Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (23 page)

But we did, after some more arguing back and forth and this terrible sentence: “At that point, I stopped protesting.”

That night, when he fell asleep, when he had finally finished to my great relief, I got up and got away from him. I took a long, burning shower in the abandoned communal bathroom. I grabbed my French book and sat on the floor outside my room in the hallway and stared at verb conjugations for several hours. When it was barely dawn, I woke him up and told him he had to leave. He whined, saying he wasn’t ready, saying come on, let him sleep, protesting some more, until finally I started yelling at him and he went back to his car.

A day and a half later—in an intro-to-women’s-studies class, of all places—I started crying, and could not stop.

Back at the dorm, I wandered down the hall to the room of the best friends I’d made in the short months I’d been at school. Unfortunately, they were eighteen-year-old men. More unfortunately, the most outspoken of them held some views that were, though I wouldn’t learn to recognize such things for years, deeply misogynist. This was an honors floor, and so I sat there, supposedly precocious, debating the ethics of what had happened with other ostensibly gifted students, all of us chain-smoking and using logic and rational language, though I continued crying for the entirety of the discussion. Yes, I had flirted with him, I admitted from the onset, had even said during our drive that I could be interested in having sex with him, but I had changed my mind, and I had said no. My argument for being upset was that I had said no, no, no, so many times. The outspoken philosophy major countered that, culturally—or maybe it was biologically, or evolutionarily, or all three, I forget—it was my job to say no, just as it was the rocket scientist’s job to talk me into it, overcome my professed resistance and other obstacles of the hunt, pursue me until I was disarmed and he got what he and probably we both wanted. That I had allowed him into my bed to begin with had been my green light to engage in this game. That I had said “No” multiple times but failed to start yelling, kicking, or trying to run demonstrated my willingness to continue playing it.

This philosophy major wasn’t saying anything I could disagree with: All the representations of relations between the sexes that I knew positioned man as pursuer and conqueror and woman as resister to be won over—or finally admit that she’d wanted it but was just pretending she didn’t all along. Everyone knew that. Everyone in the dorm room agreed, myself included, that I was the kind of girl who could stand up for herself. Self-confident and queer, strong in debates, I was, we extrapolated, perfectly capable of fighting off unwanted advances, vehemently if need be. If any of us had to guess, we’d guess I would start a fight if I really had a problem with something. Again, since it was my job to automatically say “No” no matter what I meant, it was also my job to show that I really
meant
no by screaming or fighting.

This all sounded reasonable to me.

I returned to my dorm room. Still unsettled, I wrote the journal entry. I spent most of the rest of the eight pages trying to figure out how I let it all happen. “I didn’t want to fuck him,” I wrote. “So why did I? Why do I let myself wear down like that?” Some of my speculations are frenetic and nonsensical. “Because I was taught that sex was so important and sacred that I wanted it to be such a great experience with me? That really doesn’t sound right. My dad always says I’m the best. Do I feel like I have to be the best at this? Why? Because it’s so personal and the competition is so unknown and fierce?” Did I want to pacify him, “despite the fact that it was against what I wanted?” Did I not want to make him mad? And if so, “why not? What the fuck do I care what some stranger thinks?” Did I just want to be “something cool, something sexy”? Did I “have some sort of void” in me? “I really do have a lot of self-respect,” I wrote, but “maybe my sense of self-respect comes from others thinking well about me”? “Maybe I needed to make him happy because that makes him like me and maybe that’s supposed to make me like me too”? Maybe I just “wanted to be a beautiful girl who put out.” Maybe I was “showing off.” It hadn’t been the way I usually made decisions, but maybe I just felt like I had “to prove something.”

Though I had clearly decided this before I even picked up the pen, I went on to “conclude” that the events were my fault. “I can’t say it’s his fault, I didn’t tell him enough times how I felt. Not that I should
have
to, but I know from experience what’s necessary.” I’d had sex with two other men before, and made out with several others. After I stopped protesting—“I saw sleeping with him as the only option and I wanted to get it over with”—I wrote that after penetration started, “I hated it. I wanted to ask him to stop a lot more times” but didn’t bother anymore, giving in, the whole time “thinking I just wanted him to get off, really fast, and be done. I hated it.” I name myself as the one responsible for “perpetrating” it, and being “disgusted and disgusting.” “I said no, but not enough. I fully consented to sex I absolutely by my will did not want to have. Consented by default. Because I didn’t want to fight.”

Looking back over these sentences as an enlightened adult, I feel sad for this girl, of course. Not just because her socialization has blinded her to the glaring contradiction between “I said no” and “I fully consented,” but because she doesn’t know that “didn’t want to fight” was really “couldn’t fight.” Because her lack of information and education about certain innate responses to threats, responses that were common to lots of other people and that she would experience again, leads her to blame herself. Just like she would again twelve years later, when she is diagnosed with PTSD.

“Why don’t I want to fight?” I asked myself several times, frantically, in the journal pages. In the day-to-day, my self-protection practices were on point, especially for a teenager. I didn’t fuck assholes. I didn’t get in cars with anyone who’d been drinking at all, ever. I can understand why I was so confused about why those systems had failed at a crucial moment. “I think probably the only way he would have stopped was if I yelled really loudly or left,” I wrote. “I honestly didn’t even think of either. So I let him do whatever he wanted.”

And there you had it. My first fateful freeze.

A month later, I had sex with him willingly. My female friends, also eighteen, also knowing nothing—and who among them could say it hadn’t happened to them, that one time they’d said no at first, or second or third or fifth or eighteenth?—agreed with the misogynists down the hall that it seemed like a reasonable misunderstanding. Convinced I hadn’t been wronged, I started taking his phone calls and constant online-chat messages, dismissing my profound anger and resentment. Anyway, if we were having long-distance phone-fun, talking about classes and our families and joking around, then he must not be a monster, and what happened must not have been bad. Both back in Cleveland for Christmas, we saw each other again, and I consented to sex this time, after we’d hung out all night and early morning was starting to break.

I consented to sex, but I still felt strongly that I did not want him to come inside me—as he had done the first time without asking. (Let’s not talk about the idiocy of my having not used condoms when I was on the pill at this age.)

I told him to pull out. I told him more than once.

He refused.

I didn’t cry this time. But I wouldn’t make the same mistake again. As I had done in my past, I would make certain for the rest of my future not to sleep with anyone until I was sure he or she respected me.

*   *   *

What about that time when I got lost on the beach in North Carolina? When I wandered away from my parents near the water because I was composing a story in my head, and couldn’t find my way back to them and I really thought I’d never see my family again? “You just walked up to me being so cool,” my mom always said when she recounted our reunion that day, “but I dropped to my knees and put my arms around you and your heart was pounding so hard. You were so cool about it,” she said, “but you must have been petrified.”

Or the night some guy who turned out to be my dad’s friend was skulking around our house when I was home alone in fifth grade and I called the police because I thought he was going to break in and murder me? Or when I was sixteen and I got caught having sex with my girlfriend? My parents came around and became accepting after a while, but that first night, my father pulled me downstairs, ambushing me for hours with how twisted I was, repeating that I was so fucked up as my mother stared unhappily into space and I cried, enraged by their narrow-minded condemnation.

Under the right circumstances, any of those might evoke the feelings of extreme fear or helplessness or threat that could be the T in PTSD. Anyone who was asked to make a list of bad things that had happened to them could have something on it that has given someone PTSD at some point: a death, a mugging, a car crash. At least 25 percent of Americans have experienced a trauma by the time they reach adulthood, and by the age of forty-five, almost all of them have. Child abuse, domestic abuse, parental neglect. Cancer. A break-in, a fire, a natural disaster. Rape, assault, terrorist attack, war, torture, childbirth. Getting divorced or going to prison. Civil conflict. Watching too much terrorist-attack footage on the news! The normative human response to trauma is recovery, and if I had recovered from all the previous “traumas” in my life, who could know how traumatizing they’d been, or if it was their existence that made trauma in Haiti one trauma too many? Or if it had been just too many work traumas too close together (long assignments being an additional risk factor for journalists)? Or just one trauma that was
just
the right amount of traumatic?

Attempts to answer these questions definitively seemed to require imposing sense and blame on a phenomenon that was accountable to neither.

Other contemporary studies had found that personal characteristics didn’t matter, and that the
trauma
’s character was the deciding factor in a person’s resultant psychological condition. And while some research suggested that previous trauma might be a statistically significant risk factor for developing PTSD, it was certainly no guarantee.

Nico was evidence of this. During our first night together, he had told me about his father’s suicide, when he was seventeen. It wasn’t until we’d spent more time together that I realized that that story was even worse than it’d sounded. That he and his father had had a long heart-to-heart the day before. That they’d all had Easter dinner the day of the incident, everyone in the family eating together and drinking some wine—but not too much for Nico, who’d got the
Don’t you dare
face from his father when he picked up the bottle to pour himself a second glass. After dinner, Nico took a shower; his dad caught him in the hall to say that he would go running with him tomorrow. Nico went to join his mother in front of the TV. His dad didn’t come. His dad took the leash to walk the dogs, but no one ever used the leashes because they lived on a farm. His dad arrived in the living room, drank a cup of coffee, and a glass of cognac, and left out the back door.

Thinking he’d been acting weird, Nico gave him ten minutes. Something felt wrong, but maybe his dad just needed time alone. When he didn’t reappear, Nico went to look for him. He checked the kitchen and the bathroom. The garage light was on, but the door from the kitchen was locked. Not wanting to alarm his mother, he asked, “Is it nice outside?” before walking out the front door and around to the big garage door. He pushed it up. No one was in there. He walked past the motorcycle several times, not seeing the letter on the seat. He went back outside. Walking back toward the house to get the car keys so he could canvass the surrounding streets, he looked to the outbuildings and noticed a light on in one, shining through the bottom of the half-closed roll-up door.

He was too late. He tried to scream but nothing came out of his mouth. He jumped up to unclip the leash his father had strung over the rafter, and fell to the ground under his weight. He tried to pry off the noose, but it was too tight, as if it’d become part of his neck. Having run back to the house, he couldn’t figure out what to say to his mother.

Hey, can you help me with something?
No. That didn’t seem appropriate. What was he supposed to say? He had to tell her what happened two or three times before she comprehended it. He told her he couldn’t get the rope off. They went back together with scissors. They still couldn’t get it, and didn’t want to be aggressive because they didn’t want to hurt him, though he was already dead. They called the fire department. They waited, and had to call again. It came, and then the police. The doctor filling out the death certificate had drugged his mom, so Nico identified the body. If he wanted to cry, he should, the doctor told him. He didn’t want to, no—he thought he should, too, but couldn’t. He slept for an hour, but his mom’s screaming woke him up. So he went to the police station and gave his statement, then took his parents’ address book, and started making the phone calls.

Then, five months later, Nico’s best friend came over to his house, asked him for help with tying his necktie, went out to a fancy dinner, drove to the woods, and hung himself from a tree.

Somehow, Nico finished the year of high school he had left. Then he started at the University of Strasbourg, an hour away. But within three months of medical school, broke and feeling adrift, he dropped out and started working odd jobs before signing up for a career as a gendarme.
Gens d’armes
: men at arms—there is no equivalent American service, but their duties most roughly resemble the National Guard’s. He specialized in SWAT operations at home and abroad, getting up in the middle of the night to stand outside doors, waiting, before storming into drug dealers’ houses; chasing them, first in formation and carrying a ballistics shield, when they ran; stalking immigrant gold pirates through the jungle of French Guiana, one of several territories his government never returned to independence; acting as riot police in Paris; lent as peacekeepers in Haiti, where, like the displaced, the gendarmes slept in flimsy, leaking tents, listening as they lay in cots to the gunfights echoing across the valley, hoping a stray bullet wouldn’t land them on the list of the night’s murders posted on the bulletin board before breakfast:
1 person found stabbed at the edge of the road
,
2 people shot
, etc.