#or that I got fucking brain damage from ptsd and i’m never going to accomplish what I once thought I would

[spacemancharisma]

I just can’t find the center of the grief, I can’t find the source. I didn’t like who I was then, I do like who I am now, I wasn’t happy then, I am happy now, why do I want so badly to go back? why do I miss her so much? i’ve done everything right, i’ve built a life I love and am genuinely happy in, I’m doing better than I have in my entire life, why do I feel like I’m making a mistake? why do I feel like I was supposed to be her, not me? why do I feel like i’ve failed?

[mappingthemoon]

We have to build up the skills of being able to ask questions like: What does it mean to actually center a survivor who is harmed? What does it mean to actually support people who have caused harm? What does it mean to take responsibility for saying, 'We refuse in our community to condone when this happens'? One of the things that is so important is that harm causes wounds that necessitate healing. That is what so many people are looking for—a way to begin to heal. How are we going to create in our communities, spaces that allow people real opportunity to heal? "Again, this will not necessarily be accomplished through compulsory confession in a public way. But, how do we hold that people who have been harmed deserve an opportunity for that harm to be addressed in a real way? Often, that is all people want: a real acknowledgement that, 'I was hurt. Somebody did it. I want them to know that they did it. I want to see that they have some remorse for having done it and I want them to start a process by which they will ensure to themselves, at least, and be accountable to their community for not doing it again. That is what I am trying to get as a survivor.' I think there is hope in that.

Mariame Kaba, “From ‘Me Too’ to ‘All of Us’: Organizing to End Sexual Violence, Without Prisons”

(thx @gowns I’m p sure I got this from one of your recent posts)

Okay, this is the kind of thing I (personally) needed to hear re: abolition. I think I react with cynicism/skepticism towards a lot of the lil IG-ready blurbs I see circulating with these vague admonishments to “rethink justice” and “rethink criminality” because to me (and perhaps my ptsd-addled aggressively-defensive trauma brain comes into play a lot here, I will own that), they come off as putting the onus on survivors to “just get over it.” Oh, you were hurt by someone? Well, consider the pain they must be suffering! They’ve experienced so much trauma and oppression under [the kyriarchy] that it drove them to hurt you. You need to be more compassionate.

A fucked-up thing, at least in my own case, is my obsessive efforts at “being more compassionate” contributed to my inability to escape abusive situations in the past. I excused my abuser’s behavior because I knew that he’d also been a victim. I sympathized with his inability to express himself in nonviolent ways: he doesn’t know any better, no one ever taught him how to do emotions. I tried desperately to empathize with his struggle to quit drinking because lord knows how impossible it is for alcoholics to access affordable, effective recovery programs. The System didn’t help us but I often felt abandoned by the countercultural community, which itself was teeming with toxicity. I felt like I had to be the therapist and the mediator; I was the one reading piles of self-help books and zines, learning nonviolent communication strategies, and trying to singlehandedly ~restorative justice~ my way to a healthy/functional relationship with someone who wasn’t putting in any effort -- and then I’d wonder what I was doing wrong! I was bending over backwards to recognize the humanity inherent in my abuser while he was isolating me from my friends and gaslighting me into madness. It’s hard for me to separate all these threads, and that’s why it’s important for me, as a survivor, to see discussions like this, about centering survivors (and their healing) without (intentionally or unintentionally) pressuring them to lead the whole community into a post-cop world by changing our perspective on “crime.” (To be clear, I am talking specifically about crimes committed against the person, not like damage or theft of property, not like mere “neighborhood interpersonal conflicts.”)

Kaba’s assertion here that often, what survivors want is acknowledgement that they were hurt, and a way to begin to heal, is completely true in my case. I never wanted revenge against my abuser. I never wanted him to be punished – prison doesn’t, uh, typically result in rehabilitation. It seemed hopeless but I just wanted him to get the help he needed to no longer drink himself to death. I wanted people to know what had happened to me, for their own protection as well as my own. And, even more hopeless-seeming, I wanted him to know that he had deeply hurt me. Like, that was one of the most crazymaking aspects of the abuse was I had experienced so much anguish while dude always insisted he’d “done nothing wrong.” For years after my escape I worked on settling into the limbo that this experience might have no resolution, that I might never feel a sense of “justice” or even meaning. I am one of the lucky ones, I think – I did eventually, unexpectedly, receive what I felt was a sincere and heartfelt apology from him. And I mean, since capitalism still exists lol, I won’t deny I’d fn love it if I could somehow be reimbursed for the $10,000+ I spent supporting him over five years (not to mention however many thousands of dollars I’ve also spent on therapy and meds for my own recovery). But reading the words from his own keyboard, receiving that validation that MY PAIN WAS REAL really was an accelerant to my healing. It wasn’t a requirement, but it certainly felt like a huge weight off my shoulders and it helped me to be able to focus on moving forward. I doubt many survivors actually get that kind of validation, though, which is why it’s so important to be not only rethinking how we deal with “criminals” or perpetrators, but also working on creating and strengthening real community support structures for survivors.

I suppose that the basic meme-ready imperative to “rethink justice” can be a good Intro to Abolition 101 for an average karen who has never before even remotely considered a world without cops. But I’ve been anti-cop since I was like 14, and since my personal background has included shitty experiences with cops and shitty experiences with “””community-based”””” “””accountability processes””” – both methods failing to produce any semblance of “justice” or “safety” regarding my interactions with abusers – I just get frustrated with fluffy big-picture-thinking language. I want people to be talking about the messy, complicated details, like in this piece. I don’t have a lot of exp with abolitionist literature so I really appreciate being steered in this direction – thx again @gowns

[thingscometogether]

Dear J --

9/20/20

I know this letter is unsolicited, not a response to anything you’ve written, but if you’ll indulge me I have some thoughts I’ve been wanting to share with someone for a long time.

J, I’m not good at losing people. I’m so terrified that people will leave me that I desperately try to hold on to them, far past the point when other people move on, past when it’s no longer healthy and it’s to my own detriment. It’s why I’m so insecure in my relationships with other people. I’m afraid I’m going to do or say something that will make them not want to be my friend anymore, not love me anymore.

It’s been 17 years and I’m only now understanding the depth of damage my parents’ divorce had on me. I was 16 when it started, and you’re still very much a kid at that age, even though I didn’t understand that then. I was the oldest still in the house and felt it was my responsibility to keep everything together for my younger siblings while everything around us was falling apart. My parents were so destructive -- would have explosive arguments in front of us, would put me in the middle of their own fights. I couldn’t stand being in my mom’s house while she was going through her own anger and grief, so I chose to live with my dad, but then she did and said some deeply hurtful things to me that left scars that still remain. And then my dad, for all the support I thought he was giving me, told me over the phone the day after I moved into my freshman dorm that he had move to another state to take a new job. Just like that. He gave me no indication he was planning to leave, even though I knew it took months to find a new position for what he does. He knew he was going to leave the whole time and never told me. He just left. Checked out. ‘I don’t want to deal with this anymore.’ See ya. Bye.

My life was a story of complete instability for a long time, so many things falling apart at different points despite my best efforts to keep them together and keep moving forward. (Add to it a burgeoning mental illness I didn’t know I had.) I walked without a steady foundation underneath my feet, not even a safety net, and I now understand that the whole toxic maelstrom was a trauma in my life.

Three and a half years ago PTSD burned through my brain like a fireball. I remember the exact moment it opened up. I was walking through a neighborhood in the city where I went to college, a neighborhood through which I’ve walked a thousand times, and all of a sudden I felt this oppressive anxiety. My lungs were constricted and I couldn’t breathe. It felt like a thousand needles were poking at my lungs just underneath my skin. It stayed that way the whole night. When I finally got to bed, I collapsed face-down on the bed and started crying deep, guttural sobs. I remained that way for 20 minutes before I finally choked up enough to get myself a glass of water. But this is the thing that’s so strange to me now: I wasn’t crying about my parents.

How do I explain? The psyche is a complicated thing.

***

The only relationship I’ve ever had was in college with a guy named ___. He was my first boyfriend, and our relationship meant a great deal to me. He was older than me, already out of college and working. It wasn’t that great of a relationship, honestly, although I didn’t know enough to know that at the time. He was patronizing and dominant; he was very good at making me feel very small. But I was with him because he provided the feeling of security I desperately needed in my life. (He was literally the physical embodiment of security, short and stocky, a wrestler; you couldn’t knock him over with a dump truck if you tried.) 

At the beginning of our relationship ___ told me he was looking to move to another city. He had interviewed for a new position, and a few weeks after we started dating he found out he got it. He would be leaving in six months. Truly naive, I didn’t see this as a problem, and I spent the next six months playing the role of supportive girlfriend and cheerleader. I sincerely believed our relationship would last, that we’d have a future together, and all we had to do was wait out my senior year until I could move there to be with him. ___ didn’t feel the same way I did and had no such intentions to stay together, but he never told me the truth about this, about how he felt, about what he didn’t want. Before, during and after our entire relationship, he was never once honest with me about his feelings.

When the day came for him to move, once again I was being left behind by a man whom I loved and depended on. I simply couldn’t lose ‘him’ again, so I held on as tightly as I could. The next eight months depleted me of every spindle of energy, emotion and spirit I had. For what I’m sure was a result of his own emotional mechanisms, he could not end our connection. We were not officially together but we were still in touch, and I desperately wanted things to work out, so I held on. 

Despite all the little things he said and did that hurt me, I convinced myself that if I just held on tightly enough for the both of us, things would work out. But my self and my condition steadily deteriorated to something well beyond mere depression. I wasn’t sleeping or eating. I wasn’t going out to see friends. I was spending my days entirely in bed, my nights mindlessly watching television eating whatever food came from a bag that I didn’t have to cook. I lost enough weight that my usually tight skinny jeans were falling off my hip bones. I couldn’t get out of my apartment enough to attend classes which, by the end of the semester, I had abandoned anyway. My life had, once again, completely fallen apart.

Shortly after the new year ___ told me he had met a new girl who he was now dating and said, quote, “I don’t think we should talk anymore.” It felt like someone had shot me in the chest with a bullet. All I could respond was “You broke my heart.” Three days later I woke up with the worst case of the flu I’ve ever had, the sickest I’ve ever been. I could no longer take care of myself. A week later I was headed home on a Greyhound bus. I had withdrawn from school, left my apartment, left my friends, left a city I loved, completely broken and a shell of myself. My spirit had died.

***

I didn’t remember any of this for a long time. If you’d asked me the details about my experience with ___, I could have told you we dated and that it ended because he moved, but I couldn’t have told you anything else. My brain had packed everything about the experience into a box and tucked it away far in the recesses of my mind in order to survive and keep going. It was too painful to remember them. But then, eight years later, that day in the city when I had the anxiety attack, I realized it was brought on by a memory I had of ___ and I in that part of the city when we dated. The memory itself was benign, but for whatever reason it was enough to release the dam waters of pain and memory, and I drowned in them. (Terribly overwrought metaphor. My apologies.)

For three years I spent every. single. day. with pain in my chest -- sometimes heavy and suffocating, sometimes an anxious tightness and pulling, sometimes an acute squeezing. I would have fierce, violent adrenaline attacks that would erupt into punching and hitting and screaming into pillows or blankets or anything I could find that I knew wouldn’t hurt myself. Then I would collapse in exhausted fits of sobs on the floor or the bed. I would become irritated by the tiniest things: high-pitched noises, too-bright lights, dog barks that would startle me, being unable to open a jelly jar and throwing it across the room. The worst of all of them was an inability to escape reminders of him in every single facet of my life, however benign and mundane: shopping trips to Target, watching the Super Bowl, pumping gas into my car. I put ___ into the context of whatever medium was in front of me: movie plots, books, songs, other people’s stories, anything. I saw a vacuum commercial on TV one night and immediately wondered what kind of vacuum ___ owned. I couldn’t escape it, and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop any of these things. It was torture, and I was miserable, but no matter how much I tried, I found no relief.

***

In my first therapy session, when I realized that I needed to see someone about my PTSD, my therapist told me that most relationship problems have something to do with our parents. My therapist said both our individual relationships with them and their relationship with each other models for us what a relationship is supposed to look like. My reaction was “What. That has nothing to do with this.” All my PTSD symptoms were about my relationship with ___. But with the help of therapy and through a lot of fucking hard work, I now understand that the original trauma in my life was my parents’ divorce, losing my family (which was my safe space) as I had known it, and losing my dad. It was so foundational in my life that I couldn’t even see it; I was walking through the trees without realizing the entire forest was on fire. Only by reliving the secondary trauma of losing ___ did all of this come into focus. (The psyche is a complicated thing.)

Mercifully, after three years that felt like a lifetime, my symptoms waned to a slight whisper of existence, and now I am left with the task of rebuilding myself. I grieve the lost time and opportunity my traumatic experiences cost me, the things I would have been able to accomplish if I had had a secure and safe foundation upon which to build my life. I miss my family as it used to be -- whole -- which I will never have again even as I have new iterations of one. I miss my dad. His leaving left a hole in my life, one I’ve spent every day since trying to fill but will never be able to because no one can take the place of one’s dad. His departure left me believing I’m not worth keeping, that no man will be ever be there for me when things get tough, and that I’m not worth fighting for.

***

This letter is much longer than I intended it to be. Thank you sincerely for reading it. I don’t expect you to know what to say in response; most people don’t. Knowing that you read it means enough.

I don’t know what this means, J, but do you remember how I said I spent every day for three years feeling constant pain in my chest? When I saw your face, before I could even register a thought, I felt a full, warm sensation in my chest, in the exact spot where I always felt the pain. It happened so quickly, so instantaneously, I could not have manufactured it. It came from somewhere other than my brain.

The spirit makes imprints on the body we’re not always conscious of. So I don’t know what it means, but it was the first time in a long time I felt something other than pain in my chest. And not just not-pain, but something good, something whole and secure. People leave imprints. Maybe that’s why I decided to tell you all this stuff.