Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (9 page)

But another major difference was social. As Bessel van der Kolk, one of the nation’s preeminent trauma specialists, has pointed out, after 9/11, most of New York still looked like New York—a reasonably safe place to live. People retained, and returned to, their homes. After Katrina, with so many communities destroyed, communities couldn’t band together, with many residents dispersed for months, or forever. They also lacked a wider kind of cultural support: Following 9/11, New Yorkers were represented in commercials and newspapers and political speeches as heroes. Survivors of Katrina? They were hapless victims. Sad, sweating, standing helplessly on a bridge or roof or sidewalk waiting for a helicopter or a bus. Or worse, criminals. They looted, and later, when the crime rate skyrocketed, people didn’t think about how New Orleanians had been failed by emergency services and the Army Corps of Engineers and leaders of various levels of government both during the storm and long before, but shook their heads at the poor, or black, animals who didn’t know how to behave in an end-of-their-world scenario and made bad life decisions—to not leave the city earlier; to be poor in the first place. As New Orleanians returned and walked around an Armageddon whose levees had been compromised—and remained that way for years—certain to have everything leveled again if another big storm came through, they were not nationally celebrated, or congratulated for having survived.

If validating the experience of the traumatized requires regard for the victims and the culpability of responsible parties, in the case of poor, Southern, mostly black New Orleans versus a New York City besieged by brown terrorists: trickier on both counts. And validation is another crucial component of healing. So after Katrina, not only was the first requirement for healing—security, safety—not in place, neither was the second.

*   *   *

On my return from Haiti, having reestablished safety behind the two double-locked doors of my apartment in beautiful, highly structured San Francisco, Meredith mounted a one-woman validation campaign. It’s OK to have PTSD, she kept telling me. Your symptoms are normal for PTSD.

I did not believe her. A year later, I would have Herman’s
Trauma and Recovery
always on display at my house so I could look at it, and sometimes touch it, to remind myself that trauma is a real thing and that my symptoms, weird and outlandish as they seemed, were literally textbook. Later, I would go digging through libraries of universities I didn’t attend and see the similarities to traumatized Civil War vets, but for now, I felt like an overdramatic emotional freak show. Meredith was a single voice, and one I was paying to talk. I’d seen the world react to traumatized people before, even if I hadn’t known what I was looking at, and I’d learned that even a great national catastrophe wasn’t an acceptable excuse to fall apart. Even under the grave, multiple-disaster circumstances of the fishermen’s wives, the sympathetic nonprofit clinician trying to help them never uttered the word
trauma
, using instead the less-validating words “stress relief”—as if the problem were just that they weren’t relaxed enough. As far as I could be convinced, there was no space for accepting So You Dissociated While Witnessing Mortal Terror in Haiti and Then Were Sexually Terrorized as an excuse for meltdown in my culture.

“Nothing bad ever even happened to me,” I told Meredith, over and over.

“OK,” she said, shifting in her seat in a way that struck me as frustration. “If you drew a picture of what happened to you, it might not look that bad.”

OK. If I did that, in one picture, I’d be backing away from a guy in a wifebeater in a tiny concrete room with a closed door. In another, there’d be the events of the witnessing and the screaming. In a thematically related frame, perhaps, I’d be sitting alone in the dark in the middle of the American Southwest with several enormous drunk men with fight scars holding Budweiser cans while one of them was sliding his hand up my thigh.

OK. Maybe those would look bad even as illustrations. Maybe as a series, they’d justify why it was reasonable for me to have developed a conditioned response of fear and terror that refused to turn itself off. Either way, there was no protocol in my community for supporting a person with PTSD; nobody was going to bring me casseroles or send me cards and flowers. But just because my culture didn’t acknowledge it, Meredith said, one seemingly small, isolated incident could be plenty to give a person crippling PTSD. No matter what she said, though, I couldn’t agree that I had earned the diagnosis.

“I can’t believe I’m so weak,” I cried. I knew other people thought I was, too. One of my coworkers, and two superiors, suggested that I needed to consider whether I could handle my job.

Growing up, I’d had a paranoid schizophrenic aunt who couldn’t take care of herself. I still had a schizophrenic aunt, but when I lived back home in Ohio, I saw her a lot more often, on all family birthdays and holidays. I was a little bit scared of Aunt Terri when I was little, the way she always talked to herself. Or probably more accurately, I was afraid of being her, of not being able to tell the difference between real voices and voices in my head, of being pulled so deep into my imagination that I’d never get out—and of then becoming a burden. Before her psychotic break, Aunt Terri had been a straight-A student and a talented artist. When she was sixteen she’d appeared in the backyard one day, pacing and flailing and screaming-babbling incoherently, and as for her normal functioning and living, that had pretty much been that. I saw how my friends who came over looked at her; how I continued to see people look at, and fear or hate, crazy people on the street. I saw how Aunt Terri mostly sat off to the side of family gatherings talking to her voices, how everyone in my family but a few seemed uneasy around her. Though no one admitted it to me explicitly until I was an adult, there was no way I didn’t pick up on it as a child that some of our relatives thought—despite her legal diagnosis—that she was faking, or lazy, or just spoiled and wanting attention.

A lot of people are afraid of the mentally ill. But most people take their own mental health for granted. I, having watched Aunt Terri, actively cherished mine. When I was a sophomore in college, I was asked in a sociology class to write my No. 1 goal in life on a piece of paper, and as the anonymous responses were collected and read aloud, I was definitely the only one who had written “To be happy AND SANE.”

But here I was, a blind and staggering baby. What was I to do with or make of this gagging, sobbing mess of a person I was now?

5.

I’d brought my Haiti drinking habits home with me.

In fact, I’d got drunk at San Francisco International Airport as soon as I landed. I’d begged Tana to meet me for my rough homecoming, and we headed directly to the TGI Fridays in Terminal 1.

“Where are you ladies headed?” two businessmen seated at the next table had asked us when our drinks were delivered, assuming we must be in transit if we were getting drunk in an airport.

“Nowhere,” we’d responded, staring them down. “We live here.”

After workdays, I dragged Tana to more bars around town to tell her, and tell her again, what had happened, while I pounded cocktails, though I’d already hashed out and rehashed it with her in drunken phone calls from Port-au-Prince. What the terrified screaming had been like. What Henri had done. What Marc had said. No matter how much whiskey or gin I swallowed—I usually never drank gin, but since that night I’d ordered it at the Oloffson, I craved it—it didn’t stop that awful gagging from coming back as I talked. I leaned over the side of our outdoor bar table, spitting, constriction in my throat and roiling bile in my stomach.

It made me so mad. At myself.

“Why don’t I get some real problems?” I demanded. “What kind of fucking pussy cries and pukes about getting
almost
hurt or having to watch bad things happen to
other
people?”

“Dude,” Tana said. “Marines.” Tana, tall and brilliant, who made excellent points about everything. “Marines get PTSD even when they don’t get hurt and only see bad things happen to other people. When you hear about that, it’s not that they got shot but, like, how they saw their buddy get shot.”

I wasn’t hearing it. Tana, like Meredith, was too biased of a source to be reliable.

Soon after my homecoming, I figured out that I could consume almost an entire 750 milliliter bottle, some 25 ounces or so, of hard liquor in a night and still work the next day. I weighed 125 pounds. But I had a six-spread magazine feature about Haiti due. I forced myself to work on it sober until at least early evening, but come six, and then five after a couple of days, and then four, I couldn’t bear it any longer, my shakiness worsening as I wrote about rape activists and rape survivors and the earthquake-displaced, so I continued working from home with a small drink in hand. Once, on a day I had to go into the office, I left in the middle of the day to go to a bar, did a shot of whiskey, and then returned, going around to ask my coworkers for gum. One night, I arrived as a judge at a literary competition drunk, having had five or six cocktails, and then had two more when I got there. At a fund-raiser where people had paid up to $50,000 a table, I took the stage as a speaker, and I did so hammered. I was invited to an even higher-end fund-raising dinner and got hammered there also. “I almost got sexually assaulted in Haiti,” I leaned over and slurred, tearing up, to the millionaire stranger seated next to me.

Fortunately for me, she’d had a nervous breakdown herself once, after her prominent husband left her and their children in spectacular fashion. “You just tell as many people as you want as many times as you need to,” she said.

I recognized my level of tolerance and dependence as a red flag for an issue I would have to reckon with at some point. But at the moment, I considered it the least of my problems.

*   *   *

A trigger, in the parlance of the trauma community, is anything that fires a PTSD gun. Anything (or a nothing) that sparks an episode, or any moment in a firestorm of symptoms. That was what it was called, I learned, when I was going about my business, la-la-la, and then all of a sudden, not doing that anymore, but crying or gagging or having a flashback instead: being triggered. Sometimes it was something vaguer—an overwhelming agitation that could last for a moment, but more often hours, and sometimes days. It was a noun, and a verb, and a psychological phenomenon. It was nonsensical and unpredictable.

Logistically, the randomness of my triggers made it difficult to make plans. Emotionally, the inconsistency was its own form of terror. But worse than not knowing what could set off an episode was knowing one thing that always, always, unfailingly would: sex.

Historically, my assessment of my sexuality had been positive. A serial monogamist, I was rarely interested in having sex with people I didn’t know, and the loving people I did have sex with tended to describe me with embarrassing but healthy words like “sensual.”

“You talk about sex a lot,” one of my boyfriends in college had always said. That was true. But only by comparison with the puritan silence surrounding it in suburban Ohio. I talked about sex the way some people went on about soccer, or their kids, and only more so the further I got from the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland’s educational institutions, which kept the hallways and lunchrooms spied for punishable language about it. “Petting Is A No-No” was a section in my junior high “sexuality” textbook. In high school, certainly no one was trying to facilitate my honest sexual expression when the faculty got word that I had, since the age of sixteen, been dating a twenty-year-old lesbian from Ashtabula. They instituted a special rule my senior year so that we wouldn’t be able to go to prom together. Even after we’d broken up and I’d fallen in with a male member of the hockey team, they suspended me—
me
, in the top five of my class—for “some complaints that you are gay.” So yeah, I often exercised the validity of sexuality through language, gave it a stretch and took it out for a walk, letting it stake its claim in discourse, in the open, in the land of things people could admit out loud.

I’d come from a long line of perverts, anyway. In my grandfathers’ day, it regrettably manifested as philandering, but my parents—not that I wanted to know—appeared to have cultivated a relationship where mutual lustiness could thrive. When my dad came home from work, there was a lot of hugging and mouth-kissing. Since my childhood, they’d gone on vacations without us, and my older sister Jessica and I theorized that they were sexy vacations, stacked as my mother’s bedside bookshelf was with Anaïs Nin books; as adolescents, our suspicions were confirmed by suggestive notes they left each other and didn’t hide well enough. One Christmastime in high school, my dad handed me a shopping bag and asked me to wrap its contents for my mother, then had to awkwardly apologize for handing me the wrong one when I dumped it out on my bedroom floor and found it contained sex toys.

The (evidently) above-average libido I’d always felt, and that people like my (practicing Catholic) college boyfriend accused me of, seemed like my destiny. By the time I moved to New Orleans, and still more by the time I left for San Francisco, I was long proud that I’d overcome my mean religious indoctrination to be able to enjoy sex. To love sex.

Now I couldn’t even think about sex. Or rather, I could think about it, but it made me wince out loud and scrunch my face and eyes and mouth up watertight, because it was invariably accompanied by rape imagery.

That was unfortunate, because heavy drinking wasn’t the only new thing I’d brought home with me. Since the moment I’d left Haiti, Nico and I had been continuing to exchange e-mails at least once a day. Usually more than once a day. Fifteen in the first four days after I left. And my sex trigger was turning out to complicate our burgeoning epistolary relationship. Nico was still in Haiti for another month, and said everything there reminded him of me and made him miss me and my eyes—and my body. The letters weren’t all dirty; he labored to venture outside the conversational English he barely knew with Google Translate on hand, saying
excuse me for my english
; mine contained details about my life in San Francisco and the weird awfulness of suddenly struggling to cope with it, in sentences stripped of complex tense and advanced structure. Mostly our letters were sweet. He’d never been to my country, much less my city, but I told him I missed him like he’d always been there, biking to work looking over my shoulder as though he’d be biking next to me, picturing him with me at every restaurant, in my apartment, at the grocery store. But when the correspondence took a graphic turn, I responded in kind, about his beauty, about his body, about missing his tongue. In theory, I wanted those things. But I couldn’t picture them without making myself sick.