Afterword

From 2013 to 2017, my wife and I made a series of questionable decisions that ended with heads full of PTSD and a busted marriage. After the Revolution was written as an act of therapy. Every day I would run a half-marathon and then bury myself in my laptop, writing until I could no longer keep my eyes open. As a result, this book is primarily about trauma, and the different ways people process it.

At the moment, I suspect trauma will be at the center of every book I write. Getting PTSD is a bit like dropping food dye in a glass of water. Just a little bit changes the color of everything around it. The same is true on a larger scale, when we talk about how trauma impacts vast populations of people. I’m writing this now in the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, too early to say how the collective trauma of this plague will change the world, but far enough along to know I will not live to see the end of the shockwaves.

My grandmother, Cleo, was a survivor of the Great Depression. She and my grandfather were both very poor. By the time she died, they’d accumulated enough money to own a couple pieces of property, which my grandma had dutifully filled to the rafters with junk. It was stuff she was certain she’d need when the bottom fell out from the world again. As a kid, watching my mom and her sisters deal with grandma’s mounds of crap, I didn’t really understand what I was seeing.

I recognize it now as PTSD and, if I’m totally honest, a healthier coping mechanism than my own, which heavily resembles Roland’s. The only reason I made it out the other side intact was because I’d surrounded myself with good people. There’s really no replacement and no better treatment for trauma than letting the people you love know you’re hurting.

Anyway, thanks for reading the book. Try to avoid getting PTSD, if possible.

Copyright

2022 CC BY-NC 3.0 by Robert Evans

This edition © 2022, AK Press (Chico / Edinburgh)

ISBN 9781849354622

E-ISBN 9781849354639

LCCN: 2021944651

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Cover art and interior illustrations © Tavia Morra

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