Getting Intimate with You Guys. Thanks for listening/reading:
Tonight I’m wondering about what love really is. Did I have it? Are there different kinds of love? I’ve always avoided writing about love, because I have this outer shell that believes it’s ridiculous. Hmmm. I had someone. A keeper. I grew into loving him. Is that really love? It is a genuine kind. But then there’s the love that strikes you dead in your tracks and makes you uncertain of yourself and your heart pounds. I was thinking, with my fiance of nine years–we didn’t have really any intimacy. I’m a virgin to it. I don’t know how I’d react if I ever encountered such a thing. I never let him in. Why? I’m listening to “Slow it Down” by the Lumineers over and over
I feel naked what I’m aiming to write. It’s so easy for me to write about mental illness and shit like Continue reading →
At some point everything becomes clear. That doesn’t necessarily mean a good clear, but fact is preferred over fiction when you’re locked up in a mental ward. Again. And it’s snowing out–and worse–it’s New Year’s Eve and you’re thirtieth birthday is coming and you’re little girl must be looking for you. It’s all you can do to decipher the shell-shocked woman looking back at you in the tin mirror bolted to the wall above your sink. Here you get your own sink because this time, this trip into the bin, they knew it was much more serious than they had originally thought, and your “security” is upgraded. You have a thought you would usually have–that the upgrade only makes you feel more nuts–but at this point, you don’t feel nuts. You are nuts. I say to myself ‘I’m clinically insane’ and for a moment I believe it’s something to smile about. When the leading psychiatrist told me on New Year’s Day morning that I was clinically psychotic and suffering from complex PTSD, I thought about my mind–clearly–for a second, and I imagined a blue and Continue reading →
(in response to the question “Do You Believe In God?” over at Storylane)
I was brought up strictly Catholic. In college I dabbled in Buddhism and Hinduism, studied the Qaran (Koran?) and Judaism. But I never understood what faith was, or God, or Love, until after I hit rock bottom. When I was 28 my childhood years of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse all came to a head and I had Complex, chronic Post-Traumatic-stress Disorder. I began having psychotic break-throughs daily, along with auditory hallucinations from my Bipolar Disorder. I was chronically dissociating and hearing voices and existing as if on a different plane, dissociating into a godless existential space where no one could reach me. I was spinning out of my life. I lost my job, my friends, my sanity, my house, and my fiance within a year. I admitted myself to “the bin” when the voices and the dissociating and the psychosis became too much to bear. I showed up there like a child in a woman’s heels, banging on their yellow security door, crying “help me, help me” into the intercom.
My entire life, for as far back as I can remember, I was empty. I spent most of my twenties searching for some kind of substance of me. I got lost in a city, drinking and drugging and sleeping with anyone. The emptiness only grew and darkened and it wasn’t until my biological father died on the bar room floor from drinking that I had my first major panic attack and psychotic break. I moved home and tried to recover. I went to college and had a daughter; I made the Dean’s list, I was nominated for a writing scholarship in New York, and my essays and stories in college were coming out like a fever. I began writing about my past, which I’d never done before. I was remembering things I’d never remembered before. And the sickness took flight. I had to drop out, being to ill to face class every day. Too ill to face life every day. The emptiness was no longer a pit but a festering wound that I knew I’d have to face head on. But I knew I couldn’t force it–I had to hit rock bottom patiently. It would come in its own time. And when I was engaged and living a happy, safe, comfortable life, my body broke down. My mind soured.
In “the bin” there was no god. There was no heaven or hell, just a pointless meaningless world where nothing and no one mattered–we were all products of chaos and chance. I’d have flashbacks where there was blood on my face and a blindfold on my eyes and I’d sort of come to and I’d cry for all the sadness in this world. I was beyond empty–the girl that was empty was now dead. She was gone. And not worth finding, I believed. I was gone. She was gone. I’d stare at myself in the safety mirror which was like a metal pan bolted to the tiles in my high-security private room, and I’d stare into my black eyes. There were no stars in them. No light. I was terrified of showering, terrified of the way certain lights fell across the carpet. I’d close my eyes on my cot and try to imagine my grandmother but all I pictured was this black creature with red eyes–every time I closed my eyes. I ended up in the bin four times, I couldn’t survive at home, being so afraid of everything, especially myself. The psychosis was an oily, hellish plane of reality where no one was real, no one could help me. My family would have to hold on to me and say I was ok and I’d shake and shriek and say “I’m not going to make it, I’m not going to make it!” I wanted to die. This continued for a couple years, every day, like that. And the nights were just as awful–I was afraid I’d hurt my daughter so I stayed with family. I was afraid my breath would quit this body too and that I wouldn’t wake up in the morning. I don’t know how I went through two years of that. I don’t know how I survived. I was so afraid I’d kill myself (because when I was psychotic I thought I’d lose control of my body) that I avoided the bath with my pink razors. I’d slam the medicine cabinet on my pills and run away crying. In a nutshell, I was nuts. Clinically insane.
But one day, early in the spring, I was sitting on the back porch watching bees, and it was like I suddenly woke up. And it all made sense. The emptiness I’d carried around my entire life was gone. I wasn’t in pieces anymore. Sure the pieces needed sorting out, but they were back together somehow. And one night, I wrote a poem about Jesus being with me and God loving me and carrying me when I couldn’t walk–that I fell to my knees and sobbed, overwhelmed by some foreign love for me coming from somewhere. I knew I hadn’t been alone, because I would have died had I been. It all fit together–the teachings of the Buddha, Hinduism, the Upanishads, the Vendata, the Koran, the Bible, Jesus–they were all one and the same. They all meant the same thing. I was a child of God. I wasn’t alone on this journey. I don’t know how it came to be, I just knew it to be true with my entire being. Even now, every time I go to church I have to hide my tears because I’m overwhelmed by a power and love I cannot name. God, the Atman, the Godhead, Yahweh–whatever you want to call it–breathes into every molecule of our beings and the world around us. I have found a sort of peace. I have a certain kind of grace that is quiet and private. I’ve aged so much in so few years…and it was worth it. God was merely awaking me. In the dark–that cold, lonely, hellish place–he never left me alone. He/It carried me. Carried me like water.
I was taught to keep my mouth shut. Not because it was the right thing to do, but because my story wasn’t worth telling–I was nobody. What was right and wrong? Keeping secrets wasn’t about fear so much as it was about loyalty. After all, when it’s your parents abusing you–the people in this world that are supposed to love you the most–then their kind of love indicates what kind of person you are. That was my thinking.
In my earliest memory, I’m a dirty toddler hiding in the lilac bushes next to the farmhouse. I remember the smell of the purple flowers, the smell of rusty chains and oil from the tractors, and the smell of the pink apple blossoms that fell like snow. I am space here, just before everything began. I am a beginning here, empty, waiting to be filled.
My mother left my father because of his drinking. Soon after, she re-married a man that would change me irrevocably. I was four or five, with white blond pigtails and chubby cheeks. I sang the entire Patsy Cline album for my great aunts. I was happy—listening to Cat Stevens and Bread while cleaning the house with mama as she chain-smoked Dorals and drank pot after pot of coffee. I was her little bumble bee. But something changes after this memory. I shrink inside. I still play and explore and laugh and get lost in the land of make-believe. But I’m emptying.
There are memories from this age of being forced to watch child pornography of my new step brother and step sister. I don’t remember if I’m in the video or being forced to watch it. Something is happening to my body, but I don’t know what. Whatever happened was enough to numb me from all intimacy for the rest of my life. Then I’m chased with fists and boots and belts, propelled across rooms like a boomerang, a strange mixture of euphoria and humiliation. My head gets kicked into a wall where I am knocked unconscious and I wake and go play barbies. It’s not that I am bad; it’s that I don’t count. I take it and look the other way. Shame drives me because my instincts know better. Someone taught me how to lie, because my mother brought me to therapy after she’d found me curled up in a ball whimpering that I didn’t want to have babies. And in therapy I remember being told to draw my family, and I forced myself to draw a blue bird, retracing the black and blue crayon lines over and over.
speak
My teens were a time of discovery, adventure, fight, and loss. Outside I discovered the magic of the woods and climbed mountains of sand hills with my best friend, rode my bike with the Forrest Gump soundtrack playing on the speakers wrapped around the handlebars. But at home I was just a body–my step-father constantly grabbing at me and staring at my new breasts. Then my sisters and I discovered the hole he put in the wall of the basement bathroom which was connected to my bedroom. The hole looked right into the shower and he covered it up with a mirror you could see through from the other side, where his “den” was. I’d find him waiting on my bed in his underwear when I’d get out of the shower. I’d scream and tell him to leave, and oddly he listened. He was afraid. Maybe because I was angry enough to open my mouth now.
“You’re different from your sisters, you’re not my real daughter so it’s hard for me, I’m attracted to you and I will try to control myself.”
My mother believed him over me. And my anger fueled her. She was suffering still from a mental breakdown and Major Depression. She was a force I couldn’t reckon with. I lost my friends. I began to change. I didn’t care about anything. I’d listen to Skynard’s “Free Bird” over and over and hide in the corner of my room, feeling nothing except myself changing into something I feared.
Speak
I didn’t tell anyone anything. I didn’t speak. I didn’t feel worthy to myself, and that’s the hardest part of abuse—finding your own worth. At twenty-eight, seven years after my biological father died of alcoholism, I had a mental breakdown and was diagnosed with Complex, chronic Post-Traumatic Stress disorder among others such as Bipolar Disorder, Dissociative Amnesia, and Psychosis. My brain was sick. Is sick. What if I had told someone? Would this have happened? I lost my job, I lost my friends, I lost my house, my fiancé, and I lost myself—what was left of it. I spent many nights in the hospital, too lost and mad to believe in anything. But I got through it, and faith returned in full force.
Every day as I struggle through flashbacks, nightmares, episodic psychosis, and intrusive thoughts, I still have hope. I hope that one day I’ll be who I was meant to be. I hope that one day I’ll heal. But healing isn’t a goal, it’s a process that requires grace and patience and self-love. Most importantly, I tell my story, hoping that others will do the same. Hoping that others will do what they believed they couldn’t: speak.
Prompt 1: An anniversary can be a time of celebrations or a time of solemn reflection. Write a story in no more than five hundred words that describes your protagonist‘s feelings about the event being remembered and how it affected their life. Use words “flashback”, anniversary, “recognition”, and “future”.
Prompt 2:Summer is always a special time, and is often characterized as a period of transition in a young person’s life. Imagine a powerful coming-of-age experience for your protagonist, and in five hundred words or less, describe how this particular summer changed their life forever–for better or for worse.
(Writing Prompt 2) “The Swimlot” for Mike
They’re almost there, pedaling as fast as they can into an unknown idea. July is ending and the small town buzzes with campers, RVs, coolers, boats. The highway is the shortest way, they cut across in a flash of chrome and into the woods behind Frankie’s Pizza.
“I know its down here, Amos, I know it’s here somewhere,” Mike shouts back. They’re eleven without permission. This is about to be the peak of their childhood, knowing too well that it was time to grow up. But there was something special between these two–the love of adventure. They’d spent the summer climbing the city’s crumbling ore dock, fishing, biking to the lake to jump into the waves during storms, exploring ravines in the rain, and at night they’d draw and dream and watch The Goonies, thinking about how they could chase tornadoes together.
Up ahead they see the trees thin and then suddenly it’s just water. The field immediately stops, held back by a four foot high cement wall that runs the expanse of the woods. At the bottom of the wall there is a thin, wooden ledge to stand on, the water lapping it in the silence.
They don’t have to say anything. They’re sure they discovered this. This was it. This is what they’d been searching for–a wild place to call their own. They look at each other, reflecting back the same glint in their eyes, the explosive joy heaving their chests. They say nothing, but give a knowing nod to each other.
“Let’s hold hands, on the count of three!” Mike says. They don’t bother taking off their chucks or clothes, there’s no time. It must happen now.
The water is a cold aqua, with sun beams striking through into the deep.
She holds her best friend’s hand.
He counts “one….two….THREE!”
That second, that split second in mid-air, before their futures were riddled with scars both inside and out, they were free. Untouchable. Beautiful.
I’m standing on the roof of a four-story building downtown in a city. I’ve just taken Ecstasy. I don’t feel ecstasy. I feel what I learned later to be verging on psychotic, panic. I’m going to jump off if someone doesn’t stop me, if someone doesn’t touch me. These arms aren’t mine. The sky is clear. Alisha spins and spins, her arms out “Amy, oh Amy I love you,” her red hair flashing. I feel like the roof is going to tilt and my body will let itself slide to its death. I’m too embarrassed to speak, the stars pulsating in time with the veins in my temples.
It intensifies. I feel the depth pressure when I look over the edge and then run back to the center and fold, wrapping my arms tight around my legs. Alisha is sliding all over in smooth colors. She’s scaring me. I am a bottomless void. Nothing can fill me. I take and take and take until I reach near death, until my body cripples under the pressure, and once that passes, I take again. I’m a train. I need the ultimate climax in everything I do until I’m repelled by fear. And it’s hard to scare me. Alisha takes my hand and pulls me through the thick air and into the stairwell and kisses my cheek “Let’s go,” and I hold her hand and crash into another night.
I find myself rocking in the dark wet grass behind my apartment. I don’t know how much time has passed since the rooftop.
…this is too much, this is too much
The night is warm but the grass cool beneath me. I comb my fingers through it like hair and it waves and gleams. I had demanded that “Jason” come outside with me because I was freaking out. Again I’m a train rushing toward a peak I’m too weak for. “Jason, Jason, Jason,” I can’t speak lovely enough in that beautiful fucked-up way back then. “Jason, I need you to take me inside I need you to touch me hurryupJasonI’mnotgoingtomakeitJasonIcan’tfeelwhenpeopletouchme-did-you-know? I-want-you-to-help me talkmethroughitJasonmake lovetome.” He takes me to my room and plays Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” and spends the next four hours talking me into a peak neither of us had ever known. My body a city beneath his, an empty city with all the lights on. And I find myself lost in the tone of his voice, “now I’m going to…” I’m a train again, finally hushed on a long, lonely track beneath the cold stars.
In the mornings, it was excused for sleepiness. We’d pass each other in our own floor patterns and habits, maybe say good morning., My cigarette smoke leaked into the morning yellow on the back deck where I’d wake and listen. Birds and wind and traffic and exhalations. Then my brain would squeeze as the sun rose higher and the dreams cleared, knowing it was time for the day to begin, wondering how it would go, if it would last, if we’d changed.
We dressed at different hours–I, with the comfort of time suspended, unable to work and trying to heal–and he, in the rut of unemployment and agitated fingers buttoning his shirt. The hush of clothes as we passed in the hallway to the bedroom, maybe a polite ‘excuse me’ to break the air. I sought space at this time, for meditation and thought and perspective. He sought with hot flesh and prodding fingers and a tired way to love me. I couldn’t be touched. The possibility of my lover touching me quite thin, as my skin was too awake and afraid. I wondered if we had anything else to give–what was left to receive from each other when we needed such different things? One day I had said “space, Justin, space…I need to be alone because I’m broken. I need to take care of this mind” and I could never tell him how my soul wept for him in loneliness. I could never tell him he could have my soul if he tried to take it.
The year before, when I was healthy, he proposed through a poem he had written, down on one knee, his hands shaking. I cried the moment I understood, and the ring glittered like snow; I was really loved. We’d lay in silence together be and making love, our minds lax and limbs jello. How I could love him then, in the floating hours of the day, and I told him through my fingertips how I loved him. We’d laugh and touch our lips together. We’d flirt with argument. Later, in the kitchen Continue reading →
An empty space. Empty peace because I didn’t understand life’s big emotions yet and consequences; empty space is what I feel in my first memory—me a snot-nosed, white-blond, dirty four year old hiding in the alcove of lilacs at the corner of the farmhouse. The damage had already begun, only I didn’t know it was damage. There is just space, space inside me. I am no one. I feel nothing, I only wonder at the smells around me, lilacs, tractor oil, honeysuckle and grass. I feel like a nobody. I’m neither happy nor sad. I am nothing. I inhale the earth around me and I feel how it swells in me. There was always the earth in all it’s beauty that never stopped captivating. Even now, past thirty and still the space, I am a little girl in love with the world in my teeth when I’m around floating flower petals.
I remember the sound of the tractor, how I used to sit on it, my arms spanning the steering wheel’s skinny diameter, feet dangling. It probably wasn’t the best place for young girls. There were a few alcoholic pedophiles mozying around the dirt drive, kicking beer tabs and flat basketballs; the yard just past the pink set of blooming wild apple trees overgrown with broken equipment, broken barns, rust, nails, glass, grandma’s blue mason jars. There were dozens of kids–my father a part of thirteen brothers and sisters. It was my father’s parents’ house (“Pa” and Grandma Helen), an old white-washed hamper of a place, but when everything was in bloom—now that I remember. We were just learning to call him “Daddy John” because my mother and new step-father we teaching us how to spell our new last name, and he was “Daddy Scott.” I remember sitting in my mother’s kitchen, scrawling out the capital “S” next to my new dad whom my mother said would love us, too. Then I miss a lot of time, so many memories blanked out and weak, accept for Daddy Scott forcing me to watch his other two children in a child porno he made, and I can’t remember if I’m in it, walking toward them on the tire swing, naked, being cajoled by the happy camera man. They were in white tank tops, their eyes vacant. This was always a secret of mine, and I don’t remember how. I was chased with boots and belts. I remember being propelled across rooms like a boomerang–a strange mixture of euphoria and humiliation. My mother, where was she? Looking the other way somewhere, cleaning rectories, vacuuming to Cat Stevens and Carole King. ….to be continued….
Lady Day’s voice dips and drones and flattens the back of my throat as we open the summer together. I’ve waited a whole year for this. My car coasts so easily on the black road that climbs up and swoops down green hills, as if I’m not even driving but simply along for the ride. The heat comes in from all directions; it radiates through the glass and wilts the lilacs on the dashboard; it blows in the front windows and weaves out the back. I’m sweating but I welcome it as much as I welcome this annual tradition. Somewhere deep within the miles of trees, our cabins await us (along with about two dozen other family members) on clean, clear lakes just beyond Delta in BayfieldCounty.
White clouds and treetops scroll across the silver hood and up the window. Shadows dance across my arm as I steer the wheel.Through muffled static, the notes from the piano lightly dance up and down scales, and the trumpet sounds miles away –backdrop rhythm. The bass clarinet’s riff sways and blunts my spine, taps my sandal on the pedal.
…like a summer with a thousand Julys…you intoxicate my soul with your eyes…
Her voice is the long, velvety cord that laces all the different sounds together in a lovely, melancholy song. I reach to turn her up.
CountyE slopes intoCountyH and disappears behind a wall of oaks around a bend. This is where the road begins to wind and zigzag throughout the countryside, taking its sweet time to reach Delta. A series of sharp angles skims us past Benson’s Horse Ranch, where horses graze fearlessly close to the fence, barely looking up at the flash of chrome and blaring trumpets. Another turn and we ease parallel with a grove of maples and pines behind the familiar old fence that is becoming less and less visible in the overgrowth of bramble and daisies. I wonder if it all looked the same sixty years ago. I wonder if someone drove through here in a shiny black 1940s Coupe –my dream car –listening to Billie Holiday crooning out of the radio. I imagine the reflection of leaves rolling over its rounded surfaces, the quiet whir of the white-walled tires, my fingers curled around the slender wheel.
…all of me…
Everything is alive and bursting green. I drive well below the speed limit; I am in no rush to get there. I have carried the same thought every year since childhood –the faster we get there, the faster the long-awaited week of camping will be over. But now that I’m older, the drive has become one of my favorite parts.
Pavement gives way to fine rocks and ruts, and we are swallowed up by the national forest, hidden from the sun beneath the canopy. I look in the rearview mirror and see my toddler sound asleep. Her plump cheeks are pink from the sun, and the gentle breeze that floats through the open windows cools her skin. Strands of golden hair wisp this way and that around her face, which has lolled to the side of her car seat. Life is good. If I could choose my heaven, it would be this drive, unending through this country on a bright summer day, just Emma and me.
…I see your face in every flower…
We reach the sun-bleached “Fresh Farm Eggs 4 Sale” sign, and I know we are almost there. The car rambles across the rickety bridge over a shallow creek and into cylindrical beams of sunlight pouring through the leafy ceiling. Burning campfires waft in through the windows, and there is a blinding flicker through the leaves –sun on the open water. The road again bridges a small river and then skirts the very edge ofDeltaLake. I gently brake and look around: everything is just as I remember it. The few cabins here have been dusted out and families are unpacking coolers or resting in their lawn chairs. Pink flamingos and windmills line their private lanes and encircle their summer homes. We nod and smile at each other as I roll by. On the other side of us, the lake gradually opens wide to the sky. Just a few yards out, a boat sits still on the glaring ripples with two men, black against the sun, puffy in their fishing vests. It’s time to turn off my music.
We drive on, and the music comes from outside now. There are birds singing high above us somewhere, and gravel spits from beneath the dusty tires. I hear the echoes of branches breaking and laughter from hidden campsites. I suddenly remember the frogs and become more cautious of the little bodies that love to hurl themselves across the road. The water ends and we are bordered by Birch trees that hide yet another campsite–Scenic Drive Resort. I take us further in, left up the hill, where the pines grow thickly. The welcoming sign to Flying Eagle Resort comes into view. I’m almost reluctant to turn, but I take us down the bumpy drive that will wind its way around the wooded resort and bring us to our cabin.
“‘…It’s just the thought of you…the very thought of you, my love…’” –I look back to see her cheeks jiggling with the bumps. She stirs.
At some point everything becomes clear. That doesn’t necessarily mean a good clear, but fact is preferred over fiction when you’re locked up in a mental ward. Again. And it’s snowing out–and worse–it’s New Year’s Eve and you’re thirtieth birthday is coming and you’re little girl must be looking for you. It’s all you can do to decipher the shell-shocked woman-child looking back at you in the tin mirror bolted to the wall above your sink. Here you get your own sink because this time, this trip into the bin, they knew it was much more serious than they had originally thought, and your “security” was upgraded. You have a thought you would usually have–that the upgrade only makes you feel more nuts–but at this point, you don’t feel nuts. You are nuts. I say to myself ‘I’m clinically insane’ and for a moment I believe it’s something to smile about. When the leading psychiatrist told me on New Year’s Day morning that I was clinically psychotic and suffering from complex PTSD, I thought about my mind–clearly–for a second, and I imagined a blue and orange brain-scan image showing clouds of sick. Then I slipped back into the room , in and out of dissociating, and the yellow walls were much too close and I could taste rubber in my mouth and then the hyper-arousal–the flashback coming. My clarity is gone. I need drugs. I need chemicals to help me this is too much–and I dart across the sitting room to the glassed in cage the nurses sit in eating Christmas cookies; Nurse Jo knows me well by now, she knows I’m too embarrassed to say anything; I inch towards the far left window near the hall to my room, she casually looks up and I give her the look and point to my room. Like I don’t want people here to think I need help. God I’m an idiot sometimes.
Nurse Jo always followed with a heated blanket, Seroquel, and fact sheets. As I laid there sucking in air and crying like I imagine I must’ve when I was a little girl, feeling blindfolds on me and blood on my cheeks, hot and sticky and too real, Nurse Jo would shut off the lights and tell me to squeeze the blanket as she calmly, almost like a drifting story, read aloud the facts of trauma and sexual abuse and post-traumatic-stress disorder. I liked facts. They neatly fit into my head, massaging my brain.
The last few years of my life have been, well, like nothing I’d have ever expected or believed for that matter–in both good and bad ways. The seven or so years before this my life was quite productive and filling up with things like love, the obsession of staying busy or occupied (in my mind) so as not to journey too far into unknown territory–I was breaking down then but very very slowly which allowed me more time to work on me and see where I wanted my life to go. I met White Buffalo Woman who read my Animal Totems, I minored in Sociology (in love with the way people work, like you could actually map it–it thrilled me), I explored Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity a little, the Beat Generation, Alan Watts, meditation, looking at the world through wide open, fearless eyes, testing and sometimes criticizing, trying to see where I fit. For awhile I went through this phase (Emma was a baby then) that I had to move to India, or some kind of place away from materialism and media down my throat–I had to raise her where life was about living and being and using your hands. It drove me nuts.
In those seven somewhat healthy years, I went to college, I began to write and write (which turned into a pitched fever as a spelled out the past and I began to decline, in my late twenties), I made the Dean’s List, worked full-time, and had a baby girl, and all the while I had no idea who I was or what I had been (or what I was going to become).
Maybe God or the godhead or the powers of the universe blessed me with a few years of peace (and ignorance, I knew it would all come to a head) because the future was an awaiting nightmare, and the past was a numb journey through alcohol and drugs, music, men, and me giving myself away to anyone who’d take me.
Now before those seven “ignorant, peaceful” years, I was a subtle train wreck, running and running away from myself, and I had become so numb in my early twenties that I had nearly vanished. I felt that there was one small piece of me, though, that hung on, always hung on, even when I was a little girl, and this tiny piece of myself was enough to help me survive. And surviving was all I wanted. It feels strange to recognize that truth, how ambiguous we are, because at the same time I was clinging to a shard for survival, I was also finding myself standing on top of downtown buildings in a bigger city, high on Ecstasy or Coke, feeling less numb, less afraid of death, less afraid of everything–except for my life. I was terrified of me. Of what I had become. Was it reversible? Reparable? Each night I’d sit up in bed in the dark room, burning with “what have I done what have I done to myself.” “>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQwUD-Oyfkw]
It’s kind of easy to, when you’ve been abused and abandoned most of your life, to think you’ve actually done it all to yourself–all the chaos, all the emptiness, the loneliness you’re too proud and fake to admit, the terror in the night when panic attacks make their first marks on you. It’s so easy to look at your pathetic self in the mirror, someone whom you thought was pathetic before you tried to ruin your life, and feel the guilt and shame wash over you, drown you–only you don’t gulp for air, you don’t fear the drowning, you expect it, you don’t believe your little life is worthy enough to seek air, so you sink. And when I was sinking, I knew I’d pay for it some day, because I believe you must take care to every instinct you have about yourself. If you ignore what you can’t hear but see that it’s there, you’re not a fool because you weren’t wired to care about yourself, and in this sinking time you don’t realize that you were rewired by someone other than yourself. It’s not about blame and forgiveness and all that stupid worthless bullshit, it’s about believing and knowing that you did not do this to you. It’s about believing in the deepest part of you that there is something beautiful in all of this, you just have to find it, and that journey is cruel and relentless and so tiring, but I believe with everything in me that there is something beautiful about it all–the madness, the emptying and filling, the love and hate, the underlying of current of love from loved ones.
I’d try to vaguely remember the young girl I once was, if she ever was young; I have to go back to the sprite I was before the age of five, before I was molested and beat and then abandoned by those around me that could have saved me. My mother, she left me there, wanting to believe so bad that she had found true love with a “real man” unlike my alcoholic father. And to make it worse, she loved me in a different way, different even from my sisters, different from anyone else, because she loved someone she allowed to get hurt and damaged and broken. She watched him throw my little body around the room and into the sides of a truck and off a dock when I couldn’t swim and boots and belt and humiliation. It is not so much the physical that gets you, it’s the power-raving lunatic who terrifies you with his presence and threats, his child pornography and secrets. It’s still hard not to be so overwhelmed and furious with my mother (furious is such a small word) when I look, now, at what I’ve become. Granted, the emptiness is gone and there is a kind of peace in me I’ve never ever known, but my life aside from that is, well, sad. Very sad. How can I not think sometimes (especially we she shows no respect for the work I’ve done to get this far) that if she were given the chance, if the same opportunity should arise in a different disguise, she would again, leave me in the back where it’s dark and the sick prey on you.
The only person that can save me from this very present is, quite clearly, myself. Most of us with Complex PTSD I believe already know self-reliance, how to fight your way through anything, how not to give up, and know the quiet resiliency of getting back up, again and again, no matter how many times you have fallen after they’ve quit kicking you down. Rewiring. You’re falling on your own. You seek out any means of obliterating your potential. You begin to master what they (they being whoever your perpetrator/abuser(s) are) set out to to do. And yet still, buried beneath all that self-hatred and self-abuse and loathing, you’re still hanging on, like you did as a little girl, because your instincts told you, even then, that your body was your temple, and anyone intruding was vile and ill and they knew of no things like faith or love or God. There was, in that early moment of intrusion, self-awareness. And you knew that self was worth protecting–extremely worth protecting. She was sacred. To you. You loved her. You treasured her. So you stowed her away inside because you were too little and too…human…to face the unbearable.
What got me thinking about these things is oddly much more universal that what I’m saying here, yet I can only write about my experience, not that of others. But I was imagining all the pain in the world humans endure, all the sweet little children that have it so much worse than I did, and then those that seem to go through life unaffected. First, I imagine this pressure on the globe, and for the first time I understand why Jesus wept for us, why the Hindu’s and Buddhists seek nothingness and that that is everything–we have to learn to rise above our pain, and that, now that is a beautiful thing to see. Pain and love are one in the same. There is no good and bad, no black and white. So I imagine pain teaches you the makings of your guts–your will–and love, love compliments it by filling you, filling you up so that when pain comes around again, love hasn’t dressed your wounds but is your wounds, your scars. We fill with love and then are tested through pain to see what we’re made of, what others have made of us, and what we will make of ourselves. I imagine with each great pain we can a peek at the love inside that has grown and is growing, and we can bear more, because we are so full, and they both bring us to tears.
Well I’m sorry I haven’t written in so long. I and my docs experimented with new meds, which involved getting off what had been lifelines for me for so long–abilify and seroquel. And we tried Latuda, which was amazing at first–got rid of my auditory hallucinations (yeah I hear a little girl crying CONSTANTLY throughout the day if I’m not medicated or “my time” is coming), but unfortunatley the amazing med made me sicker than a dog. I was a useless wreck, tapered off, then went somewhat crazed and terrified for lack of meds in my system, and now we’re trying Lamictal. I also had during this Bronchitis and a seriously infected tooth. Sure I’m complaining, but really I just wanted to tell you why I’ve been gone so long.
I am disappointed in my mental reaction to being off most, maybe all, my meds. The abilify was just about out of my system when I momentarily “cracked”, the Latuda I quit for three days to stop the nausea, and the Seroquel was well out of my system. My, I guess, “reaction” or “state” was extreme anxiety ( I was certain I was going to lose it again and be back in the bin), I thought flashbacks were coming liking a train and I was this amebic blog that was pissed that I hadn’t managed to develop my own, personal defenses and strategies strongly enough; I was sort of in that floating stage where nothing seems quite real,
I suppose I’ll tell you now, this is more like a journal entry, a rant, a musing, a questioning…I’m seeking things and trying to find it this way…we’ll see
Here’s a Tune for you to enjoy. It’s called “Lost in My Mind” by The Head & the Heart:
So I’m constantly trying to figure it out–the IT being what happened and what’s happening and a little bit of what will happen. The problem, what makes it so damn hard to write, is I think it must either be the bipolar disorder or the dissociation that has me chasing my f’n tail. I’m trying so hard to always to gage myself and what I do and say and feel, I’m my own worse critic and judge, because I want to know if I’m getting out of this PTSD shit. Am I evolving, or only involving excess? I have times where I dive into the emotions and the ambiguous feelings and the actions and reactions I have (not digging into the past but into the present). I swim around in it and really get pretty far with discovering patterns and behaviors, progress and declines. Then something happens…I space out. I get tired of it. I get so exhausted. And time slips by and I make myself busy (what’s a disabled gal to do but beach it and read and study study study and art art art) and its like I wake up and forgot everything I sought, all the answers I was on the brink of have disappeared or seem foolish. I don’t know where I am (spiritually, socially, and mentally). Doubt comes like big city shadows across buildings and I’m this little black jerk in the alley. It’s only natural that kick my self in the ass for this, for doing it again, for getting so close to something, getting ahead, getting ‘somewhere’ and then bang, I vanish. I lapse back. Am I subconsciously protecting myself? Or is it mania and lows? Or is it the ADHD’s exhaustion and lack of focus after too strong of a focus? Ya know I keep thinking about when I had my animal totems read by White Buffalo Woman, a proud member of the Lakota Tribe. She took me under her wing when I first began to ensue writing as a living because it was my passion. Her sociology class in college drew us close and she took me to do a reading. I have it all written down somewhere it was AMAZING. But i’ll never get over this: when it came time to see what my spiritual guide was, (and this was before the temperature in my brain and all the disorders escalated) and at the time I believed I was tough, strong, solid–because I fought against those that abused and abandoned me–so I thought highly of my secretly fractured self. I mean come on Amy–you were burning out on fumes. Anyways, she asked me what I thought my spiritaul guide was and I felt this well of pride in my chest for how far I’d come so I’d said “A Lion.” Yes. I f’n said “a lion.” Oh to be young and to dream that ego up. We did the cards and what I chose stunned and disgusted me then but is actually soooooo sooooo true to who I am (with the PTSD/trauma). I chose the animal that plays dead in danger: the possum. Hehee that cracks me up now. I’m so possum. I left there broken hearted that day and feeling like an idiot. If I’d only known then how true it was, and that it wasn’t so bad. It’s not like I play dead to everything (hear I am still trying to make myself feel better about it
Maybe I’m forgetting the important thing–to just be. To let myself feel what I feel, be as I am, be in the now, stay present (had lots of practice on that in the bin!) instead of examining everything so closely to prove to myself that I’ll be okay. I need to know that I’ll be okay and that I’ll be prepared if anything backlashes–like the EMDR coming up with a counselor that really doesn’t know me that well. I want to be bold and brave like I used to feel but moreso I don’t want to be STUPID. Is he the right therapist to do this with? I miss my old psychotherapist. Saw her for ten years. I stopped because it got too personal, too involved, and too much about herself. But now I want her back, the tradeoffs were worth it. Because she KNEW me. She got me through some rough-ass times. Because of her I had no rage and anger issues in the thick of the PTSD–I was looking beyond that for my meaning and my purpose and what I could get out of it. My abuser couldn’t have anymore of me, I was hungry for myself. She knew these things. She’s brilliant. She’s also too personal and opinionated. I don’t know what to do.
I’m going back to the Upanishads and Alan Watts. I need to get my feet on something sacred. I need to…regain my fragile lucus of controlf. I see my situation like a fushigi ball, know those things? It’s mirrored center ball “doesn’t move” it reflects, and there’s a clear, thick ball or coat around it that you use to rotate it and make it look like gravitational magic, the centers not moving as you manipulate your hands. Yeah. Info-mercial. My child “had to have it.” I kind of play with it. But anyway, (clearly this is a sporadic, moodified journal post and I apologize to all who were looking to read something that contained a point). Anyway, I don’t take much stock in the life that is happening around me as of yet (apparently I’ve stopped “being” that much is clear) because I’m too preoccupied with looking at my reflection. That’s it. I’ve figured out my problem. So what. What do I see in me? Or is it her? Do I still see this woman I’m trying to be as this “her” that I’ll someday fill. Filling my hands–I”m constantly trying to fill my hands: I set up boundaries between me and my ex, which was goddamned hard, and I decided to press charges against my abuser. I also am teetering on facing him and getting it from him–the whole truth. But will I get it? Can I stand it? I’m testing my waters so I can move–move somewhere, in some direction.
I picked up my old PTSD workbook, got another book called Trauma and Recovery which is okay, and got The Stranger in the Mirror on my kindle, though I prefer these texts as actual books. And I read at the beach with my daughter or at night and I’m wondering why it feels new to me–these facts? I’ve already read the hell outa them before. It’s like I need proof to know I feel the way I do and live the way I do for a reason. I need facts to show me that my feelings are valid, real, and mine and should be respected. I’m floundering in the respect arena. With my ex, with my sisters, with my mother. My family, they love me, they support me, they’ve been there for me like nobody’s business, yet….I have this lingering ick in my gut that they see me as this sick, disabled woman who is too messed up with ptsd, bipolar moods, adhd, and dissociation and insecurities that she can’t tell her own damn way around. that she doesn’t know what’s best for her, that her opinions and convictions have great purpose and make sense. Why do I feel so disrespected by them lately? Why do I feel like they see me by my labels? I’m still Amy; I’m still hot-headed and quick to defend; I’m learning how to respect myself; I don’t judge ANYONE, so why do I feel so judged? It’s shunning. It makes me angry. Furious. And I don’t know how to tell them “Hey, it’s ME for Christ’s sake, if you don’t take stock in what I say about what I want to do with my life, then fuck the fuck off!” But no, amiable me doesn’t want to cause anything, because I deeply doubt myself and think my chemistry is playing tricks on me and that they’re right. Good God. I gotta quit writing for now, I’m getting irked. Later.
I used to think that my story was a tragedy. That’s bullshit. My story is about love and our centers and what it takes to find that love. What it takes. I certainly didn’t feel that way a year ago—or even ten years ago. I lived through child physical, sexual, and emotional abuse and I was left to my own devices from the age of five on. I was also born with Bipolar Disorder and ADHD. Before the Complex PTSD set in—around my early twenties—I was a numb, fractured, unattached, empty girl, destroying myself as often as I could. Let me start from there.
I was in another city, wasted, when my biological father fell on the barroom floor and died. He drank himself to death. I remember the phone call from my mother at two in the morning. I felt nothing, as was often the case in those days. I pretended to hurt. Even though he left us when we were young so he could have his drinking life, my earliest memories of him are the safest ones from my childhood. He wasn’t like my abusive stepdad. My real dad loved me as best as he could. He was shy and slow, driving us around the old farmhouse in a wagon behind his tractor. There were two wild apple trees in the yard and in the spring the slightest breeze created a snowfall of the soft, pink petals. That was my purest time. That was a time I vowed I’d return to as a woman (though I never thought I could).
My mother drove the three hours to pick my sister and I up that night. It was on that ride back home that I began to feel it—something cracking, something opening–deep, deep in my body. The next morning when we viewed his body in the basement of the funeral home, I remember one minute I was staring at his waxen, long eyelashes that used to sweep across those big, terrified eyes. I just remember those lashes, and the next thing I knew I was launched into a full-blown panic attack. That was the beginning of PTSD’s temperature starting to rise. I moved home and lived with my mother until I was well enough. I went to college to pursue writing. I made the Dean’s List. I had a baby girl named Emma Jane. I was on top of my game for several years, dedicated to psychotherapy and a guinea pig to different anti-depressants, trying to find the right one. My moods were out of whack (still not diagnosed with anything but depression and anxiety) and I was having flashbacks, but nothing that I felt was dangerous enough to mention. I wanted to be well. I had to be well. I was strong, wasn’t I? I was a fighter, wasn’t I? I fought against my abuser and my mother because of her abandonment. I was invincible. Then why this creeping sensation? Why these shadows? I think you know, or your body knows, when something is coming. Busy your life all you want, but when issues go unattended, they’ll come back.
It was in my late twenties, after being properly diagnosed as Bipolar and finally, finally medicated that my life collapsed. I lost my job, I was losing friends, my fiancé and I lost our house (and soon I’d lose him, too). Inside it started as this static that disrupted my thinking. I had fevers. I wasn’t sleeping. I was having body memories and disturbing thoughts and they grew and spread. I’d catch myself, laying in bed at night, crying, and suddenly there were voices—voices in my head. They didn’t talk to me or demand me to do anything, but rather it was like I was listening in on a conversation of a young boy and an old woman, and they gave me peace. Of course it freaked me out in the morning. It added to the fever I ran around in. I was physically sick as well and the doctors had no answers. I was hypervigilent. I saw death around every corner. My daughter was the age I had been when I was molested, and I couldn’t deal with her. She scared me, honestly. My control was slipping, and with that loss I feared suicide. I wasn’t strong enough to stop myself if I did it. I hid all this from everyone, until I found myself running around the empty house holding my head and crying and breathing hard, whispering to my dead grandmother to save me. My mind was out of my control. I was terrified. When I shut my eyes I was seeing things—black figures and red eyes. I threw my things together and ran for the car, and drove myself to the mental hospital. I was like a five year-old in a woman’s heels, banging on the heavy security door. “Help me help me help me.”
It took months and several more trips into “the bin” before I was diagnosed with Complex, Chronic PTSD, Dissociative Disorder, and Psychosis. I wasn’t put on new meds at first—only pumped with shots of Abilify (my Bipolar medication). In the hospital I died. The girl I was was dead. I couldn’t save her—I thought I had to, and I was too weak. I had flashbacks of blindfolds on my eyes, blood on my face, and sexual body memories. I lost all control and identity. My sisters came to see me on Visitor’s Day and they bawled right along with me as I told them I was gone; a caged animal, half-beating. I knew in my very bones that I wasn’t going to make it, and that I had lost. I had lost what was mine because my stepfather chose to take it from me. I knew I’d never get her back, and I was right—only I didn’t know that what I would gain would be so much more.
As time went on, I got worse. I began to have sporadic, psychotic break-throughs. All the world dissolves around you and no one can save you—it’s a delusional trip. Voices I heard appeared in strings coming from the phone receivers. The only thing that calmed me was having someone holding me while it happened, me shrieking in their arms, telling them I wasn’t going to make it. It always passed, but they came on more and more often. I was so terrified of the psychosis that it froze me. I wouldn’t go anywhere, fearing it would happen, and I wouldn’t be left alone, because I was sure that it was going to kill me—or I was going to do it myself. My sisters and I developed a support system that saved me, along with a five-point-scale to let them know how I was feeling or where I was with my psychosis and moods that day. This fabulous way of living continued on for over half a year. I was finally put on a new medication during my fourth or fifth stay at the psych ward, and it eased the flashbacks. I couldn’t stop the psychosis though, but it had slowed to about once a month. As the symptoms let up a little (aside from the dissociative states and hypervigilence) I was finding I had room to breathe. I began to write again. When I can’t find my way, I use my pen. My questions and obsessions about my illnesses were turning in a new direction. Each moment that I wasn’t freaking out in was a decided and much appreciated blessing. I began to meditate. I began to read Hinduism’s Upanishads, Alan Watts and his Eastern thinking, Buddhist scriptures, books on Christianity. I was this swirling eddy. I was awakening as if from a long, long dream. Each day brought me closer to myself, and I began exploring who that self was. Where were my fractured identities? Why wasn’t I feeling like all split lines and divides, half-thoughts and doubts? Who was this woman in the mirror? My eyes were back somehow, as if a veil had been lifted, or was lifting. I cried every day for a long time, relieved that the worst had passed. I was gaining control. But how?
The body has to enter into its own darkness in order to find the light. The light is in the darkness. I had to accept that I had lost, and I had to let myself fall. I died. But somehow, be it faith or God or some divine intervention, I was becoming whole. And I’d never been whole in my life. I realized I had curled up in my own wounds and shadows and I faced utter fear and terror, and because of that sacrifice to my soul, I was able to become from it. As I grew stronger in spirit, my symptoms began to vanish. Your mind is not your friend, it is your enemy. Go with your instincts, your soul, your spirit—that is where the truth is. I let go of the stigmas attached to my illnesses, as I decided that they were not who I was. Letting them go meant breath, I gave them to something else as vague as air and I was new. The mental illnesses were becoming to broken, too translucent, to damage me anymore. I was becoming, at last, enough.
Writing it all down in poetry, essays, memoir pieces, and stories played a major factor in my healing. Once you’ve put down on paper, you’ve given it away. It becomes a thing, instead of part of who you are. I also spent much of my time alone in silence, just being. I was learning to love myself—no matter how messed up that self could be. I accepted myself, I loved myself, I gave myself what I wanted. The ache of what happened will never leave me, but it’s a small scar to own. It’s not ever an emptiness but a numbed, sacred ache that will never know grace or relief but grief for all that was lost when I was young. Sometimes I think of the woman I could have been had it not all happened. Sometimes I ache for that lost little girl. Sometimes I think he stole my life from me. And maybe that’s so in a way, but the parts he took away from me died because I took it to the edge, fell, and came back different. I know that had it not all happened—the abuse, the PTSD, even the bipolar (which I’m still learning to live with)—I never would’ve found myself. I never would’ve had a reason to search and discover. I’m more of who I was meant to be because of it all. In a strange way, PTSD saved my life. What did it take? What does it take to make it? I think that maybe, aside from courage, it’s the will to go on—and that will is so deeply in us that we don’t know it until we’re stripped bare of everything else, and we choose. We choose to survive.
It is this—I healed because I wrote it. I was in the full fall-down, I was hearing voices at night (bipolar/psychosis) as the complex PTSD boiled to its apex. I had put down the pen awhile before because I was so lost in what was coming, I knew it was coming—and what came was me having to step off the ledge and into the dark, into the madness. I had “psychotic breakthroughs” every day, where nothing is real, the room is an illusion, voices looked like strings or threads from some distant world. I was having body memories, I was hypervigilent, I was holding my head, running around the empty house, a real screaming in my head, crying and talking to myself, talking to my dead grandmother, begging for relief. It only got worse. I spent so much time on that edge—how strong our will is when we are terrified. I knew that falling down into that darkness meant one thing—I would somehow make it through and be cleansed, saved, find my grace, get through it, and live. Survive. OR I would be completely destroyed. Annihilated. For a long time after I fell/ as I fell, I believed I was completely annihilated. The girl I was was dead. Something—the pain—took her away from me, and however dirty and fucked up she was I wanted her back not because I liked her, but because I wanted to be a self, a someone, an identity that was naked and raw at the bottom of the well. The world was pointless and endless. I wanted reason and purpose to guide me out. I wanted to see a point, but there was none. It was vast empty space that took you a step beyond terror and into dissociation, where you see with real eyes the mystery of things you can’t name. Dissociation scared me but while I was in it I was too separate to express any fear. I’d lay there for hours in the infinite space, my body numb but floating, my mind aware that it was gone. How had I gotten to this point? How had I lost? I thought I was losing. I spent many nights in the psych ward believing with all that was left of me that I had lost the life. I would forever be this empty pit, this shell, suffering the psychotic waves that made me cling to my mother like a drowning little girl. There was no logic or base to end the fear. I was reliving years of sexual, psychological, and physical abuse (the physical not as damaging as the others), I was skinned alive and thrown backwards, back into the gut of my memories, and I had to sink or swim in that acid. I chose to swim, even though I believed I was gone and dead. I died, I really did. This woman today can’t even feel what it was like to be her anymore. She is a lost shadow that taught me and built me, I blossomed out of her. Because she was brave enough to swim. How did she swim? She wrote it down. All of it. Poetry, essays, scribbles, stories. I was sick like that for a year. I died for a year. Sorry to repeat but its difficult to see those words. I lost it every day, I died every day. My family was so supportive. We had codes and a support system, built by my sisters, and I chose to use it. I didn’t know then that I was making choices—going to the hospital again and again, trying new meds, going to psychotherapy, the psychiatrist, taking my meds, calling for help help help, saying simply to my fiancé “it’s coming” and he’d hold me as I shrieked. Yes you have to fall and know you will either make it or die, its fifty-fifty. And because of the sickness, you believe with all that’s left of you that you will die. And you do. The falling is death as you climb into the mouth of your monster and realize the very thing that’s killing you is the very thing that will heal you. Your monster is your teacher. And your monster and teacher is you, and it is also something greater—something nameless and divine and holy. Faith from somewhere gets you through the sludge of time. Faith wakes you up slowly to a day where you for the first time in a year, see the sun, you’re even so close you can almost feel it, and faith tells you that you will. I never believed in anything before, I was too lost my whole life. Now I know with every ounce of me that I’ve earned that SOMETHING wondrous and huge and as full and as vast as that void I was in was also a space of awareness. Acceptance. Something held me in that dark time, something not of myself or the others. Something that makes my heart sing today, something that gives me peace, a kind of grace I feel running through me every day. I’ve never felt so good in my life. I’m not this split girl with multiple, broken identities, broken. I am this whole being that is calm in settling into every moment. Every moment is a blessing. I guess you have to believe once that every moment could be the end, could be your destruction, and believe it, in order to find the grace in loving every blessing, and appreciating everything—right down to the bumble bee.
I’m writing this today, it comes out like a flood. I was inspired by a friend named Brendan who introduced me to this:
In the Gospel of St. Thomas, Jesus said “If you bring out what is inside you, what is inside you will save you. If you fail to bring out what is inside you, what you fail to bring out will destroy you.”
My madness was expressed in psychotic delusions and writing. Writing saved me, I swear to all that’s holy.
Another thing—in my vast amount of time I spent healing towards the end of that year (last year), I traveled through my writing and began to question how I’d gotten there, how I’d made it. I was propelled like a crazy magnet to Tao and Buddhism and Hinduism. I read the Upanishads and other books/sources. I read the poetry. I meditated on my back porch in the spring air. I read books on Buddhism, I read books on Christianity (my favorite being Why Christian? By Douglas John Hall). The Rig Veda, The Buddhist Scriptures, The Secret of the Golden Flower, The Bhagavad Gita, parts of the Bible, most of Alan Watts—my personal favorite that made my heart pound was The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. EVERYONE should read that book. Ever since then, at the very secret core of me, I want to take my daughter and move somewhere remote, somewhere surrounded by Zen and no pop-culture, no consumerism. I wanted to live off the land and use my hands and teach her with my soul. Teach her what I’ve learned and seen and how beautiful life can be. If I could do anything in this world, it would be that. Unattainable? Can I find a way to do that here? That is what I struggle with now. Off track. Anyways, writing. I’ve always been a writer, even when I was a young girl. It is something naturally in me, it is what saved me (along with a few other things—God, the Godhead, time, meds, and love—not my love, I couldn’t love myself, but the love given to me by others, I borrowed their love to hold me up a little). My friend Brendan wrote “whatever great wounds we suffer are the very wombs of their healing, if we find a way to approach them and name them, let them sing their litanies and tragedies, grieve them, let them go.” He nailed it.
He is standing at the end of the dock with a cigarette hanging from his dry lips. When the sun rises soon, it will warm his bare feet on the planks of warped wood–just inches above the soft water. His spirit belongs to older generations–an ancient part about him that sent him away from cities and busy people, never trying to chase or capture time. Maybe it was because of the rheumatoid arthritis; he had it since he was seven and now, almost thirty, he’s found where he belongs–taking each day slow and steeped in chamomile, never knowing or planning for the next flare up.
He tinkers with cameras and foods and clay until they make sense in his hands, creating masterpieces in the long afternoons of tea and painkillers. On summer nights he sat outside his house, smoking in the dark, capturing fireflies with shutter modes, trying at it every time he noticed the camera buried somewhere on the counter.
He embodies that Beat-look–aged blue jeans worn thin at the knees and seat, torn and meticulously patched, fitted and worn white t-shirts, shaggy hair. He doesn’t give a damn about troubles or answers; he likes to watch the way things move and take their time. I once sat for two hours watching him creep up on a skunk to catch a shot. I got lost around him, the way he stole time with a naturally sedated articulation and spread it out like night, talking about politics or to whatever was turning in his hands at the moment. Taking a drag, taking a sip, and sauntering back and forth with the pace of an old man on Sundays. I loved him. I envied him without jealousy. I loved how he drew me into that world of his–like we were kids again behind that old red fence full of knots and spy holes, waiting for Spaghettio’s and blowing up frogs.
Mike has already had his hips replaced. It comes and goes; it worsened when he reached his twenties. His bouts in his youth were shorter and he remained somehow elastic and tireless. I couldn’t keep up with him. Now they stretch and tear, and he gets so tired. When he cried to me I knew there was something so deep in him that I could never understand—all the way to his bones.
I listened to him over the phone and watched him when we were together—amazed at how this wild boy had been defied by his own body. He was beautiful. Sometimes it got so bad he’d be in the hospital, worn away to his skeleton, his eyes protruding out of his hollow face. He was embarrassed when I saw him. Some days he couldn’t get out of bed, or turn doorknobs and steering wheels. But some days he could fish with me until the sky turned navy blue, and teach me again how to clean fish. His streaks of health, we learned, were becoming more and more sparse, but when he rounded back out into a healthy body, he picked up where he left off—as best as he could.
When his wrists are swollen, he fills space with dreams. He wants a sailboat, and he’s taking me away, out in the ocean. He tells me this as he sculpts his clay and I play at my old charcoals. Sonny Boy Williams, Ali Farka, and Billie Holiday take turns breezing out my kitchen windows and down my stairs. I make him tea and tell him about the cherry blossom trees in Japan. He talks about oceans and masts and ropes while creating a sculpture with his very own, private signature—a kind of howling like a metaphor in the sinews of his figures.
“Amos (that’s my nickname), we’re gonna do it some day. Man, just picture it—out on that water, the clearest, blue-green water. Just watching the sea and breathing in that air. And we’ll do just this, like we always have.”
I think he started sculpting for two reasons: he was left immobile and looking for things to help the time pass (he has also become a chef, he tailors his own clothes, plants gardens), but I think he also came to a hard conclusion about his situation—optimism is bullshit, you have to take what you get and appreciate it. He wracks himself blind with depression when his body gets so weak and he is so ready to take on the world. He can’t work; he’s on disability. He lost Lindsey, the girl he wanted to marry. The American Arthritis Foundation did a full spread on him and his sculpting in their magazine. He wonders if he needs surgery on his wrists and knees.
With Mike, every moment felt limitless. I remember the time we raced to my house in a storm. He had about a block on me. I ran as fast as my short legs would let me, splashing through growing puddles in my PF Fliers. The seat of my cut-offs was slimy in mud—we’d gone hurdling down the muddy slopes of Suicide Hill and splashed into Bay City Crick. It was a jungle down there. The spray-painted remainders of ancient sewage canals were broken bridges that loomed over the stream and burry themselves into the wall of the ravine. I imagined hieroglyphics and secret codes whispering to us. When we crossed them, every step could have been a booby-trap, so we silently made our way, testing each other for nerve. Then it started to pour. Rain showered down through the canopy of leaves and thunder cracked.
“Yes!” we screamed, and made our way up the muddy path. I kept slipping and sliding, grabbing for vines and thorny branches to pull myself up. Mike was just ahead of me. When I busted out of the scratching brambles and woods, Mike had spiked it down the street, racing me to my house.
The rain stung my skin. My wet ponytail slapped me in the face—side to side—as I pounded the sidewalk. The storm put a yellow shadow on everything, making the grass and lilacs blot in electric color. I saw his skinny legs leap up to the front porch, and he waited for me, panting and soaked through his white t-shirt.
“This is friggin’ awesome Amos!” We paced on the porch.
“Should we go back?” My heart was pounding.
The door opened and my older sister, Nikki, appeared through the gray wires of the screen door. “You guys are gonna be in trouble. When dad gets home he’s gonna see you all wet and you’re gonna get it.” She disappeared. Inside I heard Cindi Lauper singing the theme from The Goonies. We went in and lay down on the carpet, reeling with excitement. Thunder echoed down the avenue.
We were eleven when we came to a place where we thought the earth stopped. We dropped the banana seats in the weeds and didn’t say a word. Ahead of the overgrown field that covered old train tracks, the land ended. It dropped somehow. We were sweating. This was what we were looking for. The heat permeated with milkweed and dandelion. Thorns caught on the strings of my cut-offs. I still remember the wild flutter in my chest.
“Amos…holy shit,” his words carried their way to mine and we stood in silence. We didn’t hear the highway muffled by the woods behind us—just the sound of water breaking against something, and the snap of twigs beneath our feet. We started to run at the same time but came to a screeching halt at the end of the world—a concrete slab no wider than a foot and as long as the shore seemed to go; a concrete wall that dropped off and stretched forever in both directions. Clear water slapped and splashed another ledge four feet below.
“Let’s do it, Amos—count of three.” He grabbed my hand and we screamed out the number, jumping in on “THREE!” shoes and all. Over and over we climbed and jumped. We were too thrilled to speak. We looked at each other while we were under water, trying to reach the bottom. Our limbs looked green in the yellow rays of sun that shot through the water. We decided on a name—The Swim Lot—and we pedaled back to tell my sisters.
This last August our families camped together in Delta, Wisconsin. Deep in the forest on an inlet of Spirit Lake, all is black in and outside of my cabin at four in the morning. I woke up and waited for Mike to meet me at the screen door. I heard a whippoorwill. Pine and birch and a smoky oak soaked the atmosphere. It was chilly. I gathered my fishing pole and gear and waited on the porch in the dark. I lit a cigarette that glowed the rails and hanging life jackets in a blinking red. I could smell the pond scum still dripping from the vests. The lake was barely visible, lit by the moon and stars in hazy electricity behind the black pillars of trees. In the distance, I heard his steps crunching on the gravel. I saw a faint red glow bobbing towards me. I smelled kerosene and coffee.
“Holy shit, Ame, you got up.” His grin was a casual half-smirk but his eyes were alive—we hadn’t been able to do something like this together in a long time.
“Coffee.” His gear and thermos clanked together and he picked up some of the bait.
“Where’d you get that?”
He held up an ancient lantern, “Some rummage sale a long time ago. Works awesome.”
He led the way into the darkness. I couldn’t remember the last time I was outside when the only light for miles around was from the stars. We whispered to each other but stay mostly quiet. I take in the smells and sounds and dark shapes and fresh air as much as I take in Mike, limping ahead of me in a red glow. It was like we were eleven again without permission.
The surface of Spirit Lake was covered in thick wisps of steam that lent to it’s name. A fog drifted around the upturned rowboats and shaky dock that had been there since we were kids. The fog pooled and spread and slipped around us. We slinked into the rowboat and the warm water bogged and recoiled against the hollow tin. I watched Mike’s silhouette against the backdrop of scattered diamonds, turning down the lantern, barefoot on the dock. He handed me the coffee and poles and untied us. We dipped in and over the water. The oars screeched and creaked. We went slow, listening to the oars and to the fish that flopped from the surface. I told him I’d row. The night before, at the fire, I saw his wrists and ankles were swollen ends to his skinny limbs.
“Nah, maybe later.” He breathed in deep. A loon landed close to our boat and we watched it. Its call echoed across the black lake. We sat and fished.
“Amos, when I die, I wanna come back to this, right here.”
Listen While You Read to Sleepless by Daisy May Erlewine :
So an intelligent, receptive Buddhist monk (and former psychotherapist of thirty years for people with PTSD) says something very interesting: Trauma frees us because we have come to the edge and returned. We no longer need to be fearful (http://clearmindzen.blogspot.com/2010/05/zen-of-trauma-part-one.html ).
So what happens when we no longer need, but we still are? Does it go beyond will? If we need more help along with our will, then is the will damaged? Or deterred? Can we really will our thoughts into healthy, helpful ones? I believe in part that we can (which means, based on will, we can’t) but we need therapy and perhaps medication–depending on the damage and severity. We need an outside means of survival…unless we’re really strong? No, this has nothing to do with strength. We need the patience and the awareness of the enlightened? We need to realize we are not our bodies and our minds, we are in everything and everything is in us. That’s forging a path for me–hard to see–but it’s there. Our society suggests to us that we are broken. Our own raising suggests it. Well we’re not. Something larger than us happened and something larger then must help repair. Or is that dualistic thinking? To have the full faith in the truth–that we are not our bodies and minds–is a breath of fresh air in this tight, achey chest. Because doesn’t that then knock down our terrorizers from the almighty pedestal of doom? Doesn’t that shame them as they cower in their own weakness? I think so. The deal is not to be concerned with ‘them’ or ‘it’. Oneness with the Self. Awareness and respect for the Self. That opens up an entirely new way of thinking. Is it possible to follow this and find your way and have faith in it–while you’re freaking out out of nowhere, dissociating, and depersonalizing? Can we find it and achieve it–the Moksha, the meditation, and deeper to the Self, beyond all desires, towards Brahman–can we find that place and life of being while our brain and nervous systems are chemically out-of-whack? Why are we so terrified–knowing deep down that yes we have seen the worst (thus far we hope) and we have been to the edge and back–it scared our balls off. Yet something in us tells us to go on without fear, because there is something much more amazing out there–or in here. Our instincts whisper to us like always, and when they’re in overdrive don’t we still feel a part of us that just knows (no matter how bad the flashback or whatever gets) knows knows knows that we aren’t entirely that scene. Our soul, our Self, knows no pain, but waits. Waits for us to catch up, with all the patience in the world, with our hearts. I’m sure I sound totally Western here but hear me out. The Buddhists have a name for depersonalization (panna?), and it is a level they seek to achieve. Hinduism isn’t all that different. What are these Eastern thoughts saying? I can’t wrap my brain around it and I’m becoming forever caught up in it–it’s only natural. Because it’s everywhere. And those of us with PTSD and Chronic PTSD (wave my little flag there) know that over time, all of our questions to evolve, they turn away from us and into something bigger, something more important. Is that Brahman? Are we tapping into what our pains and losses and loves have been trying to teach us?
Lady Day’s voice dips and drones and flattens the back of my throat as we open the summer together. I’ve waited a whole year for this. My car coasts so easily on the black road that climbs up and swoops down green hills, as if I’m not even driving but simply along for the ride. The heat comes in from all directions; it radiates through the glass and wilts the lilacs on the dashboard; it blows in the front windows and weaves out the back. I’m sweating but I welcome it as much as I welcome this annual tradition. Somewhere deep within the miles of trees, our cabins await us (along with about two dozen other family members) on clean, clear lakes just beyond Delta in Bayfield County.
White clouds and treetops scroll across the silver hood and up the window. Shadows dance across my arm as I steer the wheel.Through muffled static, the notes from the piano lightly dance up and down scales, and the trumpet sounds miles away –backdrop rhythm. The bass clarinet’s riff sways and blunts my spine, taps my sandal on the pedal. …like a summer with a thousand Julys…you intoxicate my soul with your eyes… Her voice is the long, velvety cord that laces all the different sounds together in a lovely, melancholy song. I reach to turn her up.
County E slopes into County H and disappears behind a wall of oaks around a bend. This is where the road begins to wind and zigzag throughout the countryside, taking its sweet time to reach Delta. A series of sharp angles skims us past Benson’s Horse Ranch, where horses graze fearlessly close to the fence, barely looking up at the flash of chrome and blaring trumpets. Another turn and we ease parallel with a grove of maples and pines behind the familiar old fence that is becoming less and less visible in the overgrowth of bramble and daisies. I wonder if it all looked the same sixty years ago. I wonder if someone drove through here in a shiny black 1940s Coupe –my dream car –listening to Billie Holiday crooning out of the radio. I imagine the reflection of leaves rolling over its rounded surfaces, the quiet whir of the white-walled tires, my fingers curled around the slender wheel. …all of me…
Everything is alive and bursting green. I drive well below the speed limit; I am in no rush to get there. I have carried the same thought every year since childhood –the faster we get there, the faster the long-awaited week of camping will be over. But now that I’m older, the drive has become one of my favorite parts.
Pavement gives way to fine rocks and ruts, and we are swallowed up by the national forest, hidden from the sun beneath the canopy. I look in the rearview mirror and see my toddler sound asleep. Her plump cheeks are pink from the sun, and the gentle breeze that floats through the open windows cools her skin. Strands of golden hair wisp this way and that around her face, which has lolled to the side of her car seat. Life is good. If I could choose my heaven, it would be this drive, unending through this country on a bright summer day, just Emma and me. …I see your face in every flower…
We reach the sun-bleached “Fresh Farm Eggs 4 Sale” sign, and I know we are almost there. The car rambles across the rickety bridge over a shallow creek and into cylindrical beams of sunlight pouring through the leafy ceiling. Burning campfires waft in through the windows, and there is a blinding flicker through the leaves –sun on the open water. The road again bridges a small river and then skirts the very edge of Delta Lake. I gently brake and look around: everything is just as I remember it. The few cabins here have been dusted out and families are unpacking coolers or resting in their lawn chairs. Pink flamingos and windmills line their private lanes and encircle their summer homes. We nod and smile at each other as I roll by. On the other side of us, the lake gradually opens wide to the sky. Just a few yards out, a boat sits still on the glaring ripples with two men, black against the sun, puffy in their fishing vests. It’s time to turn off my music.
We drive on, and the music comes from outside now. There are birds singing high above us somewhere, and gravel spits from beneath the dusty tires. I hear the echoes of branches breaking and laughter from hidden campsites. I suddenly remember the frogs and become more cautious of the little bodies that love to hurl themselves across the road. The water ends and we are bordered by Birch trees that hide yet another campsite–Scenic Drive Resort. I take us further in, left up the hill, where the pines grow thickly. The welcoming sign to Flying Eagle Resort comes into view. I’m almost reluctant to turn, but I take us down the bumpy drive that will wind its way around the wooded resort and bring us to our cabin.
“‘…It’s just the thought of you…the very thought of you, my love…’” –I look back to see her cheeks jiggling with the bumps. She stirs.
The mirror above the sink is made of metal or tin, like a baking sheet flipped over, bolted to the wall. I don’t resemble much in the scratched reflection. There is this pointy, hollow, puffy-faced woman with black circles around her eyes. I see a physical creature, held hostage. Far, far away I think I remember her, at least a trace, for a moment. And a deep saddness fills me–fills me up to the jagged edge of sweaty palms, a burning stomach, a fluttering in the chest. ‘Stop!’ the word careens through my mind ‘Jesus stop!’, up and down the roller coaster in my head. I think maybe I have to stop getting so close to that girl, because it brings out my disease–makes me nearly quit breathing–or I want to quit breathing. It makes me run for the nurse, who’ll give me a blanket to hold and lay me down on a heating pad and softly speak to me about the facts of PTSD. Facts calm me down. I won’t be able to breathe when I first lay down–I’ll close my eyes and scratch at my face for the blindfold I feel wrapped around my head. Then I’ll feel blood, hot and sticky, coming from some kind of hole on my cheek. She gives me a pill. I’ll smear the blood away and look at my hands at the peak of the flashback, and not see red fingers; no blood. And I can see; no blindfold. It’s all just my mind, like a dream. I’m shifting in and out of different planes of reality if I’m not dissociating. I have no control. The monster never reveals himself, just the shame arises and I am naked everywhere inside-out;skinless. I’m a little girl. Just another little face that cowers before a perverse hand and leaves this place. “Fear is not your monster. Don’t give it a name. We are here to show you that it’s not your monster, it’s your teacher.” I wash my hands. I am nauseous. I can’t get it away–this blood of mine on my hands.
Focus. I stop spinning in my head by saying aloud the word Focus. I can focus for about a minute. Sixty seconds of bliss as I touch the objects around me and describe them, which should supposedly help me from sliding off the ledge into dissociation. I stare out the thick window, I stare at my cot, my twisted white sheets, my balled up blanket I hold close at night like a teddy bear, my plastic pillows, my untouched books, an old journal that looks at me during the long afternoons. Then I’m speeding up, frantically saying as I grab at random “soft, smooth, hard, cool, squishy, solid, rock, concrete…” and my pace is what scares me back into a panic and I feel myself step away–in one, loud thunder-step she’s gone, leaving me empty again. I don’t stand a chance here, I think, the only place where there is help. And I sit and cry in an empty shell.
Days pass in what feels like a month. Happy New Year I laugh to myself. Just days, I say, just some days and I went so far. How do I travel so much in a few days, locked in one building, the mirage of help where the nurses sit in their glassed-in office, watching us, laughing, sharing chocolates and Christmas cookies and new diets. How many shifts went by for them? I’ve become dependent on Nurse Jo; she’s the one person I choose to show my absolute bottoms to, and she brings me back to the room in the quiet building under the street lights that reveal showers of snow, gently, outisde. At night, after supper, I stare out the glass door by my room. I stare at the soft knolls of rounded snow, imagine the buzz from the halogen street lights, the crumple of weightless snow singing to the ground. I can’t go out there and touch it. I think of the recycled generations and VIP’s that have spent the same kind of nights here. I cry (that’s about all I can do). Hard. I cry because I’d wanted someone to carry me, carry me like water–as Saenz says. But I’d run through their fingers. I cry because here I am trying to carry myself, and I’m just so tired; I have no faith left inside. No faith in tomorrow, or even the coming night when it gets bad. I realize how alone I am and that I’m falling with nothing to catch myself on. Am I destroyed? Did I blow it? Will I get her back? I stop crying and stiffen up. I’ll find her. On my own, dammit. I’ll get her back. I won’t carry myself. I’ll push myself. I’ll fight for her, because she was once so lovely. And I cry again, because it all just hurts and I have no defenses left.
it sounds like a circus back there,
behind me where I can’t go, trapped
in my mute carnival
and I’m suddenly alone
in a huge wide world, a
spinning playground and the people
are paper cut-outs with empty expressions
and painted souls like balloons;
there is no love in this place
A palm reader told Nikki that you were caught in Limbo. I listened to her guilty cry from the other end of the line and imagined you in a hazy purple space where only your eyes existed—looking away, stirring with something. I imagined you in this blank, vast nothingness without form, waiting.
The night you fell and died on the floor of a bar, I was dancing in another city—wasted. You used to pull us behind the tractor—us three bouncing in the wagon around and around the old farmhouse. Grandpa sat at the kitchen window drinking Old Style, staring at the humming birds. You breathed beer in our faces as you put band aids on our scrapes or shushed us until we forgot our hurts. I searched for treasures in the dirt driveway—round beer tabs, pennies—beneath the pink blossoms that fell like snow from the apple trees. You climbed one of them and roped a swing around one of the branches as we stood below, catching the petals on our eyelids. I sat on your long lap of faded denim while you let me steer the old mower. I held onto the skinny wheel, arms spanning its perimeter.
On the weekends that you had us, we’d wake you up on Sundays, jumping on your bed. You were fresh smiles and morning kisses, reaching for us and laughing. An itchy, beige blanket divided the one room we shared on the second floor of the farmhouse; it glowed in the sun that filtered through the yellow shade. You were the kind of dad that waited until we were in the tub, covered in bubbles, before you came in to wash our hair. I brought you a cassette tape of me singing Patsy Cline—I was five and knew all of her songs by heart. You said you loved it and played it every time we came. You took us out on a country ride in the brown boat of a car. Nikki and I sat up front, Jodie sat in the back. You held a beer and my door swung open when we drove through a pothole that made my feet hit the dash. Gravel and green blurred by; Nikki held onto me and John Denver sang. At dusk we’d walk through the fields where the broken barn fades and we’d weave around the hay bales high as mountains, taking turns holding your hands. These were the years that sopped and soaked into your memory. These were the girls you knew us by—toddlers clinging to your knees.
You became persistent and sidetracked when, a short time later, we got a new last name. You were being replaced. We stopped calling you daddy. We trailed behind you in the garden giggling your name “John, John, Daddy John”. It was the only time we saw you mad and we giggled even harder. Then we started seeing you every other weekend. Then it was once a month. Then maybe Easter. They told us you were “slow” and “simple”. We didn’t know what that meant; we knew you were like one of us, and you quietly did whatever we would say. We knew you loved us. You showed up crying and pleading after a few months had gone by, begging to take us for the next weekend. They gave you another try, and we waited in our pretty dresses by the front window. Mom watched us as the time slipped away “Goddamn him” and we went upstairs to change. We were told what was wrong with you, “He’s…an alcoholic.” “He’s…mentally slower than…” “He’s…stuck.” I had wished you would’ve understood what was wrong with me. I wanted to crawl in your lap and tell you our new dad was the monster under my bed. I’d imagine what you’d do—the look that might’ve flashed through your big blue eyes, the fall of your sheepish posture, broad shoulders sinking—you with your helpless hands, embarrassed; passive hands, scared, your brain slowly mushing into a sponge. I learned you could never save me. You slinked away to the bars for good, every day, at ten a.m..
At fourteen I sought out your apartment on one lousy Sunday. I knew you had been living out of your car but then moved in with your brother. You didn’t know my face when you opened the door. “You looking for Francis?” you asked politely. Well it had been seven or eight years. Frightened and nervous after I said my name, you offered me a quick seat at the little kitchen table. I stared at its gray, marbled top and at the laundry and boxes and rotten food strewn about. You caught hell though I didn’t really want to give it to you. I had mixed up all your intentions and put them under my bed.
Weeks later, I broke into your house in a fever. I dashed up the stairs and found your bedroom where I rummaged through your things, not caring to put anything back. I was disappointed to see you hadn’t thrown our things away. Our pictures covered the cracked walls and the letters we’d sent you over the years lay in neat piles around a bare mattress. You still had the cassette tape of me. Auntie Carol later told me you played it all the time—in those lost years. I knew that smell of you—I still do. If filled the dank, yellow house with the lonely hallways. I wanted you to come rushing for me. You would’ve repeated things you’d heard like “there’s no such thing as monsters” and I would’ve persisted like a child that there was. You’d be drunk. You’d never fill that void. I wanted to cry for you when I stole out the front door.
We were in our twenties when we looked over at you in the funeral home. Your lashes were long and waxen. Your eyes bulged beneath their lids. Your large hands with the bitten finger nails were gray. Random thoughts shot through my mind in that cold room where they released all of the alcohol from you. As your children, we were to go through your house and choose what we wanted. They gave us your address and it took us to a different side of town, near the lake. This place was hollow and empty aside from the trash. No food, no laundry basket, no towels. Old Style sat warm in the refrigerator. The same clothes you wore when we were little still hung in the closet, reeking of you. I kept a shirt. An old, beige blanket was nailed up over the window. Letters were found here and there in the laundry and newspapers across the floor. I searched for treasures—keepsakes. Beer tabs and pennies.
You called me Salt because of my white-blond hair. Nikki was Pepper. Jodie was Paprika. “I love yous’, I love yous girls” you used to always say. You never tried to teach me to be tough—you always let me cry until I was better. So alone, so alone, and did you realize that in the end? Did you feel it in those short hours before you were drunk again? Did your brain sop all that away? The bartenders said you carried pictures of us three in your wallet and showed us to them every day, bragging about where we worked and how we were doing. Somehow you kept up on us. Nikki can’t stop holding your shirts. She shouldn’t have paid the five bucks to the gypsy.
Flat affect. What a depersonalized symptom to give the hider. Yes, let’s play, you seek. You seek out your DSM and professional books among the cranberry-colored spines with gold writing, or solid, knowing, black fonts. And inside pours out six. Six disorders I have because I fit the criteria like a glove. I was better off not knowing. Yet it was something, a list, I could point to, aim the finger away from me. I wanted to say “of course I have flat affect, I’m fucking stunned that somebody with six disorders can hardly be funny anymore.” No I’m not dissociating at these times. I’m very real when I am angry or crossed or hurt or doubted. It’s when I’m scared or set by a sound or smell or the mind spins manically in and out over itself, that I calm down to dissociate, where I sit so terrified that they say “flat affect” and I’m so scared I don’t know what’s on my face. I dissociate when I panic that I am calm. That’s how messed up this body is. I’ve stowed away inside again, that’s what we do, us big kids. We’re an army– an army given cheap guns, yet known to be armed to the teeth with devices that a soul shall never ever pass, and they never will. Security lock down—it’s a brilliant defense, this dissociation, but it comes back for ya. You have to pay for it. It comes back when you’re almost thirty and thinking about a diet and reading the classics and going to school to become to become to become. And then, wham, shot down. It’s the early-on,unknowing that is most terrifying. I was sure I fucked myself up beyond repair, that back in the day, I’d done some irreparable damage and I was going to die. I saw death. I breathed my grandmother’s name and practically ran to mental health holding my head, to stop the black images popping up with red eyes. To catch my short breath, and the taste in my mouth…it was coming…the flashback. Blindfolds, blood, and sex. I’m a five year-old in heels, smashing my makeup on the ground, crying in the corner, banging on the locked yellow door.
So that’s the beginning, or shall I say, my first day, of PTSD. Drove my ass right to the bin. It was my first time but I always figured that I’d show up there some day. I don’t know why. I’m not one to prod my weird thoughts. That’s asking for mayhem. They shot me in the ass with meds and I cried all night and day after day. I remember thinking that this was it, that it wasn’t so bad, they’d fix me of course, and I’d never be back again. That was the baby version of PTSD, when the “psychotic episodes” or flashbacks were so minute they barely counted and I always came out of it squeaky clean, like it was a bad, dirty dream. Soon, after my stay there, these “episodes” began to creep into my mornings, I started dissociating more when the panic rose when triggers were set off, my legs went numb, I tasted rubber in my mouth. The flashbacks or episodes were lasting forever, on and off, at a moment’s notice. Strange, scared thoughts and ideas whipped me around on a fucking roller coaster and flung me out of its seats at the peak of the ride. Nothing was real. I called to my fiancé who seemed like an oil painting and we were all dissolving and he’d never reach me. “Talk me down. Help me. Talk to me.” I’d demand with my voice in total control. I couldn’t let anyone see that helpless chaos on my face. It was like seeing your own death. Yet you believe death would be easier. You don’t trust yourself in the tub with the pretty pink razor. What?! You’re screaming what to yourself because now the suicidal thoughts listed in the “DSM” are scrolling off the page and into your ears. Oh shit. The book. The stigma. You think as you sink “I’m one of them”. Depersonalization disorder, dissociative amnesia, panic disorder, PTSD…there’s one more (besides the bipolar) but I can’t remember. At this brief interjection of a strange paragraph I’d like to say “Gee, thanks. Thank you step-father. I have seen the light; the dark; and now I can’t see anything but exist as this open wound because of your own tormented soul. Thank you for the lesson, thanks for not beating this one into me. My flesh could’ve handled it better than my head, but could you have known?”
Anyways, death. Death. But what’s left? It got worse. They couldn’t help me. I was seeing things, feeling things, things were lost, demanding their recapture, and I couldn’t see them. I’m five years old, sitting in the crook of my fiancé’s arm, with flat affect.
What the printed, sacred documents of the doc’s don’t tell you is that there is something very key to survival…as they end their chapters in comorbidity and the morbid–suicide rates. They fail to mention the elements of two things that will save you: hope and love. Now why would a book about the mind involve such artificial, baseless tones to their story? You gotta figure it out for yourself, because each persons’ fate is different. These two elements cannot be captured, their purpose lays in secrecy as they fill us all with blessing. Hope is that last shred of light you see; it’s that part of your brain that drives you to the hospital for help, instead of into the tub. Hope makes you wake up and face another day, giving you clues and signs everywhere that there is more, so much more…to life. And in those signs beams love. The love of the fiancé who holds you to his chest and waits for you to get better, knowing more than you do that you’re going to make it. The love of the mother who doesn’t even have to speak, but sits at your side until your episode is over and you can look her in the eye with gravity. The love of the sisters, who allow you to wail out your fear and struggle through your belief that there is no future, just nothingness and death. They cry too, and you feel love because you’re not breaking alone. And the love of a friend, a long-ago best friend—agent of dreams—who tells you as you sit back in the bin again that you’re not alone, she said “tell her I am with her.” And she was. This intricate web of hope and love has shown me something not many people get to see—just how undeniably soulful it is to have each other, and to love each other—unconditionally. There is a greater purpose that must be so simple we can’t see it, but sometimes get a taste of it. It’s so simple that your heart becomes light and made of pink love that streams through your blessed body that heals; it’s so simple that the mind can find a moment where it is at rest and calm and knows peace. It can’t really be written—the love I’ve seen.
I wanted part of my soul to shine with that purple gloss of independence like hers did. I’d wait around after relaying my young thoughts or invocations for her eyebrows to arch over her large, grey eyes. I was originally drawn to her indiscrete way of telling everyone what was cool. She had balls. I wanted balls. I figured if I stuck around enough, she’d rub some of that purple off on me.
She was charming in a way all her own. She was no sun-kissed bee charmer in white cotton sundresses and dandelions, but close enough that I could catch a trace of the faint scent of honeysuckle and soap. She did put daisies in those thick blue mason jars, and she did wear dresses, though they were hand-me-downs of thinning rayon and polyester prints of puce flowers. She’d race ahead of me down the back slope to Bay City Crick. Through her eyes I did see jungle vines thick as pythons, crystal water bubbling and weaving around hundreds of skinny trees, tall as the sky. Rocky nooks and deep, green pools filled her eyes with glitter–we were on a secret, desert island, or deep in a lush forest of oak and elves. I felt the water. It was numbing and dirty. Black plastic bags and Styrofoam and shoes hung from branches or were lodged in the sand beneath the current. The ravine was about three blocks wide, between two overpasses that rained rock and oil and grit over their edges.
I quickly learned the difference between independence and disconnection–still struggling over whether there is such a thing as a balance of the two together. Disconnection was a kind of freedom that coursed through her system in ribbons. We would sit silent on our banana seats, watching a storm roll in over the fields beyond the tracks. We both waited for the cool raindrops to touch our tanned arms before we would race toward town. I needed my connections thick as bones–no–I longed for those connections thick and solid. And I didn’t understand how to encompass independenc
It came in the night. We were all sleeping in the house and I woke to it lifting my sheets; it made my nightgown bleed. My doll saw it all so I ripped out her eyes the next morning before breakfast. Then it started coming in my dreams, and I thought there was a monster beneath my bed gathering my dolls and things. On the scratchy carpet where the sun comes in, it branded my skin with its tongue, so I gave it my voice. Mother and father swallowed it up.
They found me in corners and closets and they didn’t hear their words running from my mouth. I didn’t know so I swallowed the words whole; they fed me spoonfuls of throbbing aches that echoed deep in my belly, burning my insides until it dulled and smoothed over.
I began to sweat them out my pores like a broken fever. I washed and raked my skin. Something curdled and clotted the mainstreams of my heart as I took their pieces and ate them. I choked and spewed out a doll that didn’t have eyes. Her messy dress had burned away so they stitched her a new one and kept it inside and I ran away, hungry.
(Writing Prompt 2) “The Swimlot” for Mike
must’ve when I was a little girl, feeling blindfolds on me and blood on my cheeks, hot and sticky and too real, Nurse Jo would shut off the lights and tell me to squeeze the blanket as she calmly, almost like a drifting story, read aloud the facts of trauma and sexual abuse and post-traumatic-stress disorder. I liked facts. They neatly fit into my head, massaging my brain.
–all the chaos, all the emptiness, the loneliness you’re too proud and fake to admit, the terror in the night when panic attacks make their first marks on you. It’s so easy to look at your pathetic self in the mirror, someone whom you thought was pathetic before you tried to ruin your life, and feel the guilt and shame wash over you, drown you–only you don’t gulp for air, you don’t fear the drowning, you expect it, you don’t believe your little life is worthy enough to seek air, so you sink. And when I was sinking, I knew I’d pay for it some day, because I believe you must take care to every instinct you have about yourself. If you ignore what you can’t hear but see that it’s there, you’re not a fool because you weren’t wired to care about yourself, and in this sinking time you don’t realize that you were rewired by someone other than yourself. It’s not about blame and forgiveness and all that stupid worthless bullshit, it’s about believing and knowing that you did not do this to you. It’s about believing in the deepest part of you that there is something beautiful in all of this, you just have to find it, and that journey is cruel and relentless and so tiring, but I believe with everything in me that there is something beautiful about it all–the madness, the emptying and filling, the love and hate, the underlying of current of love from loved ones.
chamomile, never knowing or planning for the next flare up.
