The Myth of Normal 181

of her throwing things at everyone except me. They put her in mental hospitals, and even sent her to an orphanage. There was a lot of violence, a lot of chaos, a lot of screaming.” When the late Downtown Eastside street poet Bud Osborn was three years old, his father hanged himself in jail, where the Toledo police had taken him after he tried to throw himself out of a window. “As a child Osborn regarded one person as a refuge: his grandmother,” the Vancouver journalist Travis Lupick writes in Fighting for Space, his book on the drug policy reform movement, of which Osborn became a prominent leader. “She was shot and killed by his aunt, who then turned the gun on herself.” As a five-year-old, Bud witnessed his mother being beaten and raped. A year later he hurled himself off the porch in an attempt to take his own life. Former Saturday Night Live star Darrell Hammond was physically and emotionally brutalized by his mother, as anyone will know who has watched the painful and self-revealing autobiographic documentary Cracked Up. Lena Dunham suffered sexual abuse at a young age, along with a factor that ensures such experiences will leave lasting traumatic effects: emotional isolation. In a recent therapy session under the influence of the medication ketamine, she experienced “witnessing this overwhelming grief about being alone in my childhood.” While each life history is particular, and while trauma has many faces, some generalization is both possible and necessary, particularly where abuse and neglect meet the lower strata of racial and class status. During my dozen years in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, I came to learn that every one of my female patients—many of whom were Indigenous, many caught up in the sex trade—had been sexually abused in childhood or adolescence, one marker of the multigenerational legacy born of Canada’s brutal colonial past. Multiple large-scale studies attest to the dynamic of childhood trauma, including sexual abuse, potentiating later addiction. According to one survey published in 1997, looking at more than one hundred thousand students,