“Why now?”
A young woman asked me this recently during a session with youth counselors from Israel’s northern border. For three years, she had kept going through war, displacement and uncertainty, always responsible for others. There was constantly something to do, someone to help. She had functioned.
Now she was crying. “Why now,” she asked, “when I’m finally taking a day off?” She described waves of stress, pain in her body, a sinking feeling in her stomach. Then she asked another question: “Is it easier to be in emergency mode?”
As we approach another anniversary of Oct. 7, her question points to an uncomfortable one for all of us: Have we mistaken functioning for healing?
We imagine trauma as collapse. But trauma can also look remarkably competent. It runs organizations, raises children, treats patients, answers emails and cares for everyone else. It can even smile.
An emergency brings a strange clarity. There is danger, there is something to do, and someone needs us. So, we survive today, then the next day and the next, until we stop. Sometimes, stopping is when the tears come.
The body, it seems, has been waiting. It waited for the meeting to end, for the children to be safe, for the community to need us a little less. When there is finally room, it asks: “Now can we talk?”
This is one meaning of “sleeping trauma”: Trauma that lies quiet while we keep going, then makes itself felt when we finally pause.
Healing cannot mean erasing these years, and post-traumatic growth does not mean that suffering was good for us.
But there is another meaning: Trauma can lie dormant during the day and keep us awake at night. In a survey conducted after Oct. 7, 42% of Israeli adults aged 20 and over reported experiencing insomnia at least once a week, compared with 31% of those surveyed before that date. The trauma may seem to sleep while we function, even as a country struggles to sleep.
I notice it in small moments. A plane passes overhead, and we listen. Is it an ordinary plane or a fighter jet?
On Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, a motorcycle starts its engine, and a 3-year-old girl holding her mother’s hand begins to shake. Her whole life has unfolded during this war. She has no Oct. 6 to remember. Her nervous system learned the language of danger before she could understand what war is. What does “returning to normal” mean to a body that has never known normal?
Along the borders, the question is harder still. We cannot ask a nervous system to feel safe in an environment that is not yet reliably safe.
Collectively, we have adapted to the abnormal. We can tell sounds apart. We know where the nearest shelter is. We pause a conversation for an alert and pick it up minutes later. We move between funerals and birthdays, grief and work, fear and humor.
Those adaptations kept us alive. But adaptation is not healing. We have become fluent in the language of danger; the task ahead is to become fluent in safety again. That does not mean forgetting danger. It means relearning the difference between a threat and a reminder of one: between a motorcycle and a missile, between silence and the expectation of catastrophe.
Healing cannot mean erasing these years, and post-traumatic growth does not mean that suffering was good for us. Some losses cannot be redeemed. Many would give back all their insights to have their loved one beside them again.
Growth is something else. It is what we do with what happened to us.
These years taught us how deeply we need each other. Strangers opened their homes. People crossed the country to help people they had never met. We learned that vulnerability and strength are not opposites, and that a person can tremble and still act, grieve and love. We learned that helpers need help, too.
We also learned how fragile life is. That lesson need not be morbid; it can be an invitation. Perfection, possessions and being right matter less. Connection, presence and solidarity matter more.
Maybe healing is not a return to who we were before Oct. 7. Maybe it is a choice about what to carry forward and what we are ready to put down.
When it becomes possible, we can begin to put down the vigilance, the constant scanning, the belief that stopping is dangerous. But I hope we keep the solidarity, the courage, the tenderness and the deeper appreciation of life.
Post-traumatic growth is neither pretending the trauma never happened nor staying organized around it forever. It is allowing what narrowed our lives to survival to eventually deepen our capacity to live.
We are not going back to Oct. 6. We are going forward, toward a life in which an airplane is just an airplane, a motorcycle just a motorcycle, and silence no longer something to fear.
Toward a time when an ordinary day can feel extraordinary again.
