Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (35 page)

There was his thing about kids again.

But tonight, everyone was in good form. After the plates were cleared, Brannan curled herself against Caleb’s side with his arm around her on the couch. They reclined there together, close, playing the old experienced couple. They’d been married for more than ten years already—“for-EVER,” I explained to Nico.

“Feels like it!” Caleb said, and everyone laughed, and Brannan batted at him.

Leaving that night, we all beamed at one another at the front door in the warm way people do when they’re separating after a nice meal. Nico and I drove home, the pleasantness carrying over in the car.

Back at the hotel, I crouched in the bathtub near the stream of warming water, washing off the day, as was becoming my ritual in addition to my bathing-time grounding practice. I was filled with sympathy for Caleb. I couldn’t get myself out of the bathroom for it. I thought how epic my struggle for wellness was, and I had never even killed anyone. And I didn’t have a traumatic brain injury to treat at the same time that would exacerbate my problems. And I had the disposable income to get treatment outside what my insurance allowed (the group therapy sessions, like Caleb went to—where, from what everyone told me, no soldier wanted to tell other soldiers about the emotional hell he was going through). And my struggle for maintaining my relationship benefitted from childlessness and loads of free time to work on connecting—“We have to find each other every day,” was Nico’s rule—and we had a hard enough time doing it all the same. And my main outlet was crying, an outlet veterans were less likely to take up. Imagine if for every time I started crying, I started yelling or throwing things instead. If instead of my energy behind a breakdown, it was a man’s, and a trained soldier’s.

“It’s not a contest,” Brannan reminded me when we talked about these things. But she admitted that she, like all traumatized people, always questioning the validity of their pain, thought my struggle was worse than hers. I stared at her in disbelief every time she started or ended her sentences with “Not that I have any right to complain to
you
.”

Caleb had told me how he wanted to go back to Iraq. He said he would if they’d take him, which they wouldn’t because of his disability. Chris had told me the same thing. He said Iraq was horrible, but in a simpler way. “I wish I could go back to war,” he had written me at the end of an e-mail about how much he hated being at war. His system was built around it now. “I enjoyed it, the Camaraderie, the adrenalin and knowing that I was great at being a United States Marine.”

While I was in the bathtub after Lasagna Night, back at the Vines residence, Caleb was in such a good mood after dinner that Brannan asked him if he was up for putting Katie to bed so she could go lie down. He said he was. Forty-five minutes later, he woke her up screaming. Not two days after that, he told her he was leaving her. “I’m going to get it over with and do it so you don’t have to,” he said, because that’s just the way the scale went that day, when he weighed the pain of being alone versus the pain of being a burden.

14.

The letters, they kept coming. I read each one several times when I opened it, and re-opened random ones frequently. When I needed solidarity or support. When I was low on energy to work. Or to live.

Hi Mac,

A friend recently sent me this article and I can’t tell you how much I needed it and how much it moved me. I hope you don’t mind me writing, it’s just that I feel like you wrote the story of my life and recent struggles in that article.

I have worked on issues of gender for the past 10 years, with the early part of my career spent as a domestic violence and rape counselor for both adult and children victims. I currently work in the field of human rights on a national level, with a good majority of my recent work focused on sex trafficking. While I am still young (27) and aspire to be the best in my field, I have in the past year struggled with the ghosts of my work. I am haunted by the women I’ve met and the case studies I must sort through each day. My emotions, my mind, my feelings towards sex, the panicking, the vomiting, it all sounds so familiar.

As women in this field, we don’t discuss enough the toll this work takes on us—how I’m afraid sometimes it molds us, into something we may or may not want to be.

Thank you again.

All the best,

Maria

Hi,

I’ve never been raped but I’ve had a difficult life, growing up in a war zone and other stuff later. Nothing even remotely as bad as what women are going through in Africa, though. You’ve made me realize one of the aspects of PTSD, the way you stop functioning in normal situations and just expect shit to keep happening. I realized how much was buried underneath the ‘brave face’ that I’m keeping up. Thank you for describing and publicizing this aspect of PTSD, and your unorthodox way to cope with it.

Anyway, thank you again, this was very helpful.

Ivana

Hi Ms. McClelland,

My name is Emily and I am eighteen years old and I go to a small university. I want to thank you for your article. I was raped last fall, during Frosh Week. For a long time, I was okay and I put it to the back of my mind and I didn’t think about it. I’m not really okay right now. I have nightmares and daymares and anxiety and insomnia and random bouts of crying hysteria. I’m in treatment now, but it’s not easy. It’s never easy. I want to thank you because of the approach you took to your PTSD. Very rough (not necessarily violent) sex with my boyfriend has proven to be a settling ease for my disorder. I thought that was really fucked up, to be honest, but after reading your article, I realize that coping with what has happened to me, and what has happened to you, and what happens to a lot of people isn’t really simple and easy to deal with. There’s no right way to help yourself feel better. Anyway, thank you so much, and best of luck with your future endeavors.

Emily

*   *   *

I had a nervous breakdown in New Orleans. That’s where we drove to get our flight back to San Francisco after Alabama. There, eating takeout, I started crying and couldn’t stop. We were in a tiny pied-à-terre borrowed from one of my friends, and Nico had to take a step back from me, leaning away in his chair at the table, cringing and shaking his head. It went on for quite a while.

But I’m tired of writing scenes like that.

And when we returned from Alabama, we were increasingly having a different kind of scene.

The day after we got home, I stood by the bed of our studio apartment watching Nico make tea. I walked over to him in the kitchen and wrapped my arms around his waist from behind. Before he could finish squeezing his tea bag, I’d pulled his pants down.

Ha-HA!

Yes.
THERE was that slut that I knew and loved! Whose desire wasn’t constantly superseded by the terror of becoming psychotic in bed! As we pressed against each other against the counter, my crazy failed to show up. It wasn’t every time that it did, but lately, it’d been often enough that I forgot what it was like when it didn’t.

I led him to the bed with abject glee. Radiating joy that reached to the walls and ceilings of my apartment.
Make way for this girl; she’s got FUNCTIONAL SEXUALITY.

That night, as we went to sleep, I started seeing scenes of people being disemboweled. But rather than finding it calming, as I usually did, I winced and thought,
Gross. I don’t want to think about
that.

“Victory!” I hollered at Denise the next day, throwing my arms up in the air.

She started laughing. “We’ll take it,” she said. Denise had advised me to have a plan ready (get up and walk around, take a break, switch positions) for when sex triggered me, per the suggestions of Staci Haines, a revolutionary somatic therapist who’d greatly influenced Denise’s work and had written a sort of
Joy of Sex
for survivors called
Healing Sex
. (Just glancing at its table of contents subheads—“Self-Trust and Compassion” “Do I Deserve Pleasure?” “It’s Not Your Fault”—was enough to make me weep.) Denise and I had devised a load of different plans—my God, in our time together we would come up with and try so many different plans—and though this wasn’t an example of my having successfully employed one, anytime I had sex without being triggered was a celebration-worthy event. “We’ll fuckin’ take it,” Denise said.

It was our first session after I got back. I confessed to the New Orleans meltdown.

“What did you need when you felt like that?” she asked. Nico had asked me that, too, when it was happening. The answer was that I needed to lie in a dark room and read a cookbook. So I lay in a dark room in New Orleans and read a cookbook off my friend’s shelf, a beautiful glossy one called
Cooking My Way Back Home
, and as long as that was the only thing I was doing, I was fine.

Denise smiled because that was random. But whatever worked. Still, it didn’t satisfy her curiosities about the million-dollar question, which she proceeded to ask.

“Should you be doing this work? Should you continue doing it?”

I wasn’t done with the story yet. I had to report another piece of it yet, plus write everything up. And I felt fine about that.

New Orleans wasn’t worse than anything I had undergone in San Francisco when I was not working. I felt weighed down by the Vineses’ struggle, and what their struggle said about how many people were having that struggle, but it struck me as appropriate levels of weight.

“How do you feel in your body when you talk about it?” Denise asked.

Well, yeah. I kind of felt like dying. I’d spent a lot of time on the trip in the bathtub, processing, stealing glances at the closed door while I cried, like an alcoholic closeted away with a bottle, hoping Nico wouldn’t come in. But I dared anyone to spend that much time in a house full of traumatized strangers and come out feeling much differently. In my totally unbiased opinion, I was doing a pretty good job.

*   *   *

Two days after that session with Denise, I woke up and said, “I feel like a regular person today.”

Nico looked over at me.

“I just feel like—” I thought about it, trying to describe how I felt. “A person.”

A). I had feelings. B). My feelings were along the lines of “Ooh, it’s sunny out,” and not anything like “I can’t understand why everyone doesn’t commit suicide en masse.” I didn’t feel like a piece of cardboard, which was what I called a “weird” day because I didn’t feel real and couldn’t connect to anything, and while I generally considered a weird day to be better than a bad day, despite its own unpleasantness, a weird day tended to end in a bad day sooner or later.

Not today. That day, I woke up person-like.

Nico smiled and rolled over onto me. “You will have to get used to it, my love,” he said. He planted congratulatory kisses all over my face. “You will start to feel that more and more.” Not two hours later, my rib cage was in a vise and I announced that everybody had to stop all movements please because I couldn’t breathe, all stimuli throwing me into a panic so nasty that my body wanted to escape from it with a fast dissociation. Which I knew would itself be so nasty that I’d spiral into the false certainty that I would always be this way; I would never connect to the earth again in a meaningful much less joyful way; I would never be functional.

But Nico blanketed me then. He dropped me to the bed and covered me with his weight, and it worked. I could feel him. I could connect to him. I gave into him, and the panic, and moved right through it. Victory!

That night, as I stood in the kitchen, my blood suddenly felt like it was on fire, lit by a tiny insignificant trigger.

Breathe
, I told myself.
You’re not that deep into the episode yet. It feels like there could be a way out still so breeaaaathe in. And oouuuut, two, three, four. Let’s name it. Let’s finger it so we’re just looking at it out in the open. You are just mad because something didn’t go your way. Breathe. OK. Now honor it. Your body feels terrible but for a reason. It’s misguided at the moment but it’s how you’ve survived.

Nope. I stopped there. By trying to honor my systems, I was reminding myself how broken they were, how much they hurt, which was starting to tug me into a space where I didn’t believe the blood-fire would end.
Try something else. Remind yourself: This will pass. This
will
pass.
I tried to remember a time when I didn’t feel like this and struggled, though it was like, five minutes ago.
OK, forget trying to remember. This will pass. And then you can join the real present. Focus on the present. Try to acknowledge what’s really happening around you, in reality.

Fortunately for me, what was happening in my reality was that Nico was dancing at the kitchen sink while he rinsed lettuce. When I looked over at him, he wiggled his butt harder, in the happy, arrhythmic, uninhibited and unashamed way that European men can, beaming. I sat down at the kitchen table near him. He started talking to me, but I wasn’t having it; his first few sentences hit a force field and dropped to the ground. I wanted to swat at them, to bat them away as if they were an insect, but he kept talking, and he said something funny, and his laugh touched me and I laughed.