Rick Rawes

Warning: Today is about trauma and awareness. Not to be glib, but if just the mention of that is upsetting, don’t read on. I’m not going to discuss specific traumas or graphic detail in any way – but I am going to talk about what a bastard it is – and isn’t. So consider yourself forewarned.

Trauma is a part of being alive. Perhaps some may say the price we pay for it. In a cold, cruel universe, I suppose there may be some truth in that. Perhaps trauma can be thought of less of the bad things that happen to us, and instead the forces and pressures that shape us into who we are. Oh dear, I think I’m a bad Rihanna record away from making an inspirational diamond metaphor.

They reflect, by the way, dear.

It seems to my humble mind that discussing ‘trauma’ has become far more common place. Growing up, we spoke of ‘baggage’ – the idea of an accumulated weight of experience. Like a family of five going to Alicante for two weeks, you tucked your rejections, your bullying, your emotional instability, and your grief, up next to your swimming trunks and sunscreen, and wheeled them behind you through duty free. Gets you a few dirty looks from Marget, as she gently caresses an oversized Toblerone, I tell you.

Now we say trauma. Same diff. It’s a universal and completely valid part of existence, and let me be clear – it does matter. It all matters. Doesn’t matter what, the loss of a love one or getting stood up for a date for the third time that week. We don’t need to sit like the characters in Jaws and compare scars. The one with the biggest one gets eaten anyway (Sorry, spoiler alert).

What matters and what makes it true, is that it sodding hurt, and in some way it shaped what came next. What is important, then, is how we define our relationship with it going forward – because that is within our control – and how we approach others from a place of awareness.

My approach to trauma, both in life and in my writing is this, it is like how I think of time. The future is water vapour in the air. Sometimes dense enough and obvious enough to be seen, but not always. Intangible, but there. It condenses, unrelenting, into the present. The state in which it can be seen and touched and felt, running through our fingers. The motion slows, but there is motion. Malleable, the liquid present fills the vessel of what is, moulding into a shape. As motion slows it freezes into the past. Like ice, or glass, it solidifies behind us in a new fixed shape. It wrenches itself around the trauma, becoming imperfections we can look back and see. Trauma becomes this, the pattern we can see, each bit affecting the next as we move through states.

This is perhaps the central point in my work that I repeatedly drive home – trauma accumulates. Many others reset, I don’t. My worlds and characters are forever changed by these events. Because I am. Because we are. So what do we do?

We cope.

For me, coping lies in the perspective – of comedy or tragedy. Was Romeo and Juliet a tragedy? Or a farce of two pimply teens missing each other’s DMs? Was Austin Powers a comedy? Or was it a one-man plus Liz Hurley crusade against a hard-working supervillain trying to provide for his grown up son, after years of estrangement?

Humour, both in the novels I write and in my own life, is not something so easily attributable to a pseudo-psychological defence mechanism. That explanation is too simplistic. It is a choice, a perspective made out of a conscious decision. To see each and every thing for the bizarre and surreal truth of it.

It is in laughing (while crying) in the crematorium, as over the tinny radio J-Lo dances the night away and Take That Relights their Fire with Lulu (true story, I shit you not). It is the choice, to turn and look back at the smoky, mucky glass of the past behind us, where that frozen history looks like a scream face, and doodle a couple of devil horns and a silly moustache.

In this way humour, even the darkest, blackest most brutal of humour, is not only a way to cope. It is a way to be able to live.

Hopefully you can see from this that I do not intend to belittle anyone’s experiences or minimise their pain. I seek to honour it, honestly and openly. To say it’s okay for laughter to go with loss, for pain to piece joy. They do not erase or diminish one another, they compliment. They, hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, through Eden make their solitary way.

And perhaps behind them, time freezes with their footsteps.

No plug or self promotion this time people, just hopefully an insight. I shared a little of the way I think, and maybe you do the same. I respect you, and I see you. And if you ever want to try my way for a bit, I can lend you a marker pen and we can go off doodling.

Rick Rawes
Friday 27^th February, 2026
Leeds, West Yorkshire