"Or on the surface of a river or all over a building"
Jenny Holzer, 1980, hand-painted, enamel on metal
I love the kind of phrase that sticks with you, becomes disembodied from its original context and takes on its own situational meaning, and so I love Jenny Holzer’s work. In my internal library it occupies the shelf next to Sappho’s fragments, under whatever the Dewey decimal category is for little glimmering shards that embed themselves in your life, like the ground glass mixed into New York pavements to make them glitter. I disagree with the premise of the piece above, though: Why people respond to danger in specific ways has less to do, in my experience, with what they believe, and much more to do with the ways they’ve survived in the past. Somebody who has found it effective to become still and quiet and small will freeze; somebody who has been in situations where fleeing is the only option will have learned to take flight at the first sign of trouble, and so forth. It has nothing to do with believing that you deserve to live or anything other than nurtured reflex and basal nature.
In m life, I have spent a long time very resistant to the idea of going to therapy, for a few reasons. For one, I didn’t want to talk about or acknowledge my feelings; they were so overwhelming that the idea of facing them head-on felt like it would be an act of deliberate self-annihilation, like Sterling Archer contemplating sobriety.
(Just replace “drinking” with “repressing” and “hangover” with “emotional impact.”)
One of the other major reasons I have been therapy-averse, historically speaking, is because I don’t and have never wanted to be changed. I don’t need fixing. I love my sharp corners; I find a fierce joy in carrying my history with me in that form. But as Dylan pointed out the other day, therapy doesn’t exist to get rid of jagged edges; it’s about making sure you no longer cut yourself with them so deeply. It’s about finding out where they are and how you unconsciously move to avoid them. Ultimately, it’s about learning to live with who you are, and maybe even growing to love that person.
Despite my misgivings, I’ve been to a lot of therapy. Some of it has been helpful and some of it less so. (I stopped seeing one therapist after I realized that I probably wasn’t going to get that much out of talking to a person I mentally referred to as “I Hate You [Therapist’s Name].”) Almost all of it has been trauma therapy, which typically works well for me because it’s highly structured and focused, and that’s the only way for me to get my emotional bearings. My father, a fascinating monster, used to surf in Cornwall long before I was born. When I was a child, he would tell me about what it was like to be dragged under by a wave so tall that you couldn’t tell what way was up. “If you lay on our apartment floor,” he told me, “imagine a wave three times as high as our ceilings.” The real danger, he told me, was when you lost your sense of direction, held under and spun around like the contents of a washing machine. If you weren’t careful, you could end up mistaking down for up and swimming ever deeper. But you could always tell which way was up if you were willing to waste a few air bubbles — because they always rise. One of the main goals of trauma therapy often involves trying to reestablish a sense of safety for people who have had theirs taken from them, reestablishing that there is a surface to swim towards in the first place.
I have never felt safe, and no amount of therapy has ever changed that. There are some experiences you can have that mean that feeling safe is no longer an option, I think. When it is thoroughly disproven to you that other people are generally compassionate and will not hurt you, that you are safe in your home, that you can trust the people around you, that each day will be fundamentally quite like the day before, how can you ever believe in a concept of safety defined by those terms? The concept of safety that I’ve cobbled together is based more on having faith in my own ability to adapt to any situation than on any factor out of my control.
That definition, I think, is a fairly textbook symptom of complex PTSD (C-PTSD), a group of symptoms most commonly experienced by people who have spent an extended amount of time in an environment where they are inherently unsafe — where that is the norm. It is a profoundly unmaking experience to think you are safe and then discover otherwise. The idea of safety is so fundamental to how we understand ourselves and the world that having it taken away leaves the rest of those pillars wobbling. I’ve described it before as a rupture; there are plenty of other ways to describe it. A fault line opening underfoot. Having your ribcage blown open. Waking up in a world that looks exactly the same to everybody else as it did the day before, but that is suddenly alien to you.
I think we are all going to have some difficulty feeling safe in the months to come. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all that failed therapy, it’s this: You won’t feel this way forever. You won’t feel the way you did before, because you’ll always know what it’s like to feel this way, but you will feel better one day. You’ve survived before, and you will again.
There’s a comparison that I don’t make aloud too often, because I never know whether other people will understand what I mean: The waiting is the worst part; just go ahead and hit me, if you’re going to. I know how to deal with that, and I know I can take it. But the waiting — that’s the real torture.
Sometimes I say that and people nod along, and I know they don’t understand it quite the right way, and that’s fine. But sometimes I say it, or start saying it, and someone says, “Right? Just hit me!” and I know they are speaking the same language as me.
I recently worked with a survivor of sexual violence who was early in her healing process. She was by turns angry and despairing and frozen—and she was afraid all the time. Though she had been practicing meditation for a long time, the intensity of her emotions felt too big for her to allow them to move through her; they bottlenecked inside her. She felt panicked and stuck in the pain. She wanted to know what to do with all the feelings, how to fix them. She wanted to know how to stop hurting and how soon the pain would end.
“All I can tell you,” I said, “is that everything you’re experiencing, all the contradictory feelings and all the pain, is a normal part of the healing process. Everyone goes through it differently, and there’s no way to know how long it will last. It sucks for a while, and then gradually it gets better. But I can tell you this for sure: Every single survivor I’ve ever known has found their way through it.”
We sat in silence while she absorbed the idea of not knowing when the pain would end and having to simply trust her body and her heart to heal in their own time. At last she said, “It’s like . . . I’m sitting with a stunned bird in the palm of my hand. If I get tense and try to hurry it, it will just stay frozen. But if I’m still and patient long enough, the bird will wake up and fly away.”
This is a passage from a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while, and will presumably get to at some point in the next few weeks, by Emily Nagoski, and it made me feel seen in those long awful months when I spent my weekends crying, furiously, for ten hours at a time, feeling everything I hadn’t let myself feel for decades, waiting for it to get better. I wish I could say I did that because it was right for me, or because I was finally ready for the truth, but that wasn’t why. I did it because I had no other option, because it was the only way to keep living. I think that’s why everyone does it, in the end: You can’t keep waiting forever. Eventually, you run out of air, and then you have to start swimming.
—R.
P.S. Dylan wrote an op-ed for the New York Times and it came out on Tuesday! If you haven’t already read it, you should. It’s very good, and it’s about how you should be kind to service workers and the other people who perform functions that seem so menial to you that you’d rather not acknowledge that people are doing them at all, and also a man who prepared for lockdown by buying “a pound of weed, a pound of magic mushrooms, all the liquor I’ll need, and a thousand bullets.” (You have no idea how hard it was for me to sit on that quote until now.)