Oct 16, 2011

Windows



Something really big happened yesterday.


So, running late for work, I was clomping around the house in my cute high-heel clog sandals, trying to remember to grab everything I needed on my way out the door. It was starting out as a high anxiety morning. And as I bent over to add a stack of student papers on top of the mounting pile of stuff already in my arms, I saw my sweet kitty Baby Girl nestled down in the shoebox out of which these very same clogs were born. And Baby Girl was staring me right in the face. Then I looked up, and I saw her sweet brother Rudy perched on the pillow on the couch, also staring at me.


“Oh god, I’m sorry, little babies, I forgot,” I said. “It’s time to turn on the Cat TV!”


And then I hurried over to the bay window in the living room, and I opened the blinds.


And that’s it. I opened the blinds. That was really big.


Ya see, if I had been back in South Central, that would not have been a big deal. It basically would have been every morning. Wake up, shower, dress, gather my things, turn on the Cat TV by pulling open the blinds. Then Rudy and Baby Girl could entertain themselves by watching the squirrels frolic in the yard, the woodchuck that hung out by the shed out back, the cars pulling in and out of the parking lot. Every morning—“It’s time to turn on the Cat TV!”, and the kitties would come running, and I’d open the blinds.


But I’m not back in South Central. I’m in Rust City and in firmly in the grip of a full-scale, four-and-a-half-month PTSD episode. Which means the blinds have not been opened since the end of May.


Let’s get into it, shall we?


So, although I’ve made liberal mention on this blog of me having Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, I’ve never said how I got it. And I don’t know why I’ve never talked about it on here because I’m really open about it everywhere else. An attempt at internet discretion, maybe? But the deeper I get into this current PTSD episode—triggered, obviously, by what shall henceforth be referred to as The Leaving of 2011—the more important the root cause has become in terms of the way the disorder manifests itself and its impact on my current behavior.


So, in my early 20s, I was raped by a friend of mine named Chris. (1. Sexual assault, next to war and natural disasters, is one of the major causes of PTSD.) We had known each other since I was nine years old. In high school, both of our families moved, and he literally became The Boy Next Door. We worked on the school paper together. We hung out nearly every day in the summers. He took me to prom. And when I was a junior in college, he called me to tell me he was getting married and asked me to be a groomsman in his wedding. The marriage was short-lived, and my first semester into my PhD program, I got a call from him saying he had moved back to the area and that he wanted to get the old neighborhood kids together for a party, which really meant the neighborhood boys and me.


The party was great, and we laughed and told stories and laughed more, and when the time came for us to settle in to sleep, Chris started to kiss me, and while I was surprised, I was also filled with the spirit and went with it. And then the moment was upon us, let’s say, and I asked if he had a condom. He didn’t. So I said no. Repeatedly. And I tried to push him off me, but I couldn’t. And then he raped me. When he was finished, he said, “That’s something that should have happened a long time ago.” And then he rolled over and fell asleep.


The second he fell asleep, I tracked down all my clothes and got dressed, my brain screaming at me to escape. The thing is, I was drunk. And I mean, drunkity-drunk-drunk. Putting my clothes back on was enough of a challenge—there was absolutely no way I could drive my car. So I thought maybe I could sleep it off in the backseat, but then I thought about Chris’ neighborhood which, to put it mildly, was shit, and did I really want to be a drunk girl sleeping in the backseat of a car in that neighborhood? And the only other option was to sleep in the living room, but there was another guy sleeping in there. Would he think I was sneaking into the living room to make a pass? Would the same thing happen again?


It seemed like my only option was to stay in that tiny bedroom until I sobered up. So I laid in that bed next to Chris for six hours, completely awake the entire time, the adrenaline speeding through my system, the blood pounding in my head, my fight-or-flight response engaged 100%, like a voice shrieking in my ear GET OUT NOW GET OUT NOW GET OUT NOW GET OUT NOW. And to top it off, it physically felt like someone was trying to suck my heart out through my throat with a vacuum cleaner. And that’s exactly what it felt like for every second of the six hours I laid next to Chris, trapped on that bed until my body metabolized enough alcohol for me to escape.


That was the start of my PTSD. It’s probably also important to say that that was not the first time I was raped. The first time was by my college boyfriend when I was 18, maybe a year into our relationship. (2. PTSD often develops at the repetition of a trauma, i.e, when a tornado blows your house down once, you can chalk it up to a freak occurrence. When the second tornado hits, your body decides that the environment is actively out to get you.) That was different. We were sober. It was daytime. And calculated. And the most terrifying experience I have ever had. And I couldn’t wrap my mind around it, so I shoved it down inside me and pretended that it never happened. Until the second tornado hit—Chris—and then I could no longer deny that rape is something that happens to me.


This is relevant for a number of reasons, but primarily because when my PTSD raises its ugly head, that’s what it feels like. I feel just like I did when I was laying in bed next to Chris after he raped me—the blood, the adrenaline, the heart vacuum, the shrieking voice GET OUT NOW GET OUT NOW GET OUT NOW. Even after all these years. So someone decides it would be hilarious to jump out and grab me to startle me? It sends me right back to Chris’ apartment in an instant, trapped on that bed with all of my senses screaming for me to escape.


Now, someone jumps out and startles me, and I jump out of my skin and scream, and I feel like I’ve indicated in the above paragraph. And while I might be able to fake it in front of other people, I’m pretty much ruined for the rest of the day, and I definitely won’t be able to sleep that night. But then I’ll get set back to rights in a day or two if the PTSD is otherwise under control.


But that’s not as bad as it gets. It gets 1,000 times worse. After the rape, I stopped sleeping. I’d get into bed at night and get the exact same feeling I had in Chris’ bed—blood, adrenaline, heart vacuum, shrieking—no matter whose bed it was. But as the shock of the event started to wear off and I had to admit what actually happened to me, things began to spiral even more out of control. I couldn’t swallow food anymore because I couldn’t stand the feeling of having a foreign object inside my body, so I stopped eating. Not only could I not sleep at night, but I became freakishly alert, constantly watching and listening for any potential threats. I thought about the rape obsessively—the event itself, trying to figure out what to do about it, trying to determine if there’s any possibly way to remain friends after something like that, racking my brain for someone to tell about it, although I was positive no one would believe me. And I had flashbacks—sometimes to the event itself, but other times to similarly horrible, torturous events that never actually happened to me. But I actually, physically saw them happening to me anyway. It was like two films were being projected on the same screen at once—the film of the actual, real world alongside an uber-violent, never-ending horror film in which I was the only victim. I knew it was not real, but I nevertheless saw it playing out in front of me nearly constantly, like the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel of my life, only with each potential ending filled with blood, torture, rape, murder.


It was not pretty. And it took me a long, long time before I could leave my house without trembling with fear, before I could look strangers in the eye again, before I could fall asleep without chemical assistance. It was two years before I had an entire day where I didn’t think of the rape once. It was more years before I got the eating disorder under control. Because the biggest thing that happened when Chris raped me was that he completely shattered any sense I had in the world as a safe place. Because he had been such an old, close friend, perhaps the last person in the world I would have suspected of being capable of doing such an awful thing to me, that clearly proved that, you know, you couldn’t trust anyone. Because really, if you can’t trust one of your oldest, dearest friends not to rape you, then you can’t trust anyone. Because when it comes down to it, guys are strong. They’re really strong. Biologically, guys will always be stronger than me. And if you can’t rely on the bonds of friendship or love or simple human decency, you don’t have anything. Because when it comes down to it, guys are always going to be strong enough to take what they want from you. So no one is safe.


Or at least, this is the way my body made sense of the event as a way to ensure my survival. So if I always watched, if I never slept, if I stayed out of public places, if I was constantly ready to flee, then I’d be able to escape if something ever happened again. It makes perfect sense in a way, that this is how that evolutionary drive to survive altered my wiring so that I could survive. However, while these things may make sense in response to an immediate threat, having them running constantly makes actually living nearly impossible.


And the problem is, PTSD is forever. (3. Yeah, PTSD is forever. It can be managed, but it can never be “cured”.) It’s not something that I can bootstrap and get-your-act-together-O’Brien and “get over”. Like the shittiest Christmas present ever, this thing was given to me without a receipt, so it’s going to be hanging around my house for the rest of my life. Fuck diamonds—PTSD is forever.


But you know, with a lot of work, I learned how to manage it, and once I could sleep again and eat again, I found myself having a pretty awesome life. And I didn’t have another massive episode until after Mr. Fox moved to the States and got all crazy and all threatening and such. And it makes sense that that would trigger a long-running, full-on PTSD episode, with the insomnia and the flashbacks and obsessive thoughts and hypervigilance, because I had really trusted Mr. Fox, and back when we lived Over There, I had really felt safe with him, so when he himself became a threat to me, every danger alarm in my body went off and it felt like I was constantly under attack.


And this is a really important point to clarify: while I always knew in my rational mind that I was not actually under attack, that did nothing to keep my body from feeling and responding exactly as if I were under attack. So I’m not exaggerating at all when I try to say how it feels. It’s not just anxiety. The body, the survival instinct, determines that a mortal threat is truly there. So it’s not like I’m maybe 30 seconds away from being brutally murdered. According to my body, I am 30 seconds away from being brutally murdered. I don’t feel so desperately trapped that I’m like a wolf the moment before it decides to gnaw its own leg off to escape the hunter’s trap—I am the desperate animal. Because the threat feels real and present—I can just never see where it is.


That’s when it is at its worst. But it gets that bad. It gets to the point where a little part of my brain starts to think that maybe I can tear open my skin and rip my own nervous system out, that maybe I can physically remove the part of me that is causing me to feel this terror. It is not pretty at all.


And all of this is important because this is how bad it has been these last four and a half months. When this fella that I talked to every day for over a year stopped talking to me—resulting in The Leaving of 2011—that’s how my body responded. With PTSD cranked to 98%, as if I were under full-scale assault. It’s been so bad that I’ve forgotten two of those months almost completely. And the things I do remember about this post-Leaving time are things like feeling physically paralyzed while I watched the bay window all night long, moving into my little guest cabin and forsaking the rest of The Gingerbread Cottage because it was too big to feel safe, hiding in the bathtub when things got really bad and trying to talk myself down—yet another use of this fractured identity I have, with the SuperHero Great Big Girl trying so hard to comfort a small, terrified, mortal Lulu O’Brien, but only managing a feeble litany of “It’s okay, baby girl, nothing bad is going to happen to you”s. I missed what little work I had over the summer. I couldn’t leave the house. I could not function. Because, as much it fucking kills me to say it, PTSD is a disability. Which means, sometimes it disables me. I mean, it’s kind of hard to write a syllabus when you’re trying not to vomit because it feels like you’re about to be murdered. You can’t really focus enough to write a chipper committee email when you haven’t slept at all in four days. It’s a disability. And I’ve got it.


Honestly, I was pretty surprised when The Leaving of 2011 started taking me this route—and really, I stopped sleeping the second I got back from South Central—but thinking about it now, it does make a lot of sense that this would be the fallout for me. Because I really felt safe with this fella. I mean, it’s not like in my non-PTSD-episode life, I walk around being threatened by people. With most people, I just feel an absence of threat, which hey, is pretty awesome, and I’ll take it. But with this fella, I felt an active sense of safety, which is rare. I don’t know what specifically it was about him that made me feel so safe, but I know he did, and I know that in all the years I’ve had PTSD, I can count the guys who have made me feel actively safe on one hand and still have a couple of fingers left over. And the fact that we communicated every damn day established him—and that sense of safety—as a fixture in my life.


So then when he was suddenly gone, it was like what I thought was solid ground underneath me suddenly cracked open and I found myself falling. When this fella took off, he took that safety with him. And because we were so intensely intimate, because there was a lot of love there, I never would have anticipated The Leaving. Never in a million years. Because life is difficult, and there is so much loss in the world, so why would you ever, ever throw away someone with whom you have such a strong connection? I felt so blindsided and betrayed by The Leaving of 2011 that of course my survival instinct kicked in, saying, “See? You can’t trust the boys. They will just do shit to fuck you up in the worst way possible. But don’t worry, we’ll make sure you stay safe—just as long as you remember that there is a threat around every corner.”


It makes sense, what with the way that the wires of love and sex and intimacy and safety and fear and danger and trust and betrayal are mixed up inside of me now as my body’s way of trying to keep me alive. It sucks, but it makes sense. And it makes sense, what with the way I was given PTSD in the first place, that subsequently my sense of safety—or lack thereof—is specifically attached to men. I hate that. But it’s in my wiring now. It’s part of this thing that I have. You know, this thing that I have to manage forever. That sucks, too.


And when this episode first started creeping up on me this summer, I thought I could kind of cut it off at the pass if I could just figure out a way to fix the situation with me and this fella. Or barring that, if I could just resolve it somehow—if I could know officially, 100% if he was going to be In My Life or Out Of My Life because at least that could be something stable. An official “I am never going to speak to you again”, while heartbreaking, would still be official—a fixed point on which I could rely. So some kind of early action could have kept it from getting this bad, or at least transformed it into something more simple like sadness which, while difficult, doesn’t give you flashbacks or make you think you’re about to be murdered in the most brutal way possible. So really, the continual, ambiguous not talking was pretty much the worst thing that could have happened for me. Ambiguity is by nature uncertainty, which only feeds the fear.


But I guess my reason for writing this—you know, for revealing what the PTSD actually feels like and that I’m still in the thick of the worst episode in many years—is just to stop hiding. Because I have totally been hiding. I’ve basically stopped contacting my friends—Trudie excepted, although now she’s flown off to work on the Frozen Tundra for six months, so I’m pretty much entirely on my own—because when I do, and they see that I’m still messed up, they think it’s “over a boy”. They think I’m pining away for this fella, that I’m giving my power over to him, that I just need to go out and find me a man and forget about him.


And dude, that’s not what’s happening at all. I mean, sure, none of this would have happened without The Leaving of 2011, and when I think about that, I still get really sad. And when I think about the awesome things that we did over the year when this fella and I were talking to each other every day, I still get really sad. I won’t pretend that The Leaving doesn’t hurt anymore because it does. Big time. But the real reason I’m so messed up is not because I’m heartbroken, as people assume, but because I feel so profoundly unsafe. Because this bomb that will live inside of me forever has exploded into a big mess of terror and threat and blood and adrenaline and GET ME OUT OF HERE. And that mess is with me all the time. All the time. The moment I wake up, when I’m trying to work, when I’m teaching class—all the time. So really, I’m still so messed up because it is exhausting work to fight your body’s survival instinct every waking minute, which are most minutes when you can’t sleep, either. I’m still so messed up because every single day of these last four and a half months, I’ve just been trying to get by—trying to breathe deep and talk myself down and find a doctor who is taking patients and trying to MacGyver some home-made Ambien out of melatonin, Benadryl and whiskey, anything to get me a couple hours of sleep.


I’m still so messed up because I’m trying to remember how to survive each day when every single moment feels like I’m under attack. I’ve forgotten how to do this because it’s been so long since I’ve felt this way. And for a whole year, anyway, I felt beautifully, actively safe. And now I feel the opposite.


It’s easy to slap on the Tiara of Truth and tell it like it is about the people that you see, but it’s a lot harder to focus its sparkly power on yourself. But I have to admit what this PTSD actually is, and it’s a disability. And as much as I hate it, I have this thing. And although most times it is much, much easier to deal with than it is now, I’ll have this thing forever. It’s a part of me.


When I started this blog a few years back, I never thought it would go here. I thought it would be all about jobs and gender and superhero jumpsuits. I thought it would be real stuff, you know, but not this. But a while back I made a commitment to explore the role of desire in my life, although originally through a performance that is now defunct. But I still made a commitment. And I keep my commitments because they’re important. I’m not going to back down now just because it’s taken me to a place that is uncomfortable and ugly.


And anyways, even in the middle of the uncomfortability and ugliness, in the middle of the uncertainty and anxiety and fear, there are some days where suddenly, you open the window without even realizing it.

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