Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (27 page)

Now, I had to go back to Ohio because my father was getting remarried on Christmas Eve. He was still friends with his old mistress, who was invited and for some reason delivered a weepy toast about how many “obstacles” there had been in the beginning of her own relationship with my father—his still being married to my mother the main one. A friend from college I’d roped into being my date put her hands on my lap to keep me from getting out of my chair and making a scene. No fat middle-aged alcoholic man in the Midwest outdrank me that night. Back at my mom’s little house, for which I’d lent her half the down payment, I spent the majority of the trip on her couch watching record-breaking amounts of HBO. Both of my parents had seen me openly weeping six months earlier, when I’d still been in Ohio for the PTSD-sex-essay publication. In the interim, my father regularly called to make me rate my morale on a scale of one to ten, encouraging me to hang in there and stay in therapy when I answered “three” or “four.” But my mother and I hadn’t talked about it since, and in front of her now I didn’t bring it up.

I don’t remember exactly when the stabbing fantasies started, but it was sometime around this time.

Or rather, I should say, that was when they evolved. In the initial broke-openness after the PTSD essay, I’d longed for a mortal wound, not unlike the injuries some cutters give themselves to distract them from their emotional pain. “I wish I would get stabbed,” I’d told Isaac, my ex, when he’d been over for one of his babysitting shifts. I’d never seen him look so alarmed. It was breathtaking, dazzling, to me, how much pain a psychic ailment wrought. With my every nerve scraped, and a deep nausea that could neither be fed nor puked away, I thought of my worst previous physical hurt, the time I’d broken my arm when I was five. The surgery and the stitches and the post-anesthesia vomiting seemed calming compared with what I was now feeling, and I wished that I were in the hospital with a life-threatening stab wound instead.

Since then, stabbing had stuck with me. Now, I didn’t wish for passive stabbing but regularly pictured myself plunging knives deep into my own flesh. The less I drank and the more I felt, the more often I wanted to cut myself open. And not for the distraction but for the bloodletting. In my head, it seemed I could feel better if I could just open up and pour some of this suffering out.

Denise and I stepped up our goals. When I’d first come to her, her primary concern had been damage control. Though she’d asked me what I ultimately wanted—
to be able to feel myself in the world and process those feelings
—achieving that from the state I was in would take a long time, and would require me to be open to feelings, first and foremost. As my body had locked itself up against feelings for good reason, Denise hadn’t wanted to pry it apart then “just to throw you back to the wolves.”

That is, she wouldn’t facilitate my full undoing until she was sure I wasn’t going to be put in danger at work—and that I could take the time and space I needed after being pried open to rest and take care of myself and fall apart and not function. Once, she’d been part of a therapists’-aid trip to a war zone. When she got there, she’d realized that the security situation—checkpoints, suicide bombers—didn’t meet the requirement for healing from
post
-traumatic stress, because the trauma and threats to safety weren’t over for anyone she treated. She and the other therapists had focused on alleviating the symptoms of PTSD rather than on treating their cause. Healing was luxurious. It was for those whose lives were not just about survival anymore. Denise and I had been venturing into plenty of uncomfortable emotional territory together already, but I had a lot more undoing to go before we could get all the way at those twin foundations of processing the trauma and rebuilding a life. And as long as I was doing my job full time and in unsympathetic and dangerous environments, Denise wouldn’t do it.

I hadn’t wanted to do it anyway, when I’d first started seeing her. I was in so much pain already. And when she’d told me that the second foundation was choosing not to stay a victim, I’d been appalled. I hadn’t done anything wrong, so I shouldn’t have been responsible for fixing it. Why should
I
have to put everything back together? And how could I possibly, when I felt too awful to carry on with even normal life? And if
I
couldn’t, as that privileged white American person who went to college, who could?

“You say that like it’s just a choice people make, easy as that,” I said, scowling at her.

“It is a choice,” she said. “You can’t choose whether or not you’re a victim. But what you choose to do with that is up to you.”

“But I
am
a victim,” I said, “and you spent all this time trying to make me feel OK about being a victim—it’s not my fault, other people did bad things, it’s OK for me to be traumatized—and then after I accept that, I have to renounce it and move on and refuse to be a victim.”

“It is important to acknowledge what happened, and how awful it is that what happened, happened. In trauma, you need that validation and support,” she said, because if you didn’t get it from your community, you felt like you had to acknowledge and reinforce your own victimhood and got entrenched in it, holding that recognition yourself. “But you still have to make a choice to move on. If you stay there in that step of recognizing that you’re a victim, you stay a victim.”

“That choice only applies to people who are educated or lucky or rich enough to have someone like you tell them that they even
have
options for moving forward,” I practically spit, “and then have the time and money to pay you to help them do it. This conceit that people have access even to awareness of that choice in this culture, and then to the help they’d need to make it, is insanely classist.”

“I absolutely agree with you that the process you’re going through, the way you’re going through it, isn’t available to everyone,” Denise said, remaining calm.

But it was available to me, as long as I pumped every cent of not-so-disposable income into it until insurance accepted my claim. I hated Denise that day, more than the time she’d shown me how much my sideways, shrinking body language had made my “No” to Marc unbelievable our last night together in Haiti. What I heard her saying was that victims who weren’t bettering themselves were self-pitying assholes, and that as long as I felt like a victim, it was because I wasn’t choosing hard enough not to be one, and goddammit if I didn’t feel like a victim of the world and fate and my own nervous system every day. But there were two types of people I could be: a stale victim, shut down and festering, at turns tough and crazy. Or I could be somebody who wasn’t impossible to live with. With the means and the option and the safety to do it, I didn’t have any excuse not to choose that.

I was so mad that I had to do this. Mad that I hadn’t picked this disorder but now had to embark on a long and excruciating odyssey just to be able to love someone. But I did love him. I wanted him, and that life. I was a ways into my undoing now anyway, since I’d gone public with my symptoms, and with Nico coming and my growing sense that if I felt like this for much longer, I probably wouldn’t survive, it was now or never to get to the bottom of it.

I couldn’t heed Dr. Shere’s advice to retire at the age of thirty-one, but after Christmas, I took my many accumulated weeks of vacation from work. When that was over, I took a pay cut and went part time. I cut a contract to do just two stories that year, and promised Denise that none of them would be in statistically dangerous territory. Whatever that meant, for a woman.

And however much of a difference working or not working made on that account. When I’d stopped in New York between Uganda and Paris, I’d gone to a magazine party. Numb enough not to have sad-girl feelings pulling my shoulders into a stoop, dressed up and peer-surrounded and feeling fantastic—wearing high heels, even, in which I stood proud and absurdly tall—I didn’t make it through the night without an important editor following me when I went outside for a cigarette to tell me that I had an amazing body, that he could see from the shapes under my dress that it would stay amazing even as I got much older, and that he wasn’t going to be able to help himself from touching me soon.

Still. Denise and I had a deal that I’d choose my assignments carefully, and arrange escorts and the utmost precautions no matter where I went.

So we delved deeper. Pressed on memory and trigger points that left me incapacitated for days. Doing table work where I “completed a movement” I hadn’t at a crucial moment before—shoving and flailing at Denise from on my back, or kicking my legs maniacally, screaming “I
SAID
no” at her—whatever my body felt compelled to. Doing trauma release work, where I released contractions in my muscles by contracting them extra hard for long periods, fatiguing them until they gave out, forcing them into a prolonged shake. The theory behind trauma release work was that the natural response to trauma was to shake, to move the surge of stress and fear through so it didn’t become trapped inside. Like some animals did—because they hadn’t been socialized to stop it. Alex told me her dad had experienced this post-traumatic shaking-release, too, only recently, long after he’d incurred the mortal fear of his service in Vietnam. Though his therapist wasn’t making him do it on purpose. At his children’s urging, he’d finally been getting help for the psychic wounds they’d grown up watching him struggle with. Since the VA generally favors exposure therapy—being too vast and bureaucratic an institution to adapt to the changing and complex needs of trauma patients—it was no surprise that his therapist abruptly prompted him to talk about things he hadn’t talked about or even let himself think about for decades. After each session, he walked back to his car, and couldn’t go anywhere. He sat there in the parking lot and shook, crying. For hours.

Denise and I finally did EMDR. She handed me headphones that played beeping noises in one ear and then the other, and palm-size boxes hooked up to wires. They vibrated one at a time in alternating hands. She asked me a question, and I closed my eyes while my ears and hands were beeping and buzzing and she sat close across from me with the controller in her hand. After a few minutes, she turned everything off and asked me what I noticed now. We did this many times over, discussing the disjointed images that came up. There was a little girl, and she was under attack. Nico appeared and tried to help, but everyone else told him not to be nice to her. My father was there at some point, in the form of an immense and floating head. We didn’t do EMDR much after that session, since Denise didn’t think it was the best choice of treatment for me. I felt destroyed for more than a week afterward. If trauma exists on a severity spectrum, EMDR works best for those who are on the simple-trauma—versus the complex—end. And Denise was increasingly thinking I was “right in the middle there.”

As we pressed ahead, my nightmares were constant. One night I had a nightmare in which my father was killed. I fainted in the dream when they told me, with these two unfamiliar people holding up my arms on each side. The next night, I dreamed I was infiltrating a pack of poor and extremely violent murderers, kind of like a gang, and I was terrified that they were going to figure out who I was and kill me. But I had to be there to help someone, maybe a friend, figure out who’d killed some relative. And so I had to fuck this guy, this slight, weaselly, disgusting greasy asshole guy, because whatever my cover was, it involved my being open to prostitution, and he had money and people were watching us. When it was over, my letting him touch my nipples and put a weaselly narrow tongue in my mouth and pretending that was OK, I caught wind that the gang knew something was amiss, and as I was leaving, walking through the parking lot, this heavy blond woman with a ponytail who murdered people was running up behind me.

The next day, I couldn’t get out of bed. When I woke up, I’d bound myself, clutching my sides together, straitjacketing my hands across my chest. Protecting the midline. Exhausted and nauseated. For the rest of the day I remained fragile as a piece of paper with a tear already in it, needing just the slightest tug to rip open fast and wide.

Nico called as I lay there. “Why don’t you try going outside?” he suggested.

You’re weak
is what I heard.

“You think I’m weak and this is my fault because I’m not trying hard enough,” I said. I was furious. He didn’t understand that I
couldn’t
go outside, because he’d never felt like that—just as I wouldn’t have been able to understand it before it started happening to me, either.

“No, my baby,” he said. “No. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I thought maybe it would help you to go outside. OK if you can’t go outside. I’m here. I love you so much. Anyone would feel like you feel if they lived what you lived. I love you even like this because you’re perfect for me.”

This would diffuse a normal person in a normal fight. This would diffuse a normal me, even a really pissed or hurt but non-episodic me. It addressed and quelled the insecurities feeding the outburst.

But I wasn’t a normal me anymore.

“Fuck you,” I said.

He tried a few more times, remarkably, before saying—and really earning—that he couldn’t talk to me when I was like this. He got mad. Though I’d asked him not to a hundred times, it seemed to take more than a hundred times for a partner to stop taking episodes personally.

“My words are useless,” he said angrily.

When we hung up, I did force myself to go outside, but hated it, and came back to count the minutes until darkness. When I closed my eyes to go to bed, my mind played images of a man in a military uniform very slowly knifing another young man to death until I fell asleep. Then I had a nightmare that I was lashing someone bloody with a whip. The next night, I dreamt about a young boy whose father woke him up every morning by punching him in the face until he vomited.

The following mornings, I woke up wrecked, continuing to be incapable of being open or loving or non-irritable even to anyone who was being nice to me—including Nico. By the time I arrived in France in February, the last time we were supposed to have to meet long distance, I had many times overextended his patience.