Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (38 page)

After the dramatic, drastic, tearing-lives-apart sadness of my divorce, I’d assumed I wouldn’t get married again. But here I’d met a partner who was a miracle, and only a fool doubled down on remaining a hard-ass spinster when given a partner who was a miracle, even if the timing sucked. I’d re-given myself over to the radical idea of a life of partnership. Of surrender. To love and to another imperfect human.

But here I was getting married in Alex’s kitchen. No words and no ceremony. I’d biked over there in mom jeans—literally, a pair of ill-fitting jeans my mother had given me during the Hurricane Katrina evacuation—and Alex signed the marriage license I’d biked to City Hall to pick up. She’d got ordained on the Internet. Nico met me at her house, and Alex, who’d put on high heels with her yoga pants for the occasion, set her pen down and shook our hands. We went to her neighborhood café and split a celebratory doughnut. The girl who sold it to us seemed to feel bad that that was our wedding party; she gave it to us on a plate with chocolate syrup and a scoop of ice cream to make it fancier, though it was already organic, local, and made with sustainably farmed palm oil that didn’t threaten orangutan habitats.

I hated Nico for making me get emergency married on a day that was tinged with the gloom of damaged family and dangerous instability. But really, I hated Nico for leaving me. For deciding to go to France even though his aunt and uncle had told him they would take care of everything and that he shouldn’t disrupt his life and his future to help his mother, who clearly, desperately needed some help. In all the stress and distress, we got married and then spent our newlywed days fighting like dogs.

“Who’s going to take care of
me
?” I screamed.

I
was sick!
I
was fighting and barely overcoming the urge to be dead all the time! I was trying, I swear I was trying, so hard, to support him through this impossible thing to be going through, calling the lawyers, getting the paperwork in order, writing the checks for the government applications, attempting to stay calm. Every time I looked at him, his head hung low with defeat and confusion, I wanted to scoop him up and hold him in a ball against me and rock him and say I was sorry for him and it would be OK. And I did that sometimes. But however hard I tried, I could not stop my true feelings from bursting through my containment systems at other times and screaming at him, “What about
ME
?”

And I had thought I was disgusting before.

The fights we started having the moment we got married were deep and scary. They were foul and foundation-shaking. “I don’t
care
about your fucking mother!” I yelled at him during one of them.

Even my friends couldn’t take my side. My behavior was inexcusable. Unforgivable. And totally uncontrollable. I knew I owed it to Nico’s mother that he was as open and loving and secure as he was—his father, by all accounts, had been a little frightening and a lot cold. But I hated Nico’s mother even more than I hated him.

“Who does she remind you of?” Denise asked me, and I wanted to blow up her office.

The day we got married, after we’d eaten our dressed-up doughnut, we’d gone home and got into bed for a nap. Somehow, amid everything else, we both had the emotional wherewithal to have sex. When it was over, though, I started crying.

“I don’t want to be that kind of woman,” I said.

“What?” my brand-new husband asked.

I didn’t want to be the kind of woman who lost it so much that she took a medicine cabinet full of pills and ruined a young man’s life. I didn’t want to be the kind of woman who lost it to the extent that she couldn’t keep an eye on the impact it had on another person, as Denise and I constantly monitored that Nico wasn’t becoming a casualty of my illness, wasn’t lost as himself, was remaining my partner, not my nurse. I didn’t want my illness to cause pain to Nico at all. But of course it did.

I didn’t want to be a woman who fell apart. Who couldn’t take care of her children instead of making them take care of her. I didn’t want to be a woman who was so undone when her husband left her and she went broke that she had to be seriously medicated, like my mother was after The Fall. My father had taken one of her heavy antidepressants from her stash once, “Just to see,” and he said that it left him so numb that he wouldn’t have cared if someone shot his mother in the face right in front of him. Still, under that dosage, my mother had taken our plates and bowls outside by the armload, walked them to the end of the driveway, and smashed them on the concrete one by one.

I didn’t want to be that kind of woman. But I knew that I wasn’t then in a position to manage the additional trauma of something happening to Nico. I knew that if he died or was taken away from me, I would be that kind of woman. I would go from passively, feebly wishing I were dead to slitting my own throat.

“Can you have compassion for her instead?” Denise asked about Nico’s mother. “You know what it’s like to not be able to control your emotions. You know she can’t help it. You can be mad at the situation, but could you extend compassion to her, which would be good practice for the compassion you need to extend to yourself?”

The answer was no. I couldn’t. I tried. Actually, maybe I didn’t try; I don’t remember. I feel confident that even if I had tried, I would have failed. On top of her having triggered my worst fears, I had always been a grudge-holder. I’d learned it from birth, and taken to it famously at a young age. I’d reveled in being wrapped up in my own sense of justice—angry and uncomfortable, but pleased by my own superior disappointment. It was a bad habit that was hard to kick, one that grew stronger when I was triggered, as in France, or now. Now, when I became furious at someone else’s trespass (as opposed to over a stale baguette), I was often also soothed and excited. Atrocity was the one thing in which I still had complete faith. When a bad thing happened, I received the transgression with my eyes and ears, and then the realization of it sunk down to my core like something I’d swallowed, landing with a satisfying thud in my stomach.
Yes
, it said there.
You were right. Everything is exactly as horrible as you think it is.

Every conversation Nico and I had, stressed and sad and burning money on immigration lawyers and Department of Homeland Security fees and last-minute airfare, turned into a fight. Screaming, severe, relationship-threatening fights. One day after leaving our new lawyer’s office, we started yelling at each other downtown, incapable of heeding our surroundings like the incurably crazed or heavily addicted, hurling loud insults at each other on the street below the bricks of respectable office buildings. My workplace was among them, just a few blocks away, and as we headed in that direction to pick up more paperwork, I panted, intolerably hyperaroused. I fantasized about bloodletting. This time, I was going to do it. This time, I had to really do it.

What was in my office that I could use? There were scissors on my desk. I could take them to the bathroom and wash them—a nerd to the end!—and gouge open my thigh. I could just drive the scissors right into the fatty side there, gash in a good hole, then pull my black pants back on and let the blood and badness seep out as I continued on with my day. It wouldn’t be that noticeable.

Denise and I had an agreement about this. She’d made me acknowledge multiple times that this was a line I was not to cross, from fantasizing to doing. But I thought my heart might explode with fury, and anyway, it was none of her business. The only problem, I realized as I stood at my desk eyeing my scissors, was that there was no place on my body where Nico’s affectionate hand or mouth or gaze wouldn’t land for long enough for it to heal.

Because the fights always ended.
The
fight wasn’t over, but the fights always tired themselves out, giving way to an understanding—if not a reconciliation—of each other’s positions, and every day, no matter what else happened that day, we found each other at least once. That day, back outside my office, scissors not having been buried in any part of my anatomy, I felt backed into a corner as I leaned back against the building. Married for only a few days, Nico said, “Do you want we get divorced? I will go to France and stay in fucking France.” It sounded pretty good to me. But the relief would be false and unlasting, and I knew it.

“I’m having a bad day,” I admitted.

Nico softened immediately. In our world, this was shorthand for “I am not trying to be combative but am moments away from self-harm.” He put his arms around me, and though we were both still angry, we held on to the hope that it, like everything else, would pass.

*   *   *

“I just want to live in a cave,” I told Denise.

It was becoming my standby solution. Feel better by dealing with no one but myself. Make getting better and staying better easier by closing myself off to anyone else. Take fewer chances and suffer less. Love no one. Control the variables, or at least whittle the source of them down to one.

But I couldn’t do that. Technically, I mean.

“The core experiences of psychological trauma are disempowerment and disconnection from others,” Judith Lewis Herman says. “Recovery, therefore, is based upon the empowerment of the survivor and the creation of new connections. Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation.”

I couldn’t get better by avoiding humans—in a cave, on a gorgeous and eventless beach, in my apartment—because recovery was defined and measured by my ability to interact meaningfully with them.

It was facilitated by them, too. Isolation was anathema to healing. The Lakota Indians knew that. When one of their warriors had a wounded spirit or ailing heart, as they variably called it, the tribe might attend to him for weeks, then throw him a ceremony when he felt better. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Russians, the modern pioneers of military PTSD treatment, figured out this personal-support modality and sent friendly psychiatrists to accompany soldiers throughout their war with Japan. Brannan had lately been watching a miniature, short-term experiment of this methodology unfold in her house, when another veteran and his family came to stay for a while. Katie had seemed calmer and more adjusted since their arrival, and Brannan realized why when she saw that one day, when Katie had a breakdown and cowered under the bed, the visiting veteran’s kids didn’t ostracize her as her classmates would. They gathered around her, climbing under the bed and hugging her. What Brannan knew, research increasingly confirmed. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a tribal species, support networks were vital components of healing from mental illnesses. In India, schizophrenics, some of the supposed sickest of the brain sick, were not sequestered in group homes but remained with family and often never even informed of their diagnosis. They performed better than schizophrenic Westerners on recovery metrics. And functioning metrics. They were less continuously medicated, less severely symptomatic, and more often had jobs. And spouses.

It wasn’t what I wanted anyway, to be alone. When I’d met Nico I’d had that trite but nonetheless true sense that I’d been looking for him for centuries. But that wasn’t going to stop me from whining about how hard it was to keep him.

“This is why you don’t surrender to people,” I told Denise the day she urged me to adopt new interpretations. Nico was at home, pacing our apartment with worry about his mother. “They fuck you over. Or they die.” At the end of every relationship, and oftentimes throughout the middle, somebody ended up doubled over in agony. Somehow, I’d used to be fine with this. Now it struck me as definite grounds for cave dwelling.

Denise responded with a shrug. “Yeah,” she said. “Everybody dies.” And living in a cave was an option, but as much as I brought it up, it wasn’t the one I had chosen. I had got
married
. So could we construct a more adaptable interpretation than that I was full of magnets that drew all the trauma of the universe toward me?

“I’m not going to argue with you that Nico’s going to die, eventually,” Denise said. “But as you know, worrying is not preparation. And he’s not dead. So could you think of this as your chance? An imperative to love him big while you’re both still alive?”

“That’s what I’m doing!” I yelled. Could I love him any bigger? Had anyone ever loved anyone as much as I loved him? No. My love for him was limitless. Unfortunately, so was my capacity for fear of vulnerability and obsession with disaster.

Denise always said I had earned that. She wasn’t going to argue with me, either, that Nico and I had a lot of bad shit around us and behind us. She reminded me of my goal, to feel myself in the world. We reaffirmed that I was committed to a fulfilling life. We agreed that I would interpret all that shit as compost for growing it beautifully.

I took a deep breath and smiled while I wiped tears off my face. “That sounds good,” I said. “But I still think it would be easier to be alone.”

As soon as I said it, though, I changed my mind. “Actually, not really.” I knew people who lived like that, not alone exactly, but without intimacy. I neither envied nor admired them. Theirs was certainly not a life I’d ever strove for, or wanted to start striving for now. “I wouldn’t say that what they’re doing is easy, either.”

“Yeah,” Denise said. She laughed as she continued, starting to pantomime struggling with something off to the side of her chair. “It’s kind of like trying to hold a beach ball underwater.”

16.

Alright.

Let’s try that again.

On a sunny, San Francisco–crisp afternoon in August, 2012, I stepped out of a taxi on Van Ness Avenue. From the opposite door of the car, my father got out and circled around to join me. There, waiting on the sidewalk, was Nico. He was holding something behind his back. He revealed it to be a bouquet. He stood with Alex, a dozen other friends, and my mother. She and my father didn’t break their ten-year nonspeaking streak, but after initial protest agreed to stand on either side of me for a photo. My lawyer had advised it was important for establishing marriage legitimacy in our immigration file.