**TW: mentions of trauma. Names have been changed/generalized.
I wake up in a room. Dazed, tired, heavy. By now I am so used to feeling this way I don't notice it. They have become my normal. Part of me, like another one of my freckles, a scar. In my mind I'm stuck in a huge room. All around, spaced evenly apart, are dozens of doors with signs above each one, "JOB", "FRIENDS", "CHILDREN", "RELATIONSHIP", "SEX", "MONEY", "CHORES". They're evenly spaced apart, but the size of them is different and it always depends upon the day. Sometimes there is a "Do not disturb" sign hanging from one or several.
In my hand is a large key ring full of keys. All silver and labeled. The door labeled "HEALTH" is always covered in dust.
My heart starts pounding and my chest gets heavy looking around at all the doors. Which do I go into first? My hands start shaking as I shuffle through the keys, knowing all these have to be done, all these doors have to be opened and closed by the end of the day. Knowing I'm the only one who can take care of them. It's. All. On. Me.
I start the internal social media coaching, "Get moving girl. Pull up your big girl panties, you're fine. You're enough. YOU CAN DO THIS." I muster all the strength I can and walk quickly toward the children door. That one feels important. I run in and out, slamming it behind me. That didn't go well.
Before I know it, I'm sprinting from door to door, opening and closing and running to the next one. In and out, in and out, panicking as I shuffle through the keys as quickly as I can. As soon as I get done behind the relationship door, I hear banging coming from the job door and dishes crashing behind the chore's door. I don't even have time to question why there's a separate room just for laundry when it falls under the chores category because I'm rushing and running and gasping for breath until eventually, I collapse.
I can't keep up, no matter how many times I go through each door there's always something chaotic happening when I come out of another one. I throw down the set of keys down with a crash, screaming like I'm tied to the tracks watching a train barrel toward me. I'm desperate to make it all stop.
With a crushing blow to my pride and my womanhood I realize it. I can't do it all. This is the never-ending highlight reel, all night, every night. My big girl panties are permanently welded on. I cannot pull them up any higher.
I wrote this post about a dream I keep having in January 2020. However, there is a door that my brain has refused to allow me to even acknowledge that I have. Until now.
My Trauma door.
Sure, I've done an adequate amount of keeping the door free of the moss that keeps threatening to take over, but I've done my best to ensure that it stays closed. Hidden away, as if a secret garden only I know, but even I cannot find the way in. Frankly some days it takes all of the energy that I have to ignore the claws creeping out from the space at the bottom. I've even replaced the nails with screws so that the threats of flying open when I'm not ready for it to are quieted. For today.
I think that the best way to get over something is full-on confrontation. With everything else, but this. I can't explain why, so I suppose that the best way to get over it, is through. And I finally feel like I can breathe a sigh of relief that, finally, I can.
I think I can, I think.....
I can.
I think I'm awake.....I can hear, smell, everything. The rustling of the leaves, the smell of decay that only a damp autumn morning on the coast of Maine smells like. I feel a sudden, sharp lightning bolt rip through me as if a chain saw was tearing me open from the inside. "It's cold. Why is it so cold?" "Why is everything wet?" "Why can't I open my eyes?" The inner monologue threatening to take in the scenery around me, it feels like I'm sitting in front of a firing squad, waiting for the order to strike. The heaviness covering every inch of my body like a herd of elephants.
I tried to move my fingers. They hurt and wouldn't move as commanded, as if just meat sleeves at the end of my hands. Nails, bent, broken. Bloody. My eyes slowly work their ways open to find my face next to the ground, a pile of fallen leaves my only pillow. "Why am I bloody?" "Why does everything hurt so much?" I realize that I didn't even realize that I was naked. "Where are my clothes?" I knew that I didn't have time to panic. I could smell the faint bonfire smoke from the night before. Short of a few crows and seagulls, there was no signs of life around me.
Doing what I could to muster lifting my head without feeling like my brain was going to fall out, I slowly looked around. I'm alone, in the woods. I could see the pile of ash from the party pit yards away. Surely nobody would have been able to see me if it was dark. I look around, my jeans about 3 feet to my left. My sweater, one of the 90s with giant holes in it, behind me, because what self-respecting 17-year-old trying to impress a boy would cover up or wear anything remotely weather appropriate in the name of flirting? A singular shoe that wasn't mine by my head. A boot. Too big, but I put it on. My hair is matted, I can't tell with what. Not yet anyways.
My underwear, socks, shoes, nowhere to be found. I didn't feel afraid, I just wanted to get out of there as soon as I could. Where are my friends? My jaw hurts. Why does my jaw hurt? There's nobody around. Someone should put out that fire, it's still smoking. Even when I can't see straight and everything is clearly wrong, I still mother the Earth. I put on my clothes, the button on my pants, broken off. I could barely stand. Dizzy, I've never been hung over before. Hell, I've never gotten drunk with my friends before. I staggered around trying to get my bearings. I came across a half-eaten bag of chips, stale, but I had to do something to soak up the $5 vodka and Sunny D. My mouth is covered in blood. My lips, covered in wood chips and bark as though I had face-planted into a tree. I basically threw the stale, powdered cheese covered logs into my mouth and swallowed them whole. Not understanding that my jaw was dislocated. Adrenaline was my best friend that day.
Slowly I made my way to the main road. It's right down the road from my best friend's grandmother, no way on God's green Earth would I dream of attempting to go there. Anna! Anna's house is right there just a few doors down. It's Saturday, she's got to be home. I slowly made my way to her house. She was only an acquaintance in my friend group, I only met her a handful of times, but what teenage connection doesn't make you instantly feel like a best friend?
I took a breath as I scoped out her house. Her mom was a nurse, surely, she would insist I go to a hospital, and I can't have that. My mind raced with the inventory of all the things my entire being ached for. Food, my clothes, my bed, oh my word, my bed. Home, my body ached for the one place I knew that I couldn't go to. I still wasn't sure what happened, but I knew that the consequences of going home and my mother and stepfather finding out that I had gone to a party with my friends, was a thousand times worse than any other alternative. There were no cars in her driveway, so I made my way to the basement door that all of us kids used to get in and out of the house when we visited her. She was one of the "cool kids", whose parents were gone all the time, so naturally kids like me who had zero freedom at our houses gravitated to time at her place.
I knocked, noticing that my hand was still bleeding from a chunk taken out of my right middle finger. I never had a lot of investment in my nails, but every single one of them looked like a bear used my fingers as a toothpick. Thanking every entity in the Universe, she answered after the second knock. She looked terrified to see me. We talked, I don't recall specifics. I just remember a blur of begging her not to call my mom, showering and seeing the extent of my injuries. My hair was matted to my head with mud and leaves and blood from a gash on the right side of my head. My face, swollen on the right where a bruise formed, and my jaw was dislocated. Popping that back into place was more painful than the drug free childbirth that I would know later in life.
My left flank still hurts 26 years later where my ribs were bruised, three of which were broken, I'd learn years later when I had a chest x-ray for another reason, the doctor insisting at the time that the relationship I was in at the time was abusive and requested my now ex-husband leave the room to ensure that I was safe. I still couldn't tell anyone. I just told him I was in an "accident" when I was a teen, he could tell that they were healed, I told him that he was overstepping and that I would report him for doing so if he continued to push me. My lips, swollen and bruised. Covered in scrapes, even today bark and debris is still making its encapsulated way out of my body.
Anna was the best thing that ever happened to me. She jumped into action, calling my dad and letting him know that he didn't need to pick me up at my other friends on Sunday morning as planned, that we were going to enjoy Hallo-weekend and our last time that we could be together to celebrate before graduation. Her medicine cabinet was already stocked for the worse case, and tag, I was it. Rubbing alcohol to soak the bruises. Clip and paint the nails to help them look like they belonged on my body. Carefully washing and combing my hair. Tweezers helped debride my lips. Canned chicken soup never tasted so good. Anna was in drama and loved dress up, so she had all the makeup that I was never allowed to have. She showed me how to cover bruises by painting orange lipstick to neutralize the color, and then cover with foundation. I stayed there until Monday. At that time, my aunt had left her husband, and I was her sitter right down the road from school, so I told my mom I was staying there so she didn't even question why I didn't return home; happy to have one less kid in the house, as if she cared about me at all in the first place. I just laughed off anything questioned as just my clumsiness, it was dark when I was out with friends, and I took a digger. Not a far stretch, as I have always been prone to tripping over myself on flat ground in broad daylight from the second I could stand on my own.
For 26 years of my life, I have been the greatest actor. Only able to maintain my sanity by simply pretending that not a thing happened. Some days, I even question if it even did, but then I look at my hands and lips closely, and just like the scene in Hook where the Lost Boys recognize the adult Peter as their old buddy, there it is. Unfortunately, the body keeps the score. I still cannot enjoy a back rub without wincing if my left flank is touched. For years I could not be in the woods on a foggy autumn morning without full on disassociation. The smell of a bonfire still threatens to undo the thread holding in my guts. You know, the ones that you can never afford to spill because you will be labeled a liar, or worse, someone will believe me, and I will have to relive it all over again. I have flashes, nothing tangible, no faces, just recalling idiot teenage boy leering; feeling a freedom and excitement for the first time that I was never going to experience ever again but spent two decades of my future self trying my best to replicate it, when it was only a tool to stuff down....well, everything.
I'm strong, because I'm in a constant battle with my mind. It's telling me that I'm weak. That I shouldn't speak up. That I shouldn't get out of bed. That I should just run, and hide, because nobody will ever want to hear what I have to say. Lately I've been listening to everything that a very different voice tells me to hear. I've always been able to find the power to ignore it, but over this past year - my year of Hell - as I've dubbed it, there have been days that felt like they'd never end where my mind has been nothing short of a battleground. Being strong, socializing, smiling, showing up; it's exhausting. Sometimes, the idea of being around people is too much to handle; but being alone is an even worse idea.
But then I remember that the only way over it,
is through.
