Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (29 page)

I just rang your bell (I know, it’s Saturday; I’m sorry about that, but I had to try), and here’s what I wanted: for a person who spends so much time talking to women who talk about how awful it is to be married to a person with PTSD, I am surprisingly shocked to watch how awful it is for my partner to be in my vicinity when I have several rough days, as I generally do every week, in a row. As a healthy 26-year-old, Nico is not really prone to long bouts of sobbing, and you should have seen how surprised he was that he was doing it, but that’s how he reacted when I was paranoid and panicked and totally overwhelmed with despair for a couple days in a row and just couldn’t stop crying, which as you know happens to me all the time. I was better today, as I usually am after my weekly Grand Bad Day where everything becomes especially bad, and so he’s better, too, he’s great, but you can see that he’s still recovering, honestly. And it’s only a matter of days before I turn into that person again. I know, he’ll probably adjust a little bit, but seeing what my sickness can do to him pretty much instantly doubled my grief, which was mostly self-pitying before, but now is also alarmed and horrified about my potential to do real and lasting harm to a person who’s going to move into my apartment in several weeks.

I’ll give you a million dollars to tell me you think it’s possible that I’ll get better. Alex’s dad never got better, and Vietnam was a really long time ago. Do you really think it’s possible that I’m going to get better?

No pressure or anything.

x!

Mac

*   *   *

I didn’t have all the answers by the time I left France. I did have an answer from Denise—“It does get better if you stay the course, do your practices and take very good care of yourself. It’s complex but healing can open up really amazing places in one who is committed to turning and facing all that’s there”—but that didn’t mean I knew if I could really pull it off and get through it. And I didn’t have answers for Nico about his proposal.

His mother, who we went to meet over a rabbit she had cooked, had Nico translate to me that this was wise, my taking my time to consider. She asked me to split a bottle of wine with her at eleven o’clock in the morning. She smoked and approved that I was pretty enough. She said she hoped I figured out the marriage thing relatively fast since I was getting old to have a baby.

I left without committing to anything either way. But on my last day in the country, Nico’s lieutenant called to tell him his request for leave had finally, officially been granted. He could use the six-month visitor’s visa he’d acquired and go to the United States in a month.

So we had that. Plus, we had a wee splash of hope. On one of the days in the chalet that I spiraled the furthest away from sanity, free-falling away from myself, lost in my own body, I flipped out and lashed out and bawled for hours. And then: I got better. I recovered—without sleeping/drugging
and
sleeping my way out of it, which I’d never once done before. I recovered enough that we could go out for a late dinner. Having first searched the bistros of our own village, the only people walking the brick streets out in the cold dark, we drove to an Italian-Alsatian restaurant.

“What do you think?” I asked Nico as we read our menus.

“I think I want to marry you,” he said.

I laughed. “Still?”

We tried each other’s entrées like regular people out to dinner. Back at the chalet, we made tea. We made fun of our uptight chalet owners for telling us when we checked in that only one person was allowed in the bathtub at a time. What kind of French people were they? We had sex in the bathtub, and on the bed, and went to sleep in a supportive tangle.

My first same-day episode recovery.

That victory was far from my last.

12.

Back in San Francisco, I had an episode in the canned-bean aisle of a grocery store. I became so hopeless and enraged that my limbs went numb and I could think only about how much calmer I would be if I cut open each forearm along the ridge of the ulna bone, from my wrist to my elbow, in one clean, long slice. Cleanse and purge. My hands wouldn’t be able to disappear then! Not if they were on the other side of very real rivers of blood, seeping out and catching on my arm hair. Invoking the image pacified me, as usual. But it didn’t seem like the most adjusted way I could be dealing with the situation.

This thought alone was a win. Though I spent huge amounts of my time with Denise talking about tools, developing and practicing tools, once I entered a crazy space, I failed to follow her advice most of the time. In an episode, nothing made sense, and I often couldn’t remember that I even had tools, much less what they were, and when I did remember, I often couldn’t persuade myself to use them anyway, or I tried to use them but quickly abandoned them. This time, holding a grocery basket in one hand, I decided to go for some grounding exercises—and not give up.

I rooted down through my feet, dropping my weight into my legs, toes spread, heavy contact with the ground. I took a deep breath, starting the first breath exercise. I pictured my skeleton, to give my contracted muscles a break by remembering it was there, how sturdy it was, concentrating on letting
it
hold me up while the muscles could just drape off, tall.…

Wait
, I thought.

You look like a crazy person.

This was the canned-bean aisle. Nobody stood around contemplating beans. It didn’t take that long to choose beans.

I relocated to the freezer aisle, and planted myself in front of the ice cream case.

There, concentrating on my breath, filling my rib cage with it and expanding across my shoulders, taking up space, my full space, the space I deserved, I visualized my energy stretching outward in all directions. Down past the floor, into the soil, into the earth’s crust. To the left through my shoulders into the yogurt case, right, all the way into the bulk foods, reminding myself that this would pass, it would pass, it would eventually pass. And there, I achieved another victory.

I didn’t feel better. But I convinced myself that I
would
feel better, later. Something moved just a little. Just enough. I convinced myself that a bad moment would end, and that I might someday be able to help bad moments end.

*   *   *

If only the post-trauma healing path always moved forward. My glimmers of progress were encouraging, but they were no safeguard against the constant threat of regression, or lack of progress in another sphere. Back in Denise’s office, post-France, I’d put myself back into self-defensive lockdown. Nico had noticed it coming on and called me on it when I was leaving.

“I can feel you becoming
Mac McClelland
,” he said—not the person but a byline, a flat persona of a tough and busy lady reporter—as we sat in the airport in Basel. I hadn’t noticed it, but he was right; I had distanced myself from him on the bench where we were waiting and started making the transformation into A Girl On Guard Against The World Alone, my body becoming tenser, muscles turning rigid under my hardening candy shell. Until he said that, I hadn’t realized that I was sitting at attention and gritting my teeth.

Now, in therapy, on the table, Denise was encouraging me to try to let my stiffness go some.

“OK,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

She pressed on my chest, supporting the contraction there. Everything was about supporting, inviting, not forcing. To demonstrate how this worked, she would sometimes make me hold out my fist and clench it as hard as I could. Then she would have me use my other hand to try to pry the fist loose, which wouldn’t work, but when she had me use my other hand to instead wrap it around the fist, squeezing gently and supporting it, it softened.

Now the tension in my chest softened as she put weight on it.

“I hate that,” I said. I could feel my nervousness rise.

“OK,” she said, stopping. “Should I move my hand away?”

“Depends what we’re going for.”

“
I want to feel myself in the world
,” she reminded me.

I started panicking as I thought about what that would feel like. People went through this process so they could have a fuller life, Denise always said. Reach their fullest emotional and professional potential. She said someday maybe I’d be glad this had happened to me; some addicts ended up grateful for their disease because trying to heal from it forced them to find a connection to themselves, a richness of experience they otherwise wouldn’t have had. I thought these people sounded like idiots. They must have had shitty lives before. I’d easily have sacrificed whatever ninja properties I was going to get from this to have my non-crazy back. Used to be, when I’d go into the office, people I ran into in the kitchen would say—with varying degrees of enthusiasm—“I knew you were here; I could hear you laughing all the way over at my desk.” What about
that
?

I tried to relax a bit, and started really panicking.
Oh my god Oh my god Oh my god
. “I changed my mind,” I told Denise. Fuck this imperative I had to try to heal. “I changed my mind!”

“OK,” Denise said. “What’s going to happen?”

“Everything will fall apart,” I said, starting to fall apart on cue, tears spilling out of the eyes I’d squeezed shut. “I won’t be functional in the world. I won’t be functional anywhere at all.”

Denise asked me if I wanted to stop.

I did. I really did. But I took a deep breath. “No. It’s fine,” I said. “Let’s fucking do it.”

I had to learn to surrender. I had to master surrendering to myself—and to Nico, if I was going to be able to accept his love, not to mention accept him inside me. I’d been so good at this before. I’d loved so hard and so easily in my life, and I was either going to get good at surrendering again or I was going to stop trying, leave Nico, and screw a never-ending string of twenty-year-old poets like the other writers with intimacy issues I knew. Denise encouraged me to keep in mind the difference between surrender and submission. “They are not the same thing,” she kept telling me. “You just have to surrender. You don’t have to submit.”

Denise pressed on me and prompted me some more, and I squirmed and resisted but then fell apart some more, and then it became too much and my hands disappeared.

“That’s OK,” Denise said. I lay on the table, crying. It was almost time to go. “It was uncomfortable but nobody died. It’s really important to remember that nobody died. You didn’t die.”

I didn’t die, but I still failed. Somewhere in this transition between brick person and open human person who was a complete mess was the key to getting better, and I was miserable at occupying that middle ground.

“Honor your defense mechanisms,” Denise said. She told me this all the time. I was wasting my energy being angry with myself for not getting better fast enough, perpetuating my problems by trying to brace myself against them rather than embrace them. “It’s a miracle that you’re alive, and your defense mechanisms got you there. Don’t be mad at them for coming up when it’s not a good time. They’re just trying to protect you.”

This instruction was proving to be one of the least attainable of my therapy directives. As a ceaselessly high-performing perfectionist, I wasn’t inclined to forgive such low achievement. When I was in first or second grade, I got a Ziggy calendar at the start of the school year (teddy bear calendars, Ziggy calendars; it says something about the kind of child I was that my favorite thing to play with was
calendars
), and set about writing in every foreseeable event. I had gym class once a week, so marked it four times a month, getting almost all the way through the school year before my mom walked over and said, “Who’s Jim?” Homophones! I hadn’t learned this one yet! I felt the hot flush of disgrace. For months, I had to look at the calendar as it hung on my wall full of crossed-out
jim
s, cursing my stupidity.

Now I was supposed to turn into a crazy person and, instead of being pissed about my dysfunction, put my arm around my crazy and say,
Hey, man, welcome
? I recognized that doing otherwise was senseless and counterproductive. But I just wasn’t built that way.

So, fine, I continued to try learning from zero the self-compassion I so urgently needed. As I had so much/too much empathy for others, I tried to sneak some of it over into my own camp. I imagined the compassion I would feel for Alex during a tough time, or a badly suffering animal, then tried to transfer that feeling to myself. The success of the practice was limited. My perfectionism was holding my head underwater in the shame and frustration pool, making my struggle harder and using up effort that could have been put to use healing. But as much as it was a hindrance, it became one of my greatest assets.

I was an accomplishment machine, goddammit. I was not going to give up, and I was not going to let this situation stand. Even Denise had to admit that she was impressed with my perseverance, a quality not always easy to come by in a majorly depressive and traumatized mind.

“You’re so hungry to get better,” she said.

“Aren’t most people?” I asked.

“No. A lot of people who come here, even though they make the effort to go to therapy, they come in here, and they just kind of sit here, and won’t or can’t do the work. Sometimes I have to wonder, ‘Do you even
want
this?’”

I
did!
I
did! Denise consistently tried to convince me that that was courageous. So we pushed on. And sometimes, on the table, it would be bad, and I would be alarmed and upset and crying, but I would let go anyway—and when the crying stopped, there would be peace. I felt solid on the table, but not too heavy; my presence filled up my body, and my body felt like it was a part of everything else around me.

“Take a picture of this,” Denise would say when I got to this place. “Take a snapshot in your head. Remember what it feels like.” Usually, the feeling didn’t last five minutes after I got off the table and into the world. Lately, I could take it outside with me and walk around with it for a while, but it still faded within a day, at the longest. “The more times you get here, the easier it will be to get here, and the longer you can stay here,” Denise said.