Poisoned By Trauma
Trigger warning: This post contains sensitive topics such as emotional and physical abuse.
Trauma is a poison. It invades your body, spreads silently through your veins and nestles itself in your deepest crevices, lying in wait. The poison can be slow to act. It’s a bad taste in the back of your mouth. It lets you live and think you’ve “moved on” until some seemingly innocent thing — a word heard in passing, the sight of a dress at the back of your closet — rips everything open, tearing through the walls you’ve built, opening floodgates that can’t be repaired.
It started the Sunday before Thanksgiving.
In a nightmare of modernity, I found out my friend had died while I was scrolling absent-mindedly through Facebook. An old picture — which I realized I had been cropped out of — was sitting at the top of my Newsfeed; I was already onto the next irrelevant snapshot when three little letters caught my eye and pulled me out of my hungover reverie: “RIP”.
I was stunned, didn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it, any of it. This boy smiling up at me from the glowing screen, whom I had known for over a decade, whose kid sister I taught to swim, whose arms I could still feel wrapped around me in a hot embrace only two summers ago — could he really be gone? And I was finding out over fucking Facebook? Only half-aware of my movements, I called a close mutual friend and, in a voice as numb as I felt, she told me it was true, and though she didn’t know many details, she had heard it was an overdose.
I arrived at my grandparents’ house in Florida for Thanksgiving the following day, and though I dutifully chopped vegetables and fake-laughed at my family’s jokes, I felt disconnected to everything. Only when I was alone could I even go through the motions of feeling something. I cried in the shower, but the tears felt forced; it didn’t yet feel real enough for me to actually grieve.
The funeral was in Virginia on Saturday, and on Friday it was decided (without my input) that it wasn’t worth the hassle of rearranging my travel. An hour later, my family trekked off to the gym and asked, in the same horribly pragmatic tone, why I wouldn’t want to join them: “Is something wrong?”
There was a ringing in my ears, a cold chill of dread went down my spine and I ran out of the room, collapsing onto the first safe surface I found. Emotions seared me like acid, eating at the walls I had made around my memories, consuming me along with them. I found myself in the bathroom, somehow, and threw up, my body reacting to the poison as violently as my mind. Shaking uncontrollably, chest heaving, I struggled to catch my breath, but each time I opened my mouth, the screaming stopped the air from getting in. I was making those sounds, that horrible, animalistic noise, I knew it was me, but I couldn’t control it any more than I could control the turning of the Earth, which seemed to be still be turning on its axis despite the fact that my world had come to a jarring stop.
I was vaguely aware of the hand stroking my back and the soothing voice in my ear, but I couldn’t hear the words. I was acutely aware of so many things at once, a montage of memories playing behind my eyelids, and I couldn’t tell what was causing the pain. It wasn’t just the news of Richard’s* death or that it was an overdose or that I couldn’t go to the funeral — it was everything he had meant to me, the connection to a past I’d spent four years trying to hide in a sealed box, a connection to the trauma I had succeeded in suppressing until that moment.
Because, though I’m not sure I thanked him for it, not sure I even realized how much it meant to me at the time, Richard stood up for me when I most desperately needed it, when I wasn’t able to stand up for myself. As I sat curled on that floor in Florida grieving for Richard, sobs wracking my body, I began to tell my mom for the first time what had really happened to me all those years ago. Richard’s death — finally real to me — had blown open my carefully constructed fortress, and the memories, the pain, the anxiety that I had been keeping inside for so long suddenly came pouring out in a flood I could not control. I thought I had “moved on” years ago, but, as it turns out, there is much more to that process than simply saying the words.
I was involved in an abusive relationship throughout my senior year of high school and into my freshman year of college, though at the time I would never have called it an abusive relationship. For one thing, Matt* never called me his girlfriend and would openly deny we were “in a relationship,” but it was more so because it took a long time, and the support of friends and a few therapists, to acknowledge what happened to me was abuse. Even now, I struggle — the first draft of that last sentence ended “despite the fact that he only hit me once” — my internalization of guilt, shame and self-doubt runs that deeply.
I know I don’t need that one moment of overt violence to call what he did to me abuse. I do not have to justify my experiences for anyone; I do not have to defend my choice of words for anyone; I am not being “melodramatic,” as multiple people have told me (and as I used to tell myself). The systematic, manipulative devaluing of my self-esteem, my agency, my identity doesn’t speak as loudly as that one physical blow, but the damage is just as pernicious. Rape is not just a stranger in an alley; sexual assault can be quiet and familiar. Consent once, twice, 20 times, does not mean consent forever. I remember how I blamed myself, and how others blamed me as well:
“You let this happen — you let him treat you this way.”
“You brought this on yourself; you stayed with him.”
“You deserve this.”
I got out before he escalated to what society teaches women “real abuse” is. The next girl wasn’t so lucky, and she has the hospital bills to prove it. When I heard about that incident, I noticed a strange, unnatural feeling mix with my horror; I was relieved, because now, I thought, people will believe me. In the worst possible way, I felt reassured in knowing I hadn’t been wrong, he really was abusive — and how disgusting is that?
Women and girls (I make a point of saying girls because I was 17 and definitely still a girl when my abuse started) are constantly told what does or does not qualify, or “legitimize,” a traumatic experience — abuse, rape, assault — and that is utter and complete bullshit. I am a survivor of abuse and I will not let anyone tell me what does and does not qualify as that. I have heard enough people (most of them men) talk theoretically about what rape/abuse is or is not, and to all of them, I have one simple message: Sit down and shut the fuck up — your voice is not needed or welcome over the voices of the survivors. This is our time to talk.
I started seeing a therapist after I got home from Florida, and in the months since Thanksgiving, I have actually begun to move on, because I’ve learned what that really means. Moving on is not about putting your past in a box and sealing the lid, but genuinely reflecting on that past and letting yourself experience your emotions freely and fully. You might cry, and that’s okay. Crying is healthy. Crying is helpful. Only once you let go and open yourself up to honest emotion will you begin to put the pieces of yourself back together. It’s hard and it takes time, but you’ll get there. I had another panic attack two weeks ago after trying on the dress I was wearing when he slapped me across the face in the middle of our prom, but it wasn’t as bad my last one; I got through it on my own. I may not be healed, but I’m healing.
I’ve tried to start this essay five or six times in the last four months. I’ve stared at the blinking cursor, the blank page and waited for the right words to come, but there are no right words, no easy way to say what I want to say — no, what I need to say, to myself and to the world. But time is an integral part of the healing process, so I don’t begrudge myself those months, because look, here I am, I made it. Most days, I don’t taste the poison in the back of my mouth anymore.
*Names have been changed
Walls
I sat in the car driving back from the airport
My sister was talking to me
but I could not tell you what she said
I was focused on the air coming through my open window
and focused on building some walls
Suddenly, violently
A familiar melody on the radio —
The walls crumbled down,
releasing the deluge of hot, burning tears
She stopped talking, she stared
She didn’t know what to ask, where to begin —
Neither did I.
***
She phoned ahead, called in the troops
did they carry me to my room, to my bed?
I don’t think so
I remember walking,
feeling the weight pressing down with each step
but my memories of these days are so vague, clouded
my body built new walls to keep the darkness out
my body didn’t know the walls were keeping it in.
The days went by
or was it weeks?
A friend joked I hadn’t been sober since break
I couldn’t remember to laugh it off
A corner of her mouth fell, then her gaze
I felt the silent weight pressing down as I walked away.
Slowly at first
then faster, brighter,
I watched the flames lick at the paper
destroying the letter he had written,
the words I didn’t need to read —
There was nothing left for him to say.
The days went by
and then the months
I’ve moved on, I said
I thought I had
I had grown too accustomed to notice the weight.
***
The months went by
and then the years,
my life “went on”
but it stopped again —
I heard the news
and the walls broke down,
walls I thought I had sealed years ago
walls I didn’t know could still break
walls I realized could not be put back together
It took some time, but I’m glad now,
that the walls have all fallen down
I have studied their ruins and I have learned
that the weight won’t last without the walls to hold it up.
I feel it a little less with each step.
