the beginning of Elizabeth trauma

It was 1838, a year after the new king had occupied his throne, and while the streets of London pulsed with rumor of reform, the East End continued to wallow in misery. Here was the heart of the poor, the forsaken half of the city, where hope was a dim memory and life a cruel lottery. It was here, amidst the filth of this dark neighborhood, that I, Elizabeth, dwelled—my name spoken in the clammy air, a name to disappear into the weave of the desperate, the voiceless.

I was only 20 years old, but in many respects, I had lived a lifetime. Born to a blue-collar carpenter, my father worked his hands to the bone, shaping wood into whatever he could sell in a marginal existence. My mother, homemaker wife, worked day and night in the cramped quarters of our small house. She washed, cooked, cleaned, and sewed, never standing still, each movement driven by the need to feed us and to clothe us. I was the third of nine, and though I loved my brothers and sisters, they did nothing but add to the overpopulation of our tiny home, a home so tiny that we could hardly move around without colliding. The noise, the chaos, the reek of sweat and dampness—it was our daily existence, and it was as suffocating as the air that we breathed.

Domestic life in our household was marked by one harsh fact: work. Rest was not an option, and space for dreams did not exist. There was a responsibility on all of us to assist in the survival of the whole group so that we may avoid the harsh reality of going hungry. Every day, we searched the streets for peculiar jobs—scraping together as much as we might to buy a loaf of bread or a miserly piece of meat. The money was always too little, never quite enough to cover our needs. And even then, there were days, too many days, when hunger burned through our stomachs, making our bellies cramp and our heads grow weak with the ache of hunger. My mother, ever clever, would take what little we had left and stretch it out as long as it would go, but it was never enough. We hungered too many times, the cold gnawing in our bellies like a weight we could not rid ourselves of.

I learned early that food was a privilege, something which came and went with the whims of fate. But it was not only food that we lacked—there was the security, the stability, the comfort that other folk seemed to take for granted. In dead of night, when the din of the world outside my door had died away into a rigid silence, I'd wrap myself up in the worn-out blanket on the chill floor, our tattered bedding offering no solace against the biting cold that penetrated our very marrow. And it was in those moments, in the midst of the suffocating night, that my mind would stray. I would close my eyes and escape, if only for a little while, to a dream world away from the misery that occupied my waking hours.

I dreamed of a life so different, so different from the sternness of poverty, that it was nearly false. I would picture myself as the nobleman's wife, a woman of refinement and composure. In my head, I could picture myself dressed in rich, luxurious fabrics—morning-glory silks that shone like the sun in the morning, velvets that wrapped around the body with warm, accurate gentleness. I would be bedecked with jewels that sparkled off the candle flame, rubies and diamonds that burned with a radiance I did not even dare to envision. My hands, delicate and soft, would never know the calluses of hard work; my nails, neat and unbroken, would never know the wear of endless toil. I would rest in a soft bed, luxurious and comfortable, where pillows would cradle my head like a cloud, and I would never wake again to the biting chill of a cold, drafty room. There would be no hunger, no hunger for a meal that never came. My life would be one of ease, of luxury, of comfort.

Oh, how sweet the vision of such a thing was, how intoxicating it became in my fantasies. To do nothing all day but to sit in the comfort of a drawing-room, to sip tea from fine porcelain, to be waited on by servants who would wait on me every whim. I imagined the days before me, stretching out like an endless road, full of nothing but beauty and leisure. How much I longed for that. How I yearned to be free of the chains of poverty that kept me to my humble style.

But as I there lay, gazing in and out of these fantasies, something twisted inside me—a feeling, black and evil, that could not be quieted. The notion of the wealthy, the lords who lived so far out of my reach, whose lives were a parade of excess and pleasure, began to churn in my stomach like gall. They who sat within their gold-lavished halls, bathed in wealth I could hardly approach, in luxuries that I could never partake of. Their laughter, so free and light, echoed in my mind, mocking me, reminding me of everything I didn't possess. I beheld their riches, their joy, and something within me snapped. It was not envy, not the want to live such a life as they lived. No, it was far deeper, far more repulsive.

It was burning fury.

With each diamond they wore, with each meal they enjoyed, with each day passed in blissful unawareness, there were thousands such as I—thousands of people who suffered in silence, worked to stay alive, whose existence was a constant fight for survival. And it seemed to me, in my desperation and bitterness, that they did not deserve to live so poverty-free, the right to live so richly when we, the individuals they claimed to rule, were only permitted to waste on the earth.

And so, under the cover of darkness, I wished something terrible. I wished that they would hurt.

It was wrong, I knew it. There was a whisper at the back of my mind telling me that such thoughts were not my level, that I should be above such bitterness. But in my heart, the truth could not be denied. I had no choice but to own up to it. They had to suffer. If I had to endure this life, then they had to be made to experience the weight of it, too. Let them starve. Make them see what it was like to wake up chilled, to have no security, to have no future but the never-ending trek of existence. Make them feel the sense of abandonment, left to the mercy of a world that never considered their pain.

It was incorrect, I knew. But at the time, I didn't care. I didn't care because my suffering had become too much to bear, too much for me to contain any longer. If I must suffer, if my family must suffer, then let them suffer as well.

We all must suffer. If we are to endure hardship, so too must they.

And so I lay there, on the ground, covered in the burning acridity in my chest, clinging to that thought. It was the only thing which made me feel some semblance of power, some semblance of control over a world that had already taken everything else from me. It was wrong, I knew. But it was all I had.

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