Way back in my twenties. I think. I mean, I think that's when some things that happened to me, things that were not good things, things that should, ideally, happen to no one. I'm using this place to journal and vent a little and for parts of this. I'm disabling comments, because my only reason for writing them is to get them out of my head, not discuss them. Discussion is the for the therapist.
I'm from stoic people. We don't how our emotions. We joke and intellectualize. We don't experience them, and if they're really, really unpleasant, and threatening, we push them away, kind of like that closet that some houses have, when you toss things in there and then shut the door really fast, before anything can fall back out.
The problem, though, is that those closets get full. And each time I peak in, I have to slam the door really fast, before something falls out. It's getting harder and harder to peek. I keep the door shut all the time now, because if by some silly impulse I were to fling the door wide open, there would be this avalanche falling out, burying me with these feelings, experiences and panic.
So. What is in the closet?
The closet includes all the times when my first husband, unexpectedly, would suddenly put his hand against the small of my back and push as hard as he could, propelling me across the room and over a piece of furniture. I never knew why. Sometimes he's just push me into a wall. It'd hit so hard I'd bounce off the wall and fall backwards.
Sometimes he punched me in the face, or in the arm...sometimes he'd hold me down and force me to do whatever he felt like doing to me at that point in time, in whatever part of me he wanted to do it, regardless of whether I wanted to. Even when pregnant. It didn't matter. Whatever he wanted, he got; he was bigger than me, so there you go.
And. Of course, his family said that if I had better been a better wife, that would have never happened.
Well, the closet includes the time that my first husband forced me to strip, held me down and tried to strangle me to death. I did believe I was dying. I wondered who would take care of my son. He was interrupted when a friend of ours, who had the annoying tendency to walk in without knocking, did just that.
Also in the closet is the time, several months later, that he hid my keys when I came over to argue with him about child support. My choices that day for getting my clothes back were to strip, leave my clothes, and drive home naked, or have sex with him. I don't remember what happened. I know that I reluctantly chose the latter, but I can't remember what actually happened.
There are other things in that closet, I'm sure, but like said, I haven't been in there for a while, because whenever I looked in there, those two incidents were staring me right in the face. SLAM!
I got busy, raising kids and living life. I was fine.
I was fine.
Sometimes a person can put things away just out of sheer business of living their lives. Sometimes they stay put away. Other times, for whatever reason, memories are triggered by some event or reminder, or perhaps they suddenly find themselves less busy. It was the former that got me in the 90s. It was the latter that got me in 2010.
I remember where I was standing when they aquitted OJ Simpson. I remember my mouth falling open, and saying to myself, well fuck me. At about the same time there was a local case about a woman named
Tammy Haas which has never been resolved, and the most likely suspect was set free.
Within days, I found myself crying for no reason. I thought about things briefly, carefully not too deeply, but not experiencing them, because whenever I've tried to do that, I feel this rising panic. I didn't deal with it then. It passed. Not long after, I took a serious of tests, one of them being the MMPI . The results were read to me and I remember a brief mention of something like, “residual PTSD symptoms”. The report was lost, and I never saw it again.
Most of the time after that, I was busy. Really busy. I went to graduate school, taught high school, moved several times, remarried, and finished raising my kids. It wasn't until 2010 that several factors converged, and the door to the closet, which was bulging, to burst open.
First, the last kid left the nest, leaving me free to be in my own head - not the best place to be sometimes - Second, I got a new job, which involved reading casefiles of abuse. These casefiles included graphic descriptions of abuse, and I found myself feeling a little pensive as I drove home each day.
Third, my usual drug—running--was thrwarted when we had the longest coldest winter in nearly a decade. It was dark when I drove to work, and dark when I drove home, and it was too cold to run in the dark. My mood began to deteriorate until one weekend, I woke up crying. It was crazy. I had no reason to be crying. I loved my job more than any job I'd ever had. I have a great marriage. We' just moved into a dream home. And I couldn't stop crying all day. I went for a run, and felt a little better. It was a Saturday, so I could run.
The following week I had a series of panic attacks that kept me awake all night, and then the next day while I tried to do my weekly long run. I felt this horrible feeling that I needed to get away, now, but home was 6 miles away, so I was trapped--trapped out in the open. I made deals with myself, moving from bench to bench, sitting down each time, my arms over my head, closing my eyes, trying to calm down. Self talk wasn't working.
- You're not having a panic attack.
- Your heart rate is rising because you're running, and you've been up all night.
- You're not having a panic attack.
I went to my family doc, who prescribed Wellbutrin, to get me through the rest of winter, and Xanax, for the panic attacks. I made an apppointment to see a Cognitive Behavior Therapist to try to empty out my closet.
And so here I am.
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