Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (15 page)

8.

I could have lived like that. For a long time. People do it. Like a piece of cardboard, walking around tall and flat in the world, without nerve endings, sinews stiff enough to keep any weakness they’re holding safely twined up. It keeps the good things from getting in, too. But you barely register emptiness when you only have two dimensions. People do it, keep their constriction mostly intact; except for the moments when they don’t.

“Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work,” says Judith Lewis Herman. “Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.” I had no such eloquently realized agenda when I wrote an essay about how PTSD had ruined my life and my sex life. Pieces of it had floated around my brain for months, and they started coming together while I was pacing the patio out behind a café in Congo where I was waiting all day in case my warlord, a regular patron, might appear. While Joey dicked around on the Internet inside, in the same place where one of our sources had been found by and escaped from would-be assassins, I took to an abandoned stretch of the meandering, scrabbly yard, attempting to march some energy out back and forth under the blinding sun. I put the rest of the notes together in the few weeks I was home in San Francisco before leaving for Ohio. Sentences about it wrote themselves across my consciousness while I was trying to fall asleep, and the moment I woke up.

“I don’t think you should write about this,” one of my friends said. He wasn’t the last.

“Yeah,” I agreed. But it seemed like a foregone conclusion that I would. I felt like it was important. I felt like I had to, though I wasn’t entirely sure why. One of the worst things about having PTSD—worse even than the symptoms oftentimes—was feeling that no one understood. If someone else had written a piece like the one I was composing and I’d been able to read it, I would’ve felt less alone those hard months after Haiti I. As a writer, how could I sit around wishing someone else was writing about it? I wanted to write about it, anyway. When I presented the gist of the story to a friend (and groundbreaking feminist) who edited a magazine, I told her I felt like it was a conversation that needed to happen. She agreed, and assigned it.

I worked on the essay between Africa and Ohio, forcing out sentences about how I’d gone to Haiti from the Deepwater Horizon Gulf, where one moment had also got a bit hairy in Oklahoma, and that I’d lost track of my own body in the car during the rape-related witnessing in Haiti. It was harder than I’d thought. I encountered a severe and extremely uncharacteristic case of writer’s block.

“I can’t do this,” I told Tana, calling her from the back steps of my apartment.

“OK, I know you know people are going to attack you,” Isaac said when I called him the next time it happened. “People hate when journalists admit they’re human, and ladies who like having sex.” Or lady journalists who touched the subject of sexual assault: A few months earlier, CBS correspondent Lara Logan had publicly acknowledged that she’d been brutally raped and beaten by an entire group of men while on assignment in Egypt, and her disclosure still garnered jokes, dismissals, and blame in the media. I was unlikely to get any breaks for getting
not
raped. “But fuck ’em,” Isaac said. “This is important to you, and you’ve got this.”

I wanted to do it. I didn’t want to not do it just because of the consequences. I thought I could handle them.

I wrote about Henri and The Doctor. I admitted that when I’d gone to Haiti again I became sexually obsessed with guns. I admitted that when I’d been with Nico there I couldn’t feel his weight or my arms. I admitted to all the crying, and the gagging, and the self-hate. I talked about my talks with Meredith, and some of what I’d learned about trauma and my nervous system, and how devastating it was that I hadn’t been able to touch myself without appalling flashbacks. I admitted what I’d done with Isaac. That when he held me down and punched me in the face, it had helped with the screaming-flashback sex problem, and the not-being-able-to-see-rape-on-TV-without-going-apoplectic problem, and the ultimate abatement of many of my symptoms.

It was a lot to cop to. As I polished the sentences before sending them to the editor, I leaned on tequila—they seemed impossible to read back over, and made me feel like I couldn’t breathe. But once I’d turned it in, I largely put it out of my mind and went on with the rest of my work.

Sober.

The Ohio assignment was a dry assignment. For one, the married people I was living with, in their guest bedroom, were near teetotalers with a baby. For another, who needed daily booze when your own insides were a veritable wellspring of numbness? Even without that, my circumstances would have kept me plenty distracted: I had to report and file three stories a week on the decline of the middle class, the governor’s proposal to slash local government budgets by 50 percent, and the fight to reinstate the union rights he’d recently demolished. At some point during that time, I also had to write the feature on Congo. And I had to find some time for video dates with my boyfriend, stationed in barracks somewhere in France.

Yes, I had told Nico that we had no future. But that conversation turned out to be more of a heads-up than a breakup. I didn’t want him thinking that we were, say, moving toward marriage or anything, but something held me back from a full good-bye. Though recalling images of us in Paris together still jogged zero loving emotions, I kept remembering one afternoon when we’d lain on the Salkses’ couch, chatting, our faces touching, the left side of my nose against the left side of his, nose tips into each other’s cheeks. As I could feel myself drifting off, I’d thought,
No one falls asleep like this
, that close, breaths mingling irritatingly, even if it looked romantic from the outside. But I wasn’t irritated. I was full of a deep kind of peace spread outward from my belly button, and in tandem we’d sunk into sleep.

Other than that, though: nothing. So I’d issued a caveat as a courtesy. Don’t rely on me. I can’t imagine my life without our continuing to talk, so it doesn’t have to end right now, but it will. It seemed like the right thing to do.

Watching his face, small on the other side of the computer screen, I saw a few tears escape his little eyes.

“Don’t cry,” I said. Since our rendezvous in Europe, we’d evolved to talking out loud.

“Don’t tell me we have no future,” he said.

He asked me if I generally informed people that I knew a relationship was going nowhere but that I didn’t want to break up. I admitted that I didn’t.

So, he wanted to know, why was I doing that with him? He told me I didn’t know what I wanted. He told me I was wrong.

“You will see,” he said. And he’d looked so sure, I couldn’t help believing him.

Now, at any spare moment in my Ohio sources’ house, we resumed our conversations.

“Hi, gorgeous,” I would begin when he appeared on my screen. “How was your day?”

I spoke very slowly, perfectly enunciating each word, with a space between every one.

One.

Word.

At.

A.

Time.

Whenever he still couldn’t understand, even after many tries, I would type the sentence or word out in English.

I’d aborted my few determined forays into French lessons over the past months. It was a miracle I was mustering the extra energy to do my laundry, much less tackle fluency of a convoluted tongue. Nico didn’t want to talk in French, anyway. He wanted to
live
English. His bravery about it leveled me with admiration and made me envious enough to strangle him. If he didn’t know a word, he merely ventured forward with a guess. “I want to make love with you on the workplan,” he said to me once, because he thought that might be the word for
counter
. I never could have been so fearless. If I didn’t know the word for
counter
, I would have excused myself from the conversation, looked it up in the dictionary, called a French expert to verify the pronunciation, practiced the sentence out loud at least a dozen times where no one could hear me, then maybe have been ready to try it on him next month.

Nico took my corrections utterly unself-consciously. He improved every day. One day when I was in Ohio, he heard me use my regular, all-syllables-strung-fast-together English to say something to someone in the house, and he got that I was talking about shoes. Brown shoes. It was a major breakthrough.

So every moment in Ohio was accounted for. I was hustling. I was working, or I was talking to Nico. Or I was spending time with my source-host family. The wife had just finished her school year as a junior-high teacher and was celebrating her transition into summer vacation with hours upon hours of my second-favorite self-medicating activity: television! At night, everyone sat around watching
MasterChef
, we women attempting and failing to distract the baby from pulling the power cord out of the husband’s laptop while he tried to apply for jobs in the run-up to his impending government layoff. During the day, between reporting gigs and interviews, I could spend a break joining mother and child in front of TiVo episodes of
Toddlers and Tiaras
or
My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding
or
The Bachelorette
or
Tosh.0
, my whole universe either reality TV or running around working, for weeks, humming and vibrating like a hologram, feeling like I might start shaking with energy and tension but remaining blissfully if unsettlingly numb.

Not everyone thought I was doing as awesomely as I thought I was. I drove several hours to Cleveland one weekend to report on the trend of people squatting in the city’s multitude of foreclosed homes. Specifically, to report how one of those people was my sister Jessica. I hadn’t seen her in a while, and we hugged hard when I arrived at “her” house that drizzly June afternoon. Having followed her through the kitchen, its walls ripped up, I sat down to talk to her on a couch among piles of discarded crap—hers or the former owners’, I wasn’t clear—and found myself the object of her concerned gaze. My sister, who, at thirty-five, waited tables at a fancy restaurant in Shaker Heights but had been living in this abandoned house with her boyfriend for nine months because he couldn’t find a job (and what was the point of paying rent when there were all these perfectly good empty houses?), was generally not much of a worrier. Definitely she was not prone to worrying about me. Now her pale eyes stared at me intently, expectantly, as if she was waiting for me to do something drastic though I sat calmly. “How are you
doing
?” she kept asking me. “Are you O-
K
?” She took me upstairs to show me the laser-sighted Kimber .45 handgun she kept in her room given the neighborhood’s crime stats, and told me that because she often drove home alone at night she kept knives in her car. But of the two of us, it was she who kept saying that
I
was scaring
her
.

She could see me. And when I could see her seeing me, in that instant, I wanted to curl up in a ball and never stop crying.

I told her I was fine. But I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

I hemmed it up and hemmed it in. Kept it compartmentalized. Kept myself busy enough not to have a second to feel. So what if it was only skin-deep, the cold functionality? It served its purpose. It didn’t last anyway. It might not have lasted regardless, since, I would later learn from literature and experience, the post-traumatic-stress-disordered often vacillate between phases of symptoms, moving from intrusion—the crying and howling nightmares and other asylum-worthy behaviors—to constriction and back, without predictability or reason. It’s one of the many things that undermine their credibility with the outside world: People seem fine for a while, but then they’re not fine, or they go from one extreme set of symptoms to an opposite one. But either way my tidy detachment couldn’t have lasted one second after the essay I’d written about my PTSD was published.

*   *   *

When the editor texted me that it had gone live, it was National PTSD Awareness Day. I was parked on a leafy side street in Columbus. It was about a month after I’d returned from Europe and Africa, and five months after Haiti II, and whatever was holding my emotions broke and let loose a flood of grief and alarm and the most toxic sludge of all: shame. There it was, all of it out there, and I couldn’t take the vulnerability I’d created back. I started hyperventilating, but had just a few minutes before I had to get out of the car and walk to my interview with an Ohio state representative. I took notes with shaking fingers.

Everybody knows that sad people often drink too much. There’s a conventional wisdom that grants recognition and some sympathy along the lines of “Oh, she was abused as a kid” or “lost a child” or “had a really rough marriage, and drinks a lot,” even if the
extent
of the relationship between trauma and substance abuse remains less acknowledged—that, for example, raped women who develop PTSD are 26 times more likely to become substance abusers than the non-crime-victim population. That 75 to 85 percent of veterans with PTSD turn to booze. I didn’t feel too embarrassed about having announced publicly that I’d had some drinking problems. But going on the record about trauma-related sex dysfunction was a whole other thing. No one ever said anything about things like that. I sensed that I probably wasn’t the first person in history to experience it, and Meredith had made comments that supported that notion, but I didn’t personally know any of these other supposed people, either. Of all the unlimited crap online, support groups and information dumps and chat rooms, even Internet searches didn’t turn up much. When I’d disclosed the gunpoint fantasy, the
less
weird PTSD-sex thing I had going on, to one of my friends, she’d looked at me wide-eyed and yelled, “You’re completely nuts!”

The editor had headlined my essay “I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me on This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD.”