In my last post, I told you about the darkest day of my life and the weeks immediately surrounding it.
It was the time I was so worn down by my abuser that I wished for life itself to end. I needed an escape. A series of events took place (insert montage including clips of my wonderful roommates listening to my chaotic verbal processing, long walks alone in the early Autumn beauty of Georgia, a view of my own knees as I sobbed in the student health clinic) that together culminated in the quiet strength I needed to SNAP. I left my abuser, who for nearly seven years had maintained his powerful grip on my mind and life. I thought it was over, finally. I had escaped, right?
Wrong.
While I was free of the immediate Hell I had been trapped in physically, I was entering into a new kind of Hell – a psychological Hell.
mind was tossed into a new world, a hyper-world of memories, fears, emotions, nightmares, and allllll the wonderful symptoms of PTSD that I didn’t YET know how to identify. Hormonal surges racked my body as my stress response flew out of control. Cortisol, Serotonin, Estrogen, Adrenaline, Norepinephrine. My body was a raging test tube of chemicals as I tried to rebalance. My mind was tormented, my body was exhausted, my heart was broken.
My first night home – merely a few hours after I had called the police to my apartment to protect me from the raving lunatic outside in the rain – I felt a strange raw energy pulse through my veins. Something that kept me very outwardly calm. I detailed to my parents the chain of events that comprised my abuse (news to them!) and was amazed at the fact I could not cry. I was cold, with this heavy energy that kept me focused on the facts. That night, if I cried, I don’t remember it. Most likely is that I laid in my bed and thought how strange it was that I could not slip into any form of emotion at all, other than a loud, numbingly cold silence. And yet, I could not close my eyes to sleep, either.
It would be weeks, really even months, before the full extent of tears would come to me. But for the meantime, I had a very dangerous ropes course in front of me.
Leaving an abuser is, unfortunately, like withdrawing from a drug. The highs and lows of being abused create a chemical cocktail in the human body that you’ll choose to choke down again and again. One minute, you’re filled with happiness because your abuser approves of you. Maybe they’ve showered you with affection, with praise, with encouragement. The next moment, there is sheer terror as you are pushed into a corner – the wind knocked out of you – and assaulted with shame, disgust. You are suddenly repulsive, disgusting. Your body wants nothing more than to get back to that first state of happiness, and so you do whatever it takes until you’ve achieved serenity in the relationship again.
And maybe you’re proud of yourself, because you think you call the shots and that you won him over, at last.
Maybe you learn to dissociate from the abuse – compartmentalize the good and the bad times – so you can ignore the pain.
Maybe the trauma has so solidly bonded you to your abuser that you don’t care about the pain, it’s just the price you pay for the drug you have to have.
Some women never reach a breaking point, I’m lucky that I did. I’m lucky that I chose to quit cold turkey. I’m lucky there was help available to me – a home I could return to while I got back on my feet, friends who supported me, even medication to help get me through those first few days and weeks.
Ah, those early days. Let’s talk about them.
Several weeks passed of which I don’t remember much. In fact, the other day a startling realization hit me that I don’t remember many moments I thought I would. I don’t remember driving to North Carolina from Atlanta – did I listen to music? An audio book? Did I sob? Did I stop for gas, or make any phone calls? I don’t remember knocking on the door – or was it already unlocked? I don’t remember embracing my parents. I don’t remember crying, or talking, or really anything. I have a vague, foggy vision of my mom and dad sitting together on the couch and staring at me with shock. I remember laying in a deafening silence that night. And that is all.
I don’t remember getting up the next day, or the day after, or the day after. I remember that I was taking an antidepressant my school clinic had prescribed me on the darkest day of my life. I remember not knowing whether it was the medication that made me feel so numb, or if that was just me.
A few weeks later and I had hardly slept – I would be exhausted, lagging all day, and then I would lie down and my eyes would pierce through the ceiling above me for hours, unblinking, unsleeping.
The days pulped together in a sticky mass of time and pain.
“Sarah?” Someone would say my name and I would snap out of my reverie. I would drift into waking nightmares, trapped in a tunnel of thought until something strong enough pulled me out.
I was lost to everything around me.
I would go to his Facebook page constantly. It was the only thing that seemed real. Him. I wanted to know what was going on there, in that world, the one I had left physically but not yet emotionally. That was my reality. That was the world I lived in.
He was the world I lived in.
The words sound sickening, disgusting to me now. I longed nothing more than to be the vibrant, enthusiastic, joyful girl I had been before all this. I hated that I was now so little of myself and so much of him.
He had made me, and it was only now, cut off from my cruel creator, that I realized this. I looked in the mirror and realized that the clothes I wore, my hair, my makeup, the way I smiled, the words I used, the books and movies and shows and friends and philosophies and beliefs and dreams that I loved -
I didn't love. [at all.]
None of it was me.
I didn't know who I was.
But I knew who I wasn't and I wanted that girl, that false facade of myself, to die.
My mother helped me cut off the black bracelet he had tied to my wrist one night.
"This is to remind you who you belong to." He tied it so tight it rubbed my skin raw. When my mother cut it off, it was like she cut it off my lungs, and I breathed out deeper than I had in months.
Slowly, painfully, I survived. I made it through the winter.
I became less and less of a ghost, and he became more and more of one.
I got a job at Target, where I frequently had panic attacks (although, I didn't know what those were at the time).
Then, I got a job holding babies. And, maybe it was being around all that crying, but I slowly realized that I too could cry. And bit by bit, nightmare by nightmare, flashback by flashback, I unraveled myself. I unraveled him out of me. [I am still unraveling him out of me.]
In that process, I slowly room to pull myself back together.
I had so much room!
I realized, one night, looking out the window at the night sky, that it had been YEARS since I had taken time to realize, to truly realize (to feel with the fibers of my mind and to hold in the cavities of my heart) how beautiful the moon is.
and in that moment I felt a glimmer of myself again.
And then there he was, haunting me out of the deep black existential night.
and there I was again, in the shooting star that ripped across the universe.
And there he was in the dark wing of the owl that hooted out of nowhere in the woods.
and there I was in the pine tree swaying gently in the strained moonlight.
And back and forth I went like this, from him to me to him to me to him to me to him to me to everybody to nobody.
Some days, a lot of days actually, I was nobody. I was merely a spectator of this awful battle of souls. I was watching the horrible dream of from outside it all.
Some Sarah.
days [and of course, in all this time, was
I there are gaps missing.] I
was Memory is strange. realized
nobody. I
and I was eventually
lower eventually
than I ever eventually
thought possible eventually
BUT eventually
I was Sarah.
I am Sarah. [and it is ok to change
it is ok to change
I always was Sarah. IT IS OK TO CHANGE]
I always will be Sarah.
Sarah is Sarah is Sarah is Sarah.
It took months, years, even, to feel comfortable taking off the facade and slipping into my own skin again. I had to ache and bleed and sob and sweat and scream. And I still sometimes do.
BUT I know I am myself, and that I am more
magical
wonderful
beautiful
than any girl The Man could EVER have created or imagined.
THE END
(for now)
(I am so tired of writing, but I will not stop.)
