel less scary and possibly even turn out to be incredibly beneficial to my own wellbeing.