Get Down on the Ground. We Will Shoot You.
On twenty-five years of surviving trauma and PTSD.
Preface:
You shouldn’t read or listen to it if you are triggered by real-life gun violence or sexual violence. It’s a recounting of a trauma that has shaped my life and my struggle with mental illness for the last 25 years.
But it’s also a recounting of the vibrant empowerment I am finding lately, a new lease on life. I don’t believe I can have one without the other, the positive without the negative. They inform each other.
I’m also sharing this because you may have traumas of your own, and need to feel connected to someone who, at least in even the smallest way, understands. I need that, too.
My therapist will ask me where the pain is, and I will tell her it is behind me, forcing my face to the ground, pressing my cheek against the hot summer asphalt.
There’s a simple reason I don’t like guns.
I’ve stared at one, held to my forehead at point blank range. I’ve been told to kneel, to look at the ground, and then felt the barrel slide to the back of my head. Execution style.
I’ve been told I am about to die, and that my friends are about to die, and we have looked at each other, 45-caliber pistols to each of our heads, with the dimming, gloss-less eyes of dying children. Darker, somehow, even in the night.
I wondered in those long minutes.
I wondered where God was, closed my eyes and tried to hear him. In his absence, I wondered where the police were. I wondered what my parents were doing, if they would startle awake to feel me die like in the movies. I wondered why people were walking past us, pretending not to see.
These are the strange hopes of violent moments:
I hoped I was shot first. I changed my mind and hoped we were all shot at the same time. I forgot to hope we would not be shot at all, because that part had been decided, told to us, a fact.
Another fact: It is not cold, the barrel of a gun in the Houston summer.
We watched them have their way with her, our friend — made to watch, at gunpoint, her eyes begging us to make them stop. She said no, then no again. It’s possible she said no a hundred times; it has always echoed.
We did nothing to help her.
You always think you will do something until the gun is at your head. Until it’s not TV anymore, not the silver screen, not a game in your backyard or in the arcade. Until the girl and her desperate “no’s” are just sixteen and you are seventeen and that extra year plus a dick doesn’t make you a hero.
I am still so sorry for what I could not do.
I am still just so painfully sorry.
My therapist will ask me where the pain is, and I will tell her it is behind me, forcing my face to the ground, pressing my cheek against the hot summer asphalt. It is a pain that has never left, that steals my breath at 2am when the house creaks and shifts and I know I am dying again, they have come for me.
Because they promised to come for us if we told. They took our drivers licenses and promised to kill our families and that is how we found out we were going to live. Back at home, every bright car light in my bedroom window was them coming for me. Every loud stereo, every backfire, every key in the front door was them coming for me. Some days, they are still coming.
They stole our car and our money and our watches and our jewelry and our childhoods and our innocence and our naiveté and our sense of wonder and our laughter and our crushes and our synapses and our solar system and our sobriety.
The assailant who stayed behind and guarded us, the one who put his fingers inside of her, said he was sorry once his friends were out of earshot. They would kill him, he said, if he didn’t do this. I believe him now. He was a boy, and I have forgiven him. I have also taken back my forgiveness countless times. I just took it back again now, writing this. Then I granted it again, and then took it back.
Because I am still not always okay. I am forty-one and I do not take many walks after dark. I sit in aisle seats, plot my escape routes. I look behind me. I look again.
I am PTSD begot chronic anxiety begot major depression begot bipolar II. I am a chain reaction. I am a vicious cycle. I am a statistic. I am a stigma. I am a 20 percent chance of suicide.
You and I owe ourselves the will to fight and heal and be kind to ourselves. That is it. We owe nothing else to anyone for our traumas.
And yet:
I am an 80 percent chance of survival. The odds are on my side.
I am traumatized, but I am not only my traumas. It took me years to find this difference.
I am a father and a lover and a writer and a laugher and a bedroom musician.
I am a Sonoran hot dog and a Mexican Coke with my friend Jason on a brisk spring afternoon. I am a ballroom dancing lesson with my wife Kelly, laughing together afterwards at the cute way our instructor says “yeah?” after every sentence, making it a night of only questions.
I didn’t think I would make it to be these things.
There was a time, before most of my current friends knew me, when I couldn’t leave the house, didn’t go out at night, couldn’t imagine even living to twenty or twenty-three or twenty-five.
This isn’t proof so much that time heals, because time just lapses. If I depended on time I would just be a lot older, still afraid of leaving a different house.
It’s living that heals. Curling your toes in the grass heals. Screaming heals. Watching your therapist cry with you heals. Holding a child’s hand heals. Going out into the night again, utterly terrified, checking your back every minute, feeling the panic and the adrenaline and wanting to run away to your bedroom heals.
Trauma tells us over and over that we can’t. But we already did. We lived through it. I am here, and so are you. We called the police, we called our parents, we went back to school, we saw therapists, we lost relationships, we made new ones, we tried and failed and tried again, we fought. I have never met stronger people than the traumatized. We show up to fights every day that we did not ask for.
Sometimes, though, my brain crosses wires and and it replaces terror with guilt or shame.
On a Saturday morning with my family, something triggers my fear, like a scent or a sight or the sound of a car stereo. Suddenly, I’m back there again. I’m too afraid to tell everyone I am afraid, so I just lash out and act rude and agitated and the day is ruined for everyone. Then, guilt sets in.
Some days, I feel ashamed that I couldn’t stop them. I envision new scenarios where I fought back and won. I envision new scenarios where I fought back and died. I end up feeling emasculated and frail, ashamed that I have let myself be such a good target.
And that’s when I have to remember: I was violated. We were preyed upon. The shame and the guilt is entirely on them, the predators. I give them all of my guilt and shame, right now, writing this. I am absolved.
You and I owe ourselves the will to fight and heal and be kind to ourselves. That is it. We owe nothing else to anyone for our traumas.
You are not a coward if you choose not to face your assailant in court. You are not a coward if you choose not to go to a funeral, or not to accept a medal, or not to recount your story, or not to dedicate your life to other victims of whatever horrendous thing you’ve experienced.
You are not guilty of anything for being traumatized.
You do not owe anyone anything for being traumatized.
You are not broken, or unfixable, by being traumatized.
You are not a lifetime of trauma.
You are just scared.
I am, too. I am just so scared sometimes.
I am a cage fighter now, sometimes. And sometimes, my trauma is just a silly little red ball.
Lately, I’ve stopped thinking of trauma as something that is inside of me. I practice visualizing it instead as something next to me, a companion I can always see but I don’t have to carry. I am so sick and tired of carrying it. So I’m making it a practice to put it down.
Today, I closed my eyes and imagined the act of physically removing all the built-up trauma and its aftershocks from my body. It’s everywhere — in my heart, deep in what I think my soul must feel like, even in my arms. So I imagined physically pulling all of that hurt and weight right out of me, entirely off of my body.
I dropped it down beside me, and took a minute to feel how much lighter I am. I felt immensely sad and hurt and exhausted from having to carry all that weight for so long. I felt upset at the enormous mess it all makes.
This visualizations does not change what happened to me. But it does help me change how I process it.
It helps remind me that my trauma is not me. It is just with me. It is a passenger, an annoying companion. I can curse at it. I can kick it across the room. I can jump atop it like a cage fighter and beat the shit out of it. I can observe it from a distance like a statue or a painting or basketball game from the cheap seats.
Another visualization I tried, shortly after:
With my eyes closed and this bundle of trauma removed from my body, I shape-shift it into a newer, less scary form. I picked a silly red ball, like you would play foursquare or kickball with.
I can throw it over the fence, or punt it into the stratosphere. I can roll it up the hill and laugh at it as it slowly rolls back to me. It will always come back to me eventually, I believe. No amount of therapy or time or visualization can magically undo what was done to me.
But it is not as heavy. It does not weigh me down. I have days and weeks and months where I can look away from it all now, twenty five years later, this gruesome violence.
I am a cage fighter now, sometimes.
And sometimes, my trauma is just a silly little red ball.
