Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (16 page)

So I felt like throwing up, vomiting distress and degradation over every surface, the moment the essay became public. That sickness did not improve when a coworker I barely knew wrote an e-mail to someone at one of the biggest media organizations in the world clarifying that I’d “had psychological issues” way before Haiti, and then forwarded it to me. Later, another coworker e-mailed me the advice that I could consider it a dire learning experience and still save myself from “career kamikaze.” Other reporters and bloggers wrote articles about the essay, but though they were positive at first, I couldn’t bear to read them. I heard from the editor that there were hundreds of comments of support—some from PTSD sufferers with similar experiences—posted on the piece, but I couldn’t look at those, either. My stability had been thoroughly compromised from the inside, even before, several days later, I woke up to find my face on the cover of a major Web magazine in connection with an article titled “Mac McClelland: What’s Happening in Haiti Is Not About You.”

I’d known the essay would go over poorly in some corners. Trauma was a tough enough topic on its own, much less a woman’s trauma, much less trauma coupled with sex. And Haiti, I knew from having written about it, evoked particularly strong feelings and territorialities, even from other outsiders. The previous year, when I’d published a piece about Daniel, the source I visited in his tent camp—who happened to live in the camp managed by an aid group founded by Sean Penn—I immediately started receiving scary e-mails from Penn. He excoriated me for not being responsible enough to include Penn’s perspective, and for damaging the country by quoting Daniel on his dire assessment of his own life in camp. So while Sean Penn didn’t “want a war with” me, he would “go ALL THE WAY DOWN on this” if I didn’t go back and rewrite the story.

But I’d still underestimated how poorly the essay would go over. “[A Haitian victim’s] violent rape feeds McClelland’s need to feel victimized,” the aforementioned article said, calling me “shockingly narcissistic.” “I mean all of Port-au-Prince is suffering from PTSD and I’m supposed to care about some woman who parachutes in for a couple of weeks and has the luxury to leave whenever she wants because she’s been inconveniently traumatized?” “If being in Haiti, or Bosnia, or Egypt, or Syria, or Libya is so damaging to these reporters’ psyches, perhaps they should stop reporting from these places.”

“She makes use of stereotypes about Haiti,” said another piece that a group of (mostly non-Haitian) women who’d lived or worked in Haiti collectively published, “that would be better left in an earlier century: the savage men consumed by their own lust, the omnipresent violence and chaos, the danger encoded in a black republic’s DNA.… Ms. McClelland’s Haiti is not the Haiti we know. Indeed, we have all lived in relative peace and safety there. This does not mean that we are strangers to rape and sexual violence.”

I was surprised that because I’d mentioned having sex with Nico, a
New York Times
reporter questioned whether I was a reporter or a UN prostitute, though having gone to Catholic school I should have been the last person caught unprepared for slut-shaming. I was surprised that writing about FAVILEK’s rape cases, being threatened, and the visibility of guns in the country led to accusations that my real problem was that I was a racist who was afraid of the lust of “savage” black men. My fellow journalists waged a war of articles and Twitter tirades, one side calling me sensationalist, self-glorifying, exaggerating, irresponsible, colonialist, and self-involved, and the other calling
those
people bullies, victim-blamers, hypocrites, silencers, racism-projectors, and PTSD-deniers.

There’s a weird but common misperception about how trauma works that was illustrated by the fight they were having—that trauma exists only in the realm of those who have it worse than anyone else in the world. I myself held this misperception, the way I’d argued with Meredith that it was impossible for me to be traumatized. First, I hadn’t suffered anything serious. Second, the circumstances of my life generally caused me little suffering. I was in the bottom of the right-to-suffer caste system; it makes a kind of sense culturally, if not biologically.

“Wowww,” Alex said, calling me in Ohio to check on me, her speech slow and distracted as she scrolled through the controversy on her computer screen. “This is why guys like my dad never say anything.” Her dad served as a naval officer in Vietnam, a combat adviser to local forces. He did, well, “God knows what he did,” as Alex generally put it; “I don’t even want to know.” Whatever he did, he came home amped up but closed down. And though he was extremely high-functioning, working and earning well for his family, he stayed closed down and tightly wound after Alex was born and, in some ways, forever. It wasn’t until she started going to therapy herself as an adult that she realized how impacted she remained by having grown up with a dad like that, and started begging him to go to the VA for assessment.

It turned out he was one of the estimated 30 percent of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. Forty years after his military service had ended, his psych evaluation showed such severe PTSD that the government rated him at 80 percent disabled. By then, PTSD had been in the news plenty regarding vets from Iraq and Afghanistan, but
no one
, Alex’s dad told her, could know about his diagnosis. The military at the time of his service hadn’t made any secret of its disdain for traumatized soldiers. And when a gunnery sergeant told him to change out of his uniform as soon as he landed in the United States before facing a public that hated him for his involvement in the war, he couldn’t be left with any doubt that he wasn’t going to find much understanding anywhere else, either.

Alex had used to think that her father’s refusal to acknowledge his condition wasn’t necessarily in his best interests, as he had always claimed. Alex’s dad had been through much worse than I had or could even imagine, but though our situations weren’t comparable, she felt she understood his secrecy better now. “Maybe that was smart,” she said over the phone, laughing, sadly and only half-joking.

Judith Lewis Herman discusses in her book why people are so resistant to sympathize with a traumatized person. Traumatized people are saying, if inadvertently,
Share the burden of my pain
when they admit what’s happened to them.
Do something—acknowledge it, at the very least
. Share the experience of knowing—while eating cereal in the morning and putting one foot in front of the other out the door on the way to work—that it is an atrocious world where something heinous could happen to you at any moment. Traumatized people are victims, of time or place or circumstance or evil, and nobody likes victims. It sounds counterintuitive at first, but it’s easier to identify with a perpetrator. A rapist, a child molester. People who are in control, who are in power, who have power, who are on the winning side. People love stories about murderers. Not the sad-sack families they leave in their wake, needing everyone to remember what happened to their loved ones while they take years and years to get over it, keeping in mind the dreadfulness and injustice, or in the case of veterans, guilt. Victims ask you to uphold human rights and decency and help. Repression and denial allow you to do nothing, which is inarguably easier.

Consequently, the thing about character assassinations of victims was that they weren’t exclusive to people whose traumatic incidents were of questionable seriousness or who had as many advantages in life as I did.

“Why don’t they just
leave
,” a culture communally asks of abused women—siding, by default, with wife-beaters. In 1964, a study of battered women determined that they had personality disorders that caused them to need and provoke battering. A 1988 study of a major hospital emergency room showed that doctors regularly described battered women as hysterics and masochists. In the eighties, some psychoanalysts tried to add “masochistic personality disorder” to the
DSM
to describe what’s wrong with women in abusive relationships.

I would’ve avoided that situation,
victims make people think, self-defensively.
Or handled it better. That wouldn’t have happened to me
.
Not like that.

In 2003, when a teenager named Elizabeth Smart was found after nine months of captivity with the man who’d abducted her, raped and tortured her, and threatened to kill her and her family, all everybody wanted to know was: Why didn’t she just run away? At the time, I was sure that I would have. I was a twenty-three-year-old post-college feminist then, and I remember thinking,
What was her deal?

“Denial, repression, and dissociation operate on a social as well as an individual level,” Herman says. Even in her field, even a hundred years after Freud, she and other trauma researchers and practitioners found themselves sometimes shunned or sidetracked and invalidated by questions of PTSD victims’ faking it, asking for it, or being untrustworthy—and therefore, as subjects, void. They found themselves harassed for taking victims’ sides. “In spite of a vast literature documenting the phenomena of psychological trauma,” she wrote in the nineties, “debate still centers on the basic question of whether these phenomena are credible and real.”

A public debate about whether my own symptoms were credible and real wasn’t doing great things for my stability. My already precarious condition had been steadily deteriorating since the moment the piece published, and I wasn’t up to weathering much without my happy if not-so-healthy numbness intact anymore. By the end of the week, I reacquainted myself with daytime drinking, to the concern of my Ohio hosts. When the second phase of the backlash kicked in a couple of weeks later, taking a turn from calling me racist and narcissist to malicious and unethical, no amount of booze made my symptoms survivable, and I asked a friend to drive me late one night to the house of another friend who had benzodiazepines.

*   *   *

When I’d been in Haiti the previous fall, and the American lawyer for whom Marc worked had e-mailed me asking me to not include certain details in the final story, I’d offered to call her. She was unable to schedule a chat but sent two more e-mails, including one that asked me not to demonize the victim-blaming doctor. Then, suddenly, she e-mailed my editors saying that before I started to report the story, I’d assured Marc that I’d give her final approval over everything I wrote. That was news to me. I would’ve remembered it, since that wasn’t how journalism generally worked, and she hadn’t mentioned the supposed agreement among her other concerns so far. Since she didn’t like the direction of the other Internet coverage my tweets were getting, she informed my editors, she was hereby instructing both Marc and another source, a rape survivor, to stop talking to me and revoking their consent to do a story.

Marc, who I saw daily for the duration of the trip, denied any such revocation and continued doing interviews with me. Five weeks later, after I’d returned to San Francisco, after the lawyer had not returned e-mails and phone calls from my editors, she made good on revoking the other source’s consent, e-mailing a scanned written note from the rape survivor saying that I didn’t have, and had never had, permission to write about her.

The magazine feature I’d written about her and FAVILEK and everything I’d seen and all the interviews I’d done was about to ship to the printer. There was no way I could contact the note-writer, though we went to great lengths to try. So we pulled the story. I stayed up late rewriting large portions of it, and just a few anonymous references to her case appeared in the final print. But when I published the PTSD-sex essay, which contained an anonymous description of a moment when our stories became entwined, during the witnessing and terror and screaming of that first, life-altering morning, the lawyer apparently made the note revoking consent available for publication.

My detractors were elated. Here, finally, was proof that I was as integrity-less as they’d been claiming all along.

Even as psychologically weak as I was, I couldn’t agree with most of what they were saying. I didn’t feel like the reason I’d felt threatened in Haiti was because I was racist—I’d never said all my sexual harassers there were black, because they weren’t. I didn’t think that a devastating natural disaster had managed to devastate Haiti only because it was populated by black people. And I knew, because I was there, that what had happened wasn’t that I’d just never had consent. But those disagreements aside, and however absurd and obtuse some of my critics were being on some levels, the main idea they were peddling was one I’d thought was probably true for a while now, and lately was feeling unconditionally convinced of.

I was a disgusting person.

DSM-V
Criteria for PTSD, Criterion D, number 2: “Persistent (and often distorted) negative beliefs and expectations about oneself or the world (e.g., ‘I am bad,’ ‘The world is completely dangerous’).”

Other people were making up wrong reasons why I was a disgusting person. It didn’t matter; I knew that there were real ones. I couldn’t say exactly from where my overwhelming sense of shame was coming, but I also couldn’t say that I wouldn’t find any deserving origins if I went looking for them.

I mean, where could I even start? I was mercifully unconvinced by the
Times
reporter’s theory that I was a “geisha to the NGO republic” posing as a reporter. But the argument could definitely be made that I was an adulterous whore.

Look at my marriage. My ex-husband was a good man. A better man has never lived, and he deserved the best. Any woman could have, should have been fulfilled being married to him. But I wasn’t. That alone was evidence that serious things were wrong with me. Then, when our marriage started falling apart, we’d agreed to try seeing other people—in retrospect, a last-ditch grasp that made things worse, not better. It had been my idea. And I had ended up with a mistress, and though it was technically allowed within the rules we’d set, I could tell that my husband wasn’t happy about it. And I did not, I could not, let her go. I spent every second with her that I could, switching my wedding band from my left, dominant hand to my right when I would put my fingers inside her.