"If the sun was always shining"
Granny looked up and down the square. “Besides, you can’t magic iron.”
“That’s very true. Not iron. Now, someone like ole Black Aliss, they could make their skin tougher than steel…but that’s just an ole legend, I expect…”
“She could do it all right,” said Granny. “But you can’t go round messin’ with cause and effect. That’s what sent her mad, come the finish. She thought she could put herself outside of things like cause and effect. Well, you can’t. You grab a sharp sword by the blade, you get hurt. World’d be a terrible place if people forgot that.”
“You weren’t hurt.”
“Not my fault. I didn’t have time.”
For me, “normal” stopped on February 24, when my therapist texted me to cancel all our appointments for the next month due to a family emergency that took her overseas. Encountering a break in my therapy routine is not particularly abnormal to me in general — I’ve abruptly stopped seeing, or have abruptly stopped being seen by, a number of therapists, for a number of reasons — but this time, because two weeks later the world as I knew it stopped functioning according to the rules I understood to be generally true, it served as a landmark of sorts, a final mile marker before the vast unknown.
Since then, because my therapist (as far as I’m aware) remains stuck on another continent, I’ve started working with another therapist. I didn’t want to, for a number of reasons which I have identified and a number which remain mysterious to me. Here are the reasons I do know:
I have had a number of bad experiences with therapists.
Many of those bad experiences have taken place while I have been introducing myself to yet another therapist.
Many of those bad experiences have been related to the way my relationships with previous therapists have ended.
Every time I introduce myself to yet another therapist, I have to run the gauntlet of a number of disclosures I push myself to make during our first session.
It is a list of disclosures I do not enjoy making to a total stranger. Loosely: my relationship with my family, my gender, my history of sex work (in detail), my history of sexual trauma (in detail), my history of emotional trauma (in detail), my history of physical trauma (in detail), my history of bad therapy experiences (in detail), the ways that all of these affect my behavior in therapy. In detail.
None of these categories are mutually exclusive. All of them are deeply personal.
Discussing them during our first session leaves me with no cover, and it lets me gauge how a therapist will react to a history that even I, frankly, have some difficulty believing most of the time. For example: Once I ran a therapist through the list of disclosures and she told me that she felt “so maternal” towards me. We did not meet again.
Discussing them is necessary, but it never gets easier.
The list keeps getting longer.
I don’t want to get better.
That last point is the real reason, every time. It’s a little simplified for the sake of phrasing — there is part of myself that always wants to get better, or rather to be better, to be the person I am but without the symptoms. But there is another part of me that believes all I am is those same symptoms. The animal part of me that dodges casual touch, that guards personal information and would prefer to slip sideways through life without forming personal connections, tells me all the time that hypervigilance is the only reason I’m still alive, that fast reactions have served me well in workplace after workplace, that my high pain tolerance makes me better and stronger and more ready for whatever disaster will strike next.
This is the nature of trauma: the belief that there will always be another disaster, that your symptoms are the only reason you have survived so far, and that without them you will die. And then when the next disaster rolls along, as it always does, it proves those beliefs right and it makes the symptoms worse and it makes them harder to shake. Trauma is self-perpetuating. It makes you afraid and isolated, and it tells you that the only way to be less afraid is to be more isolated. It takes away your sense of control, and then it takes away your ability to ever forget what it’s like to not be in control. And it tells you that thinking constantly about that — all the ways you can lose control or not have it to begin with, all the reasons you should be afraid, all the ways you could protect yourself with isolation — is the only way to keep it from happening again.
The only way to address trauma, in the long term, is head-on. If you’re reading this from your own aftermath and think that’s bullshit, by the way, you are welcome to prove me wrong. It is always possible you’ll be the first person in the history of the human mind for whom that trauma will remain forever out of sight, out of mind. It is always possible you’ll be the first person who ever manages to repress it for the rest of your life. I thought I would be, at one point, and I thought so for years. Obviously I was not correct. I thought that if I ever turned to look at the shadow in the corner of my brain, the place where I put all the experiences I could not understand as having happened to myself, I would lose control — and in the language of trauma, losing control is worse than death. I thought I would go so crazy that I would never find my way back. Obviously I was not correct about that either. (It took me a year and a half.)
With trauma, either you get into it, or it gets into you — is how Dylan put it to me once. Either you turn to face it or spend the rest of your life running, and sooner or later that stops working. The wolf only needs to catch you once. So this next sentence is for whoever is reading this and thinking that it might be true for some people, but not them, because they’re too fast or smart or strong or determined or good at repression to ever get into their trauma. In the end it isn’t really about wanting to get better or whatever people like me — who spout these bullshit platitudes and talk about processing trauma like it’s just so easy, like it’s something everyone just knows how to do — say because we’re used to talking about it to people who have no idea what it actually entails. It’s about surviving yet again. It’s about letting that last deferred degree of impact actually land. It’s about trusting the animal part of yourself to get you through it.
You couldn’t magic iron. And you couldn’t grab a sword without being hurt. If that wasn’t true, the world’d be all over the place.
Granny made herself some tea, and then boiled up the kettle again. She took a handful of herbs out of a box on the dresser, and dropped them in a bowl with the steaming water. She took a length of clean bandage out of a drawer and set it carefully on the table beside the bowl. She threaded an extremely sharp needle and laid needle and thread beside the bandage. She scooped a fingerful of greenish ointment out of a small tin, and smeared it on a square of lint.
That seemed to be it.
She sat down, and rested her arm on the table, palm-up.
“Well,” she said, to no one in particular, “I reckon I’ve got time now.”
It doesn’t always get better, but it always gets easier. One way or another, it never feels this bad forever. There is always something that comes next. There is always, someday, another time, an after. What you really have to learn is how to live in it.
—R.