Anatomy of a Breakdown
And the legacy of trauma
You have always known there is something profoundly off about you.
Even as a child. You know there was everyone else, and then there was you. You watched the white girls with their slim bodies and their smooth hair, and you looked at your own body, already sprouting awkward breasts, and you knew there was something just sort of inherently wrong with you. You were ashamed to be wearing a sports bra. The boys took note, stared at you, teased you, your mother was afraid. You must have done something wrong to deserve this.
It’s not just that. It’s that something deep inside hurts — really hurts. More than a bad stomachache, more than a knee scraped on the playground. You can’t exactly pinpoint its location; it seems to spread upwards toward your heart from your gut, flowing out into your fingers, pressing tears from your eyes. It makes you ball up, curl around it, as if to protect it, as if to try to contain it. But it cannot be contained.
You are easily angered, frustrated. You get into fights. You get sent to the principal’s office. But for some reason, they never really punish you. They call your parents, sure, but the school authority regard you with sadness, and rather than yell at you, they tell you that whenever you feel that heat rising inside you, that you can just walk away and come to the office, and there you can talk about it — you can talk about anything you like. You will realize later, when you are older, that they too saw the unsettling, unnerving profound difference in you, and they knew they were in the critical position of trying to heal you rather than hurt you more.
You don’t remember much of your youth.
You remember there was a lot of fighting, a lot of strife, a lot of that deep, old pain, as if your very soul was throbbing with a wound. But the details are all muted and gray, an open grave that plunges into infinite darkness. When you try to approach your memories, you are afraid of falling in. You’ve slipped at the edge a few times, but caught yourself before the darkness could grab you.
There is one memory in particular. You are in the pediatrician’s exam room with your father. You had a lot of problems with your stomach as a kid. Throwing up a lot. Feeling sick. Your father’s back is turned toward the door and the doctor has asked to examine your private parts … but why? You are wearing loose shorts, so he says you don’t even have to take off your clothes, just move the inseam aside —
The memory draws you in like a trance, but you snap out of it, reel backwards to realize you’ve been absently putting your hand out to touch the roadkilled body of a deer, one leg stuck out in stiff, stale death, flies filling the air, the heat swelling the stench of sun rotting flesh.
You run screaming. You throw dirt into the open grave of your memories. You want to bury them deeper and deeper, locked away forever to rot in darkness. Eventually you tire and the grave is still open, a black hole, a mouth open wide in mocking laughter.
It begins the night before.
Your head is on his chest. You absorb the heat of his life-body, listening to his heart. The light is yellow. You have asked him to share his needs. He says he would like to date someone else.
You recoil. The comment is not entirely out of the blue. The two of you had spoken, in vague terms, of this possibility, but it had always been set aside on the shelf with the rest of the “we’ll deal with this after cancer” chapters. You realize that maybe, secretly, you were hoping you’d never have to deal with that particular chapter, that maybe the both of you would just forget about it, that it would decay and turn to dust and disappear.
But he hasn’t forgotten. There is logic in this, and you struggling to hold onto that thread, you struggle to anchor yourself to the real world, but you can already feel yourself coming undone — soon there will be nothing left of you to anchor anywhere, reality or otherwise.
You try to listen when he says, very logically, that this isn’t about you. He says things you genuinely believe in … but slowly, gradually, you feel your body pass into the underworld. You feel your heels are at the edge of that open grave in your heart. You try leaning forward, to throw your weight away from the darkness. “Yes,” your mouth says, trying to play it cool, “Yes, that makes sense. I hear you. This isn’t about me. It’s about needs. And love is limitless and the patriarchy makes it seem more scarce than it is and trust is the most important part and and and … I want you to be happy … this isn’t about me — ”
This is about you, says a voice from the grave, and one pale hand with long fingers reaches out, grabs your ankle, and pulls you in.
And then you are falling.
Falling into an infinite darkness. Everything in your vision turns red. The pain — the weird, old profound pain, the only thing with any clarity among your muted memories — it comes alive as if you have been freshly wounded. You are in so much pain you feel like vomiting, and you try to catch yourself as you fall into the darkness. You tumble along the dirt walls of your grave, trying to grasp at stones, at vines, at anything to stop your fall.
The pain though — oh the pain. Nothing can allay it, nothing can soothe it. Blood fills your eyes. You finally hit the bottom with body-breaking impact. You are covered in dirty and scrapes and bruises, but nothing compares to the burning ache emanating from deep inside you.
This is what it feels like when your soul is dying. This is what existential death feels like. This is what it feels like when somewhere in the dark, unspoken past, someone with deft, sinister fingers, reached inside of you, and pulled your very identity out, snipping away the attaching ligaments and tendons, and left you like a gutted fish on the shore to die.
In death, nothing matters anymore.
You are no longer you. You are the husk of you. You are the blind, wounded, lumbering monster of you, the animal brain left running on the remaining sparks between neurons, the few that can cross down your severed spine. If you are hurting, then so must everyone else.
This is who you really are — this ugly, misshapen, twisted mis-mash of pain and darkness and blood. A teratoma of a human, with teeth and eyes and hair growing out of the wrong places. An abomination of budding breasts at strange angles, soft, fat thighs, a mane of frizz, dragging a coffin of stale memories, feeding on roadkill several days old. This is who you really are. You have committed the sin of fooling those who love you, because if they really knew you, they would not love you.
You embark on a quest to make sure they see what you really are. You want to make sure that they will not only loathe you, they will revile you.
You are the slut, the druggie, the spoiled brat. You are the creature your father turned his back on. They did not protect you because you did not deserve protection. You are a wild, uncouth animal, pissing on furniture and getting into fights on the schoolyard. You are the ugly vagina he called you. You are only as good as Affirmative Action, as fulfilling diversity quotas. Even from girlhood, you were “mature for your age” and therefore you asked for the catcalls from the dark windows of cars driving by. You put yourself in the position to get raped, and so you were raped, it doesn’t matter that you said No from the beginning. You really are crazy, angry, unpredictable, and therefore unlovable.
You set to the task of burning everything down. Burn burn burn. Destroy it all. You want everyone to see how ugly you are. You want everyone to know how you deceived them. Your mouth is full of foam and venom. Your teeth are rotting. Your bite leaves blood and bacteria. You are unstoppable in your desperation.
Let them see you. The full you. The real you. You unfurl to your full height, and twisted in your abdomen is the shape of a small girl-child, huddled in the fetal position. She grows from you, as if she were meant to be your twin in the womb, but the umbilical cord strangled her, and all that was birthed was your ugly, deformed life. And your mother refused to hold you because who would want to hold you? And anyway, your mangled limbs and too many fingers wouldn’t fit in her arms. Why didn’t the doctors just kill you?
Why won’t you just die?
You think about dying. It feels like the only way out. You thrash and grasp at whatever you can, tearing down cities, tearing down trees, tearing down the people you fooled into loving you.
Do they hate you? They must hate you. You deceived them. You made them think you were human just like them, and not this abomination of broken girl-dreams, violation, and violent anger.
Shame shame shame. Even a monster tires. You crawl into your lair. You wish for death, you think about how you can bring it about, but something stops you. Tied around your wrist is a length of bright ribbon. You follow it upwards, upwards toward the sky. There is a balloon bobbing over you. For a moment, the balloon is the only thing that matters.
A moment is a long time.
You realize quite belatedly that you are lying in bed. You have shrunk back into a much more familiar form. You are just a girl. A very young girl. You cry, an aching, ungraceful cry, one that rises up out of your soul, dredged up like a body found at the bottom of a river.
He comes into the room and lies down next to you. Puts a warm hand on your back. And you start to tremble like a frightened animal. Your whole body shakes with terror, but you are paralyzed with exhaustion now, and cannot run. Your breath is quick and shallow. He speaks in a low voice, reminding you to breathe. You try, you are dizzy. Why is he being so kind to such a monster?
Though you are human again, your brain is still stuck, as if waking before your body is ready to stop dreaming, and every movement, every thought is a slow struggle. You have failed again. You thought you were better than this, that the psych meds and years of therapy and cancer clarity had done away with the monster.
You realize with despair that the monster will always be there, lurking in the dark corners of your soul, relishing any opportunity to come forward and take down all of creation with it.
You try to count the small victories: This time, at least, you didn’t turn to self harm. This time, at least, you muzzled the beast from spitting its most poisonous venom. This time, at least, you understand what the monster is, its dark intentions, the origin of its birth. This time, at least, you feel some compassion for wounded little girl in the belly of the monster. This time, at least, you asked for help.
You feel shame, you feel embarrassment, you feel vulnerability.
Until next time.
It is a new day. You slept a lot but you are still exhausted.
You know this is not the last time. You know you will never tame the monster. You just hope that next time, when this happens again, you will be able to shelter better in place.
You are not giving up. You are still here. And you will keep trying. You may never succeed. But you will keep trying.
