Tag Archives: trauma

Merry Christmas to you, Jeremy, in jail!: A very PTSD Christmas Eve

24 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by in christianity, Evil, kids, PTSD, Rape

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I love Christmas. I’m a Christmas nut. Perhaps the result of growing up on a Christmas tree farm. I love the music and the movies and the pine cones on the mantle and the gingerbread cookies my four year old insisted using the cowboy hat cookie cutter for. Christmas Eve is a very special day for me. But it’s also one of the 365 days a year I have at least a passing thought about my trauma. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

One of my favorite Christmas movies is “It’s A Wonderful Life” starring Jimmy Stewart (who is from my hometown, by the way. I used to volunteer at the world famous Jimmy Stewart museum) as George Bailey. There’s a scene in the movie where greedy villain Potter gleefully shouts “Merry Christmas to you, in jail!” at George. (I’m not going into the context here but I’d encourage you to watch it if you’re curious)

So, I have a Christmas Eve tradition that those of you who haven’t known trauma might find a little… odd. Creepy maybe. Depressing perhaps. I like to shout,

Merry Christmas to you, Jeremy, in jail!

Jeremy’s the one who did trauma to me(read about it here if you like). I’m an anomaly in that my rapist actually went to prison. Not many do. It’s a merrier Christmas this year and the next 40 of them for the little girls he was planning to traumatize. So, I don’t see this tradition as odd or creepy or depressing at all.

Christmas is a season of hope. What was the birth of Jesus if not the creation of a whole new hope for us all? Hope that there is something more than this fallen world. And hope, I’ve learned through my PTSD, is the stuff of life. Without it, we’re not dead, but not really alive either (read about it here if you like). My hope was resored when I recovered from PTSD. I like to think sharing my recovery on here could give other survivors in the purgatory of PTSD have some hope too.

I’m a big believer in speaking your truth, in the toxicity of silence. The time I spent singing/screaming in a riot grrl band were some of my most empowered. Maybe it’s the autism in me, but screaming is liberating for me. When the problems of life seem unsolvable, I scream and it helps. For so many years I was told be quiet about what Jeremy did to me. I was told it would ruin my career. I was told it was my fault, that I was a slut and I mustn’t advertise this. I have seen the damage this did to me and so, I don’t just speak my truth in this season of hope. I scream it.

Joy to the world, you fucker.  Joy to you, little girls. There is hope.

pretending to grill in the garden of eden

04 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by in love, PTSD, Rape, Uncategorized

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I have lost some weight recently. A goodly amount, I think it’s fair to say. Only ten more pounds to go. I weighed 150 pounds nine years ago when my trauma began and by 2013 I was 224 pounds. I ate for a lot of reasons. I’ll tell you about it some time.

Today I am thinking about a picture of me grilling. Well, pretending to grill. It was 2007 and I had left my first husband and was just starting medical school. I was young. So damned young. 28 to be precise. I just knew my soul mate awaited me out there. And I would of course find him on the internet. A single mom going to med school doesn’t have time to go out, so she would of course take advantage of online dating. But, I needed a profile picture. This was before the advent of selfies and not too many of us had a gaggle of carefully angled, flattering pictures of ourselves lying around in our smart phones. I didn’t even have a smart phone. So I asked my mother to take a picture of me.

I wanted to look natural so I said, take a picture of me in the kitchen cooking spaghetti. (Because everyone has a picture of them in full make up smiling as they cook spaghetti. So natural. And maybe I could use it if I ever decided to sell my own brand of jarred spaghetti sauce. Kill two birds with one stone. Bam) Unfortunately, the lighting in the kitchen was bad so we went out on the back patio of my little ranch house in Erie. Unsure of how to keep up the natural theme, I went for the grill. Here, I said, take a picture of me pretending to grill.

And so here I am today, looking at a picture of me with my hair perfectly done, pink lip gloss shining, smiling with my mouth and my eyes (so it wouldn’t look fake. Even though it was). Holding a large grilling spatula in my hand, the cold grill lid opened. No sign of my special needs toddlers to be seen. None of the dark circles I’d soon earn staying up late studying. The flat stare of depression that had occupied my face most of my life, the fear of the abuse I’d lived under, the wide eyes of my mania, absent. I’m beaming with hope in that picture. An endless stream of possibility before me. Faith that I will have a wonderful life. (I did work in the Jimmy Stewart Museum in high school, after all).

I do have a good life now. Nine years later. I have been blessed and I have fought for it. I certainly do not have the life I imagined then, when I was young. How many of us do? I have walked through my darkness these years and come out on the other side.

I am now almost to the weight I am in that picture. And as I have dropped each pound, run each mile, I have thought, this is a victory over my trauma. I have reclaimed my mental health and now I am reclaiming my physical. He can’t take this from me. I am leaving behind my trauma pound by pound. I am escaping a body that is not really mine. Getting back to being myself after so long.

But now I am close to the weight in the picture, to wearing the clothes I wore then, all of which I have saved in anticipation of this day. And I look in the mirror and I have not returned to looking like myself at all. I am not the girl at the grill.

My stomach has gone from that of a 28 year old whose had 2 kids to that of a 37 year old whose had 4 and gained and lost a lot of weight. My face has crow’s feet and laugh lines it didn’t then. And my eyes don’t smile the same. They’ve seen too much to smile so damned naïve. They smile not with happiness, but with the joy that comes from knowing sadness.

I’ll be honest with you, I wish my body looked like it did back then. I’d love to be a good feminist and not feel that way. I know I shouldn’t subconsciously convey such attitudes to my sweet daughter. But, life’s a process, okay? And I wish I was a little firmer, a little perkier. Less stretch marks. Less lines. But I don’t wish my eyes were perkier. I don’t wish these past nine years had been different. Don’t wish I could return to being naïve.

I’ve never believed in regret. It’s never made sense to my logical autistic brain. If you can’t do something over, why would you possibly sit around thinking about what might have been? It is what it is, I often say. Life is what it is.

I have no regrets about choosing the medical school I did. About pursuing the awful man I did. About turning him in as I did. Never have, never will. But I have been continuing to labor under the false idea we get after trauma. The idea that keeps us from moving on, that locks us into PTSD if we believe it enough. The idea that we can make this trauma not matter. That it can become a minor footnote in our life story. That we can go back to being who we were before. Before. Before *it*. You know, that event that doesn’t matter anymore. Even though it’s the yardstick we now measure every accomplishment by. Constantly claiming victory. Telling yourself, living well is the best revenge. Tallying up everything you have that your perpetrators never will. Telling yourself, I’m not like those whiny survivors who blame all their problems on their trauma. I’m different. I have overcome.

The truth is, your life was divided the day the trauma began. There was before the trauma and after. And it drives you mad. You just want that damned line erased. You want your life whole again. A beautiful continuous flowing story arc. With twists and turns and dips and peaks, but unbroken. But that fucking chasm, fault, break, schism, crack, gully, canyon, whatever you call it, it’s still there. Won’t budge. It’s not something you can remove. Because it’s not something. It’s the absence of something. You can try and try to fill it, but it’s still there. Go ahead, dump in food, pills, booze, drugs, sex, work, reckless driving, overspending, self injury, reality television, starvation, obsessive relationships, obsessive religion, hours of staring blankly at walls… It’s still there. Fill it til it overflows. It’s still there.  It. Will. Always. Be. There.

The Garden of Eden will not be restored. The fallen world remains.

And that’s okay. Well, it’s not *really* okay. It’s trauma. And trauma’s hell. But… it is what it is. It doesn’t have to be okay. It just is. And you have to learn to accept that it is. Over. And over. And over. You build up a life on the other side of it. You peer down into it and thank God you haven’t fallen into it. That you’re here. Looking back at it as you run, mile by mile.

I swallowed a vitamin yesterday. A really big vitamin. I’ve always been good at swallowing pills. So are my kids. Family skill. (baggy esophagus maybe? we’re not the most coordinated family so it’s certainly not that we have an especially athletic swallowing mechanism). The thing is, Jeremy raped me a lot of ways but the scariest one was the oral rape. Because I thought I would die. He would suffocate me and count to ten slowly and I thought he might just hold me there long enough to kill me and I’d never see my babies again. I felt so utterly powerless. I was so utterly powerless. He would tell me he was training the gag mechanism out of me.

It didn’t work and ever since then, I have had trouble swallowing certain things like big pills. Vitamins in particular I guess since he had me on a vitamin regimen of sorts. It wasn’t something I ever wanted to deal with. I  just took gummy vitamins. But yesterday my husband said, these are really good vitamins, maybe you could try and see. And so I did. I put this rather large vitamin and my probiotic capsule and my two medications in my mouth and took a big gulp of water and threw my head back. And they all went down. Down the hatch.

I felt so victorious. I thought, I wish I could tell someone. I was so happy that he’d now taken one less thing from me. I thought about telling people, though, and how I would need to explain that whole oral-rape-until-you-suffocate thing. And then I remembered the whole orally-raped-until-I-suffocated thing. And I felt so powerless. So utterly powerless. There in my living room, my babies’ toys strewn on the floor, the fireplace I love, the pictures of our wedding and our first communion at the Easter vigil and… I felt so terrified and so sad and… I thought to myself, a really awful thing happened to me. A freaky, awful thing. A thing no one deserves. That happened. It happened to me. And it can’t be undone.

The moment passed quickly. In a matter of seconds it was done and I was back to my life. To my beautiful fireplace and crazy bubalink babies and my devoted husband and I stumbling through Catholicism. And now I was doing all that with the benefit of a wonderful multivitamin.

You tell yourself, you need to stop running *from* the trauma and start running *towards* the good things. And the truth is, I do have runs where I think about the healthy habits I’m giving my kids and going on hikes with my husband, maybe learning tennis or kickboxing. How good it feels to be lighter on my feet, to get around easier, to know I’m probably going to dodge the bullet of diabetes type 2 and keep the arthritis at bay as long as I can. But sometimes I think of how far I’ve come. Sometimes I think of him, of her (the head of my medical school),  of the sickness in their hearts that makes them do the things they do. Of the happiness they tried to deny me.

They did, in a way. They took from me the naïve happiness I had then. They put a fault in my life. Made it into a before and after. But I have made a home on the other side. I am not hanging off the edge. I am not in the darkness of it. My happiness has given way to joy and wisdom and a greater love than I could have known. The fault is there to stay. And that’s okay. Well, it’s not okay. But it is. It is what it is. And after all, it really is a wonderful life.

I have slept in the bed with evil

09 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by in autism, Evil, PTSD, Rape, Sin

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I am wearing all black today. I am in mourning. I am not going to make a joke about my goth days in high school. I am not going to compare the title of this post to that awful made-for-TV movie from the nineties starring Tori Spelling, “Mother May I Sleep with Danger.” This is no joke. This is not a nightmare we will wake up from tomorrow, a bipolar fugue we will not remember when it ends and we find ourselves far from home. It may be the 1930s.

I do not use the word evil lightly. A lot of people have referred to Hillary Clinton as evil in this election cycle. I am as big a critic of Bill Clinton’s policy and Hillary’s record on free trade, her foreign policy, and her “super predator” comments as anyone. But she’s hardly evil.

For four months, I slept in the bed of a man who can rightly be called evil. A man who loved raping and torturing little girls above all else, who admired Hitler, who raped me again and again and again and threatened to kill my children. A man who disturbed even the seasoned federal judge and the FBI agent who were involved in his case. He was a medical student on his way to becoming a doctor. Nobody suspected. None of us even knew such evil existed as it all came out, certainly not that our fellow medical student possessed the evil.

Trauma changes you. It changes your relationship with yourself, with your family and friends, with God, with the world itself and every person you encounter day by day. They say the fundamental experience of trauma is the feeling you have been abandoned. By the people you love, by the ones who were supposed to protect you, and by God himself.

My Ordeal changed me in so many ways but one of the worst was the knowledge of just what evil exists in our world. Evil I did not know existed. And I had not lived a sheltered life to that point. I was not naïve. And yet I was. My fear now is that we as a country are being naïve. Despite our very violent history.

We cannot underestimate the possibilities of this new world. We cannot afford to be naïve. I do not know what will happen but I know it could be very, very bad.

A few years ago we were at a festival at a place called City Island in Harrisburg. Our three sons went off on their own while my husband and Princess (still a baby) and I stayed and chatted with some friends. Eventually two of our sons came back, but not the third. Our legally blind, autistic son was not with them. They told us they’d had some kind of fight with him and decided to leave him. They were too young to know not to do this. Too naive.

My husband and I split up to cover the island looking for him. And as I looked in booths and the dense woods that framed the island, pushing Princess in the stroller, terror went through my body. My mind went to Jeremy. To the people he talked to on the internet who also loved raping and torturing children. Who sent him images of their horrific acts, recorded in stills and movies. The ones presented at trial that took any remaining innocence from anyone in that courtroom. I cried as I looked. I pictured what might happen to him. Things that are worse and more common than we allow ourselves to believe. I didn’t want to scare Princess, but I could not hold back the tears. My husband found him and I ran up to him, shaking and crying and finding it hard to bring the oxygen into my lungs.

I do not know how so many people at Penn State stood by while little boys were raped and did little or nothing. I will never comprehend that. The coaches, the janitor, Mike McQuery whatever the hell he was. I could have been killed. My children could have been killed. I laid down my body. I laid down my mind. I lost seven years of my life to PTSD. So did my children and husband, lost seven years of me being truly present in our lives. I have no regrets and never have. Not for a second. But I know the men of Penn State are much more common than people like me. And this election confirms it.

Evil can flourish, slowly, insidiously. I see friends who loved Bernie so much now so glad they voted Trump. I can see the mainstream Republicans now falling in line or being eliminated (we’re assured by Trump’s people the are making “a list” of “his enemies”). I can see the inevitable persecution of journalists and violent crackdown on peaceful protests. Hate crimes and sexual assault rates rising (if you don’t believe me, look at what happened in the aftermath of Brexit). Muslims forced to wear badges identifying them (yes, Trump said this).

You think I exaggerate. You think this couldn’t be the 1930s. And I hope you’re right. But I know in my bones you probably aren’t.

God bless and protect the Union.

 

Lemons and sugar in the snow

31 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in marriage, movies, my awesome husband, PTSD, Rape

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My husband and I are trying to get out and meet new people, to try to make some friends. “We’re putting ourselves out there,” I said to him as we discussed it the other night, “so to speak. It’s kind of like dating. We’re trying to find another couple to be besties with so we have to be more social and put some feelers out.” He looked a little annoyed, or maybe mildly disgusted. Sort of like the face you make when your stomach is slightly off and you’re trying to figure out if it’s going to pass or if it’s the beginning of a full on GI issue.

I took the first step for us (just as I did back when we first met) and found a get together for us with other 30-something couples with kids at a nearby pub. It’s other Catholic couples so I figured I could pique my hubs’ interest with it and I was right (this is, in fact, even more complicated than dating as it turns out. It’s like I’m a matchmaker *and* I’m dating. This analogy is getting a little cumbersome). I checked with our babysitter and she was free the night of the cas’ soiree so I entered it onto our family scheduling app and we were all set (It wasn’t actually that simple because nothing in our chaotic life is that simple, but we’ll leave it at that).

A few days later, we were driving home from our Saturday evening marital therapy appointment where we’d spent an hour making a family genogram (don’t ask), and my mind began to wander as my hubs drove the minivan down 376 as Soldier Boy made explosion noises behind me and the Baby tried to decide if he was going to cry or fall asleep. I started thinking about what I would wear when we went out to the pub in a couple weeks. I’ve been losing weight lately and I thought of the clothes I haven’t worn in a while that will now fit. I mentally assembled an outfit from med school and paired it with a pair of boots I recently bought. I pictured my hubs and I alone in my car (not the damn minivan, thank you very much) heading out and what nice compliment he might pay me. And then I thought of what I might say to him.

“Do you remember this outfit? Remember the last time I wore it?”

The answer is not our honeymoon or our first date or anything other such romantic thing. The answer is actually that I bought this outfit at the Millcreek Mall in February of 2011 while we were in Erie for the trial of Jeremy Noyes. The man who put me through my Ordeal.

I did not think of this moment, of telling him this, with sadness or anger. I actually thought of it with a slight small on my face.

Jeremy’s trial started on February 14th. It was my hubs Eric and my first Valentine’s Day as a couple. We spent the week up in cold snowy Erie. Jeremy had fired his attorney and chosen to represent himself. He subpoenaed me to testify. I’m not sure which is worse: having to be questioned by your rapist in federal court, or all the time before it that you spend imagining what it will be like. We spent the whole week in Erie, waiting for it to be my turn to testify. Eric was allowed to sit in on the trial but I was not since it could affect my testimony when I was called to the stand later on.

I only packed one suit but I thought I might need a second if my testimony took more than one day. So, as Eric sat taking in images and words at that trial no person would ever want to, evil hard to imagine, I went to the mall. I bought more than I needed, more than I should have. I bought a really, really pretty top. A flowy translucent top with corals and browns and turquoisie blues in a muted floral design like the impressionists, Manet and Monet and all that. It was so pretty. The trial was so ugly. So I bought it even though I was broke. I’m not sorry I did.

We stayed at a nice hotel that the government said they would reimburse us for. We went down to the nice restaurant in the nice hotel one night. I don’t remember which night. The night before I testified? The night after? The night in between? (I was right, it was two days of testimony so I really *did* need that second suit. Not everything else, but, the suit yes)

I don’t remember which night it was but I remember getting ready to go downstairs and making him laugh. I remember sitting there in that nice restaurant in that nice hotel in that pretty flowy top eating a lovely meal with my lovely fiancé. I remember he ordered us dessert and we shared it with two forks and it tasted better than I thought food could. I remember laughing. I remember his eyes. His mouth when the corners turned up. We were still there. In Erie. At a horrible stomach turning trial of a sociopath child predator. We were still there, but for a night, it was a little less. A little less there. There, but better.

And so, almost six years later, when I sat in the mocha colored minivan, a wedding and two kids and a hell of a lot else later, I thought of wearing that top again with the corners of my mouth turned up. It didn’t make me think of my trauma or sitting in that courtroom as Jeremy said the worst things imaginable to me. It made me think of that night. Of that respite, of the soft lighting and the attentive waiter and the clean linen table cloth on the little round table we sat at together. It made me think of all the years and all the hell he’s stood by me through. Of this most unusual life we’ve had together. Of the sweetness that comes with the bitters.

We had watched a documentary about a Holocaust survivor the night before. Made by a man Eric had made films with in another life. And the survivor in the movie told a story of starvation, of being moved from camp to camp. And on one train ride they all looked so malnourished these village women threw food onto the train, whatever they had with them from the market. And so, they had things like flour and sugar and lemons. And at one stop, a man got snow off the ground and brought it on and they made lemon ice with the lemons and sugar. The survivor in the movie said how much he loved lemon ice for the rest of his life. How could that be, I’d asked my husband. Eric had made a lot of films with survivors and he said, yes, he’d heard that many times before. He said, the lemon ice was the first thing he’d eaten after starving for so long, why wouldn’t he love it now? I said, “I guess if I was more like him I could take fish oil capsules.” But I can’t.

Jeremy made me take fish oil capsules. I can’t take them now. I can’t even take vitamins. The body remembers. The esophagus remembers. Remembers the other things he forced down my throat, remembers not breathing, not knowing if he would ever let me breathe again. Eric says I should try to overcome my aversion to fish oil and I say, No. I have overcome a fuck of a lot in the past eight years. I’m just gonna take fish oil as a loss. I’m gonna pass on conquering that one.

But sitting in that mocha minivan, I see the fish oil capsules are not my lemon ice. The flowy top is my lemon ice. I see now how he could love lemon ice. The joy and the beauty and the bodily memory of quite a different kind.

Life is not simple. Is not, yes or no. Good or evil. Would that Eric and I hadn’t spent our first Valentine’s Day together in gray snowy Erie at the trial of a madman. But there was beauty there too. There were lemons and sugar in that snow too. There too.

Go For It

15 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in Evil, love, PTSD, Rape, Uncategorized

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I stepped out into the cold January air, the first real 5 degree-wind blowing-makes your face hurt winter day of the year. It was Martin Luther king day. The kids were off school and we’d gone to visit my parents for the day. I took Soldier Boy, The Ax, Princess and Our New Baby. Poobah and Tree stayed behind to work on the house. It was a nice day, admiring the newly remodeled kitchen my mother finally had after dreaming of it for forty years and getting to meet my sister’s new boyfriend, the chef. I caught them up on all the goings on at our house and my mother shared the latest from the various relatives. We talked politics a bit (Go Bernie! was the consensus). My mom offered me a nice crockpot too big for her empty nest and a Keurig the wrong color for her new kitchen, both of which I excitedly accepted. She told me to go through the old board games because they were throwing out whatever I didn’t want. I scored some Gumby Colorforms (remember those?), VCR Clue II, and Go For It, my favorite 1980s board game centered on accumulating red convertibles, hot tubs, and ski chalets: the good life, eighties style.

Our afternoon was wrapping up. The kids were getting cranky and it was time for us to go. So I gathered up an armful of the dusty board games and headed out to my car. And as I stepped out of my parents newly remade kitchen onto the familiar patio, the bitter cold air hit my face and suddenly I was in Erie.

Erie. January 2008. Class just let out and we’re walking to his apartment through the snow. The crunchy kind with a thin layer of ice on top that your foot catches on for a moment before sinking in. They say the Inuits have a hundred different words for snow, don’t they? (I don’t know if it’s true but it’s what they say anyway) I could not normally tell you much about what kind of snow there was on any particular day of my life years ago. I am not an Inuit of old, surviving in the Arctic north. Snow is not something of great importance to me. But those days, those memories, are not normal memories. They are not stored in the circuitry of my brain as normal memories are. And I am not now remembering that day. I am reliving it. I am there.

We are walking to his apartment to study and eat lunch. And maybe when we’re done he’ll rape me too. My stomach is in a knot. My chest is aching. My limbs are heavy and slightly numb. Not from the cold but from The Ordeal. My head is there but not there. How do you force yourself to walk to a violent sadist’s apartment? You will it. It is survival, moral spiritual survival. Protecting the young. You must. And so you do. Your will tells your legs to move and they do. They feel heavy and numb like they don’t belong to you but rather someone else. Because they must. For surely you would never go with this man so seemingly cooperative. Surely this isn’t happening. But it is.

I am afraid of what he will do when we get there. I am more afraid of the plans he has for his other victims, that I won’t find a way to stop him. He makes my whole being nauseous. Not just my stomach but my muscles and my head and my skin. My myocytes and epithelial cells. My heart and my spirit. Helpless. I am helpless with him. If I cannot stop what he has planned then I’m hopeless too. Powerless. Utterly alone in the universe. That is how it is in his apartment. Just me and him. Only one soul in the room. Mine. And he is trying to take it from me. His apartment has become the whole universe. At once a vast expanse and a vacuum. Just me and him. Nothing else, no one else.

I make him lunch and he talks about nutrition and he talks his madness all over me, coating me in its sticky thick tack. Cortisol is coursing through me. My pulse is quick. I am hypervigilent. I must be able to detect any changes to his mood so I can prepare for what’s next. The worst thing is to be caught off guard. Defenseless. I must cut the apples just so, but I must pay attention to the nuance of his speech: the tone of his voice, the rate, the cadence, the choice of words. His body language too. The way he carries himself, the tone of his muscles, the subtle change of expression on his face. He is a sociopath so he rarely shows anger. It is not so simple as that.

The irony of this is that he has brainwashed me into believing he can read me so easily, that he is always watching me and can tell when I’m lying and what I’m really thinking. He tells me he has researched it all thoroughly, how to tell if someone is lying. The direction their eyes move when answering questions, the rate their heart beats, the tone of their muscles. (But he really was terrible at it. I fooled him. He went down. He lost his life as he knew it. Why? Because he wasn’t hypervigilent. Why? Because he wasn’t afraid. He was arrogant. My fear saved me really. And allowed me to stop him. It saved my life and my soul.)

It pressed this moment into my memory too. This moment I am reliving now eight years later. In an instant. Yes all of this comes and passes in just a few seconds. And then just as suddenly I am back in 2016 packing up my car, hurrying to get back to Our New Baby before he starts fussing in his car seat.

I’m free of my prison. I have been PTSD free for a year now. I have my moments. I have my hours. But I am no longer trapped inside. I am free and I can now appreciate the fear for what it did for me then. It saved my soul. It stopped a sadist. And now I am free to live the good life, 2016 style.

We Liked You Better When You Didn’t Talk So Much: Life After PTSD (a.k.a. after your fasciotomy for compartment syndrome of the soul)

24 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by in doctors, empathy, kids, outrage, PTSD, residency

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Compartment Syndrome with Fasciotomy Procedure

It’s been four months since I recovered from my seven year bout of PTSD. (See previous entries of my blog for real time coverage of the recovery process). My coworkers don’t really know I had PTSD (although I did give a talk on PTSD and tell them the reason I was giving it was because I had it, I think they either weren’t paying attention or blocked it out). They just know that all of a sudden a few months ago I stopped being so quiet and agreeable all the time. At first they thought it was great. I’d blossomed. Developed self-confidence, gotten a backbone. They assumed it to be the result of residency training. But as the months have gone on and I’ve become more and more my true self, they’ve started commenting to me they miss the old quiet me.

I’m a little too opinonated, they say. Talk a little too much now. I’m too hard on the interns. I’m angry, they say. Well folks, what I really am is … me. The real me not suffocating under PTSD. The real me not constantly trying to avoid the bad things I think are coming. The real me who isn’t convinced I’m going to get kicked out of the medical profession if I let on to who I am.

I am indeed angry at times. Unapologetically angry. Righteously angry. Old testament angry. Jesus turning over the money changers table angry. Malcolm X I’m-done-begging-for-crumbs angry. No apologies.

I am hard on the interns. Hard on them like my senior residents were hard on me. I thank God my seniors were so hard on me. Guess what? We’re training them to be doctors. We’re not at the brownie jamboree seeing how many friendship bracelets we can collect. They’re here to learn to be excellent doctors: thorough, hard-working, devoted, compassionate physicians who think things through and can communicate and lead. Some interns need more nurturing than others, but even the most fragile (hi, I had freaking PTSD when I was an intern. I was about as fragile as they come) needs to be held to a high standard. We owe it to them and every patient they will ever treat.

I do talk a lot and have a lot of opinions. It’s not that I have a lot of opinions that bothers them though. I haven’t met many doctors who don’t have a lot of opinions they feel you must be dying to hear all about. What bothers them is that my opinions disagree with theirs. I don’t find their sexist jokes funny or even acceptable. I’m really such a drag, I know. But I’m 36 and I have a daughter and I’m done tolerating that crap.  The male residents are assertive while the female ones are called aggressive and told to tone it down for the same behavior. The male residents really hold the line and don’t take shit while the female residents are told to calm down and lighten up when we do the same thing. To hell with that.

It’s possible I’m a little overly zealous with the assertiveness and rightous anger right now as I delight in my recovery, but can you blame me? PTSD is hell. You’re not dead but you’re only technically alive. I’ve got seven years of pent up thoughts, words, feelings, and actions here.

In my defense, it’s not all anger and thunder bolts around me. I have a lot of joy. I’ve made a lot of progress on forgiveness (entry on that to come). I’m just not PTSD Barbie anymore, putting all my energy into pleasing everyone and always agreeing and going along and not complaining and working myself to exhaustion because I’m afraid everything’s going to fall apart at any moment.

My husband and I met when I was in the thick of the PTSD so he’s had a little bit of a switch-a-roo pulled on him. He always wished I’d be more assertive and talk more, but , as the saying goes, be careful what you wish for.

The thing that’s frustrating about all of this for me is that I’ve been given this amazing gift. PTSD was hell. I can’t tell you how much of the past seven years I had spent wishing I could die. Knowing I couldn’t kill myself because of my kids and asking God why he would put me in that position. The blackness inside of you. The expansive emptiness that feels like it will break you apart. The loneliness you feel like you just can’t bear. And there’s no end in sight. There’s no hope. The fear. Every noise makes your heart race. Do you know how many times your pager goes off a year as a resident? Do you know what it’s like to feel terrifed every time it does just because of the sound it makes? To not be able to trust anyone, not even your husband. To not let yourself open your heart to your kids because you’re expecting them to be gone any minute. To go on psych med after psych med after psych med looking for an answer and all they do is make you tired and remind you you’re crazy.

And I finally escape all that and the people I work with, the physicians I work with, they tell me they like me better the way I was. So, you’ll have to excuse me if I’m unapologetic. If I relish giving them a piece of my mind when it comes to what is right. Silence does not protect us, it fills us with its void until the tensile strength of the matter of us gives out. It’s like compartment syndrome of the soul. You must release the pressure surgically and when you do, sometimes things burst forth and get messy. But it’s the only hope of saving the limb. The real me has come back out and I couldn’t stuff her back in to the old necrotic shell even if I wanted to. And I most definitely do not want to.

New Year New You! (How Ima Got Her Groove Back)

10 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by in empathy, kids, love, medicine, my awesome husband, parenting, PTSD, Rape

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I found this idea on Pinterest for keeping a jar where you write down happy/funny things that happen throughout the year and put them in this jar. I believe it advised a big jar (with the assumption being you’ll have lots of good things happening I suppose). You open the jar up at the end of the year and read over all the little happy moments you otherwise might have forgotten. The woman who’d pinned it had written it was a “super cute idea !!!!” and that she was definitely going to try it.

I pitched the idea to Poobah and he liked it (although he didn’t call it super cute or exclaim). So I took the large clear plastic teddy bear shaped animal cracker jar and dumped the animal crackers out into a bag (they’ve been sitting uneaten in the jar for 3 months so why not keep them uneaten in a different container a little longer) and wrote 2015 on the bear’s tummy with a Sharpy.

As I did so, I thought, why only write down the happy times? Why not the bad times too? It was January first and I was heading to work soon. I wasn’t very cheery.

But it wasn’t just working on a holiday that made me think that. I’d been bogged down in PTSD and working crazy hours and stress and financial problems and family discord. Bogged down for a while.

I felt like there wouldn’t be much to put in the jar.

I said goodbye to my husband and kids and headed to the hospital. Holidays can be slow because people put off going to the hospital on a holiday if they can, but it’s been a particularly busy year for hospital medicine because of all the influenza. I expected I’d be fairly busy and hoped it wouldn’t be any worse than that. I hoped no patients crashed. I hoped for some time to think.

Earlier in the day, Poobah and the kids and I had gathered in the living room around our old school fake Christmas tree (the kind that really do look fake and aren’t “pre-lit” and don’t have green concentrated pine scent aroma sticks discretely hung on a strategically chosen back branch) to continue a tradition my sister Nicci and I had started when I was still in high school. Every New Years we make predictions for the upcoming year and then the following year we read over them and see who got the most right. We also talk about things that happened over the past year that were unexpected.

We’d each made three predictions but I wanted some time before I went and started the admissions to write down a few more and think about the year ahead.

I started writing and this is what came out:
I need to move forward. But these next 6 months are going to be exhausting. I’m not sure what to do. I wish it were a simpler tale. I wish I could figure it out.
Where did it begin? Before I was born? If it did, then what?

We all seek to be an individual with self-esteem
There are those who stand in the way
And so we assert to be ourselves in maladaptive ways
Because of the innate drive towards maturity

Malcolm has something special in him. Malcolm could change the world.
He said he wants to be an astronaut so he can change the world.

Mies has this amazingly unique combination of traits.

They’re extraordinary.

Maybe I am too.

And with those four little words, I got my groove back. I didn’t just get my groove back from before Jeremy Noyes traumatized me seven years ago or before my medical school rubbed salt in the spiritual wound and made it stick. I mean I got my groove back from Way back.

It’s a process, of course, but it is set in motion. It is inevitable. The rate limiting step of the reaction has been overcome and the chemical cascade is in full swing.

I’ve spent most of my precious little free time since then wading through shame and heartache, cleaning out every dark corner of the past 35 years. It’s amazing all the things I’ve been ashamed of over the years. It’s amazing how ashamed I still felt now, decades later, simply writing out the words different people have said to me. I’ve done that sort of thing before, sitting and trying to process bad memories. But the difference this time is that I finally believed that I didn’t deserve any of it. I finally believed I’m extraordinary and so deserving of love and safety and joy, it’s ridiculous.

The words lost their power over me. Those people lost their power over me.

There are things I’ve done in my life I’m ashamed of and I sat with those too. Some of them I reminded myself I had no control over (feeling ashamed I “let” myself be raped, for instance), some I decided are just inevitable mistakes of youth, and some I had to forgive myself for. I regret very little as a general rule, but the things I’ve done that have hurt people, really hurt them, I do regret, and I had to forgive myself and let go of the shame.

Another inevitable piece of it is that I am losing the extra weight I have clung to for many years. It’s time to let it go and so I am. I feel hungry but it doesn’t distress me because it’s what’s supposed to be.

I’ve recovered from political amnesia and am reading feminists and progressives and anarachists again. I’m engaging with people about things that matter. I’m throwing a hundred evolving ideas out to my husband on everything our future holds after we graduate this June.

It’s not that I’m becoming a whole new person. It’s that I’m returning to being myself. I’m doing what we are all made to do: becoming more myself and finding what it is I am supposed to be doing to make the world a better place.

I look at my two year old daughter and see she’s there. She’s got her groove on. She knows what she thinks and wants and feels and she lets you know it. She’s engaged with everything and everyone she comes in contact with. She’s alive. She’s in the flow.

I want to do everything I can to keep her there as much as possible. I want to help all my kids find their flow. And anyone else I can. Because that’s what life is. But I see now, it’s not selfish to enjoy having my own groove on. Quite the opposite. Flow begets flow.

And so, the other day, I took a little green slip of paper next to the empty animal cracker jar and I wrote the first memory of 2015: January 1st Ima got her groove back. (our kids call me Ima. I’ll tell you about it some time)

This is for my husband now: My name is Elizabeth Spaar and 2015 is the year I got my groove back

The surprising mathematics of shame

05 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by in christianity, empathy, kids, love, medicine, parenting, PTSD, Rape

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I came home from working a 24 hour shift and thought, I should relax and watch something funny before I head for my nap. I have a tendency not to follow through on such intentions very well. I tend to wind up watching a documentary about something heavy instead. My therapist Dr. O said my main hobby in life seems to be thinking and that has its benefits and its drawbacks. One of the drawbacks being my insomnia largely caused by my unending pondering. So I knew logically that I really should put on something lighthearted to unwind and then go take my nap, but logic rarely dictates what we do in this world and I am no exception.

In my defense, I did go to the Search area of Netflix and begin to type in “Sex and the City.” I can’t be blamed for Netflix suggesting I might enjoy the TED talks on the topic of sex and love.

The first talk was “eh.” It was about parenting taboos I didn’t exactly find earth shaking. Maybe because I entered parenting via the special needs route. I was doing calculus when the parents giving the talk were still learning to count. Not to say their talk didn’t have value. Sesame Street has a lot of value, for instance. But I digress….

The second talk was different. It was by Brene’ Brown, a PhD in social work, and it was titled “The Power of Vulnerability.” She talked about the most basic human need being connection. She said it was the meaning of life. She talked about the thing that keeps us from it too: shame.

She described shame as the fear of being disconnected. Our fear that if people really knew us, they would reject us.

She said something else too: the less you talk about shame, the more you have.

She said the key to happiness in life was vulnerability. Being willing to sit with uncertainty, taking risks worth taking.

She said that the difference between people who feel loved and connected in this life and those who don’t is whether or not you feel worthy of being loved and connected.

She said we numb vulnerability with food and buying stuff and drinking and medication but when we do, we also numb joy and happiness and make ourselves more and more miserable.

She said more in 15 minutes that is worthwhile than I learned in four years of medical school. My husband says I’m exagerating a bit when I say that. I’m prone to exageration, so I guess I’ll rephrase: what she said launched an epiphany for me that will make me a better doctor and a better person.

You see, PTSD is about disconnection and not being able to be vulnerable and numbing and shame. And shame. I’ve been trying to figure a way out of the disconnection and numbing and avoiding vulnerability piece. It didn’t occur to me that the key could be shame. And it didn’t occur to me there might be a simple mathematical solution:

Talk about the shame –> less shame

I always thought it was the other way around. Maybe that’s why therapy hasn’t done a lot for me over the years. Maybe.

So I’m on a mission to talk about my shame. Every last bit of it. Everyone has it except for psychopaths, so there’s no shame in admitting you feel ashamed.

I had a grrl band when I was in college called Dum(b). Don’t ask about the parentheses. I named the band Dumb because we were a grrl band giving voice to women’s and girls voices (dumb used to mean mute in addition to meaning stupid FYI). I used to be an oral historian trying to give voice to marginalized people (thank you Howard Zinn, God rest his soul). But it’s time to look at myself now.

I need to talk about the things I’ve kept silent so long. The things I have tried to stuff down with food, to forget in the rush of infatuation, have tried to bury under a pile of things bought with credit cards. The things that have kept me from being fully present, that have made me afraid to be vulnerable.

These things that keep you from being alive. The opposite of life.

When I look at my children it is so easy to see that they are extraordinary just as they are. So easy to know in my bones they don’t deserve to feel shame. What I have come to realize is that I need to feel that way about myself.

I have spent the past seven years surviving. Surviving for them, because I had to. But survival isn’t life. It’s a holding pattern. I need to live and not just for them. I need to be fully alive again for me too. Because I deserve to be alive and joyful and self-confident and full of plans and hope and possibility.

Possibilty. It’s been so long since life seemed to hold real possibility.

I went to sleep for a few hours last night during a lull in admissions for the first time in so long. I prayed and thanked God for what the Holy Spirit has revealed to me through a TED talk. And then I stopped thinking and went to sleep. Because I deserve it.

But still it falls

30 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by in parenting, PTSD

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I haven’t written an entry in a while. I was reading a lot on PTSD–very specifically, testimonies of people who recovered from PTSD– and realized I’m not who I used to be seven years ago. And when I write, it is not really me writing so much as it is my disease. This disease which has infected my body and mind and heart and soul. This disease which has taken away the best of me and hidden it deep beneath its darkness and claws. And why would I want to give this awful disease a blog.

A lot happens in seven years, in any seven years of any given person. And my seven years are no exception. And I have told myself it is these things, these hundreds other things that come into our lives in any seven year period, that have changed me. Not the one thing that has. But it is not these things; it is *the* thing. That one thing. The ordeal, I call it. My trauma.

My husband is getting his house ready to sell, the house he’s had since his son was a baby. And he tells me about the boxes of old cards and letters and pictures he goes through as he packs up a decade and a half of memories. I don’t save those things, I tell him. That’s odd, he comments. I don’t save the boys drawings either, I remind him. (He’s the one who does) You’re right, he says.

They could be gone. Gone at any moment. You shouldn’t get so attached. But I’m not talking about the drawings and letters. I’m talking about my boys. My boys that perp said he’d kill. My boys I thought he’d kill. My boys I placed in God’s hands that day I called the FBI to turn him in.

They were so small. Soldier boy had just turned four. The Ax was two and a half. They still took bottles to bed at night and wore diapers.

I gave them over to God and turned him in because they deserved a mother who does the right thing. Because I had a choice: body or soul. But that’s really not much of a choice, now is it.

Princess is two and change and so was The Ax when the ordeal started. I remember taking them sled riding when it snowed early that winter. It was a snowy winter. It was a snowy lake town we lived in then. I remember riding down the little hill in front of our house and giggling.

I remember the possibility. Life held so much possibility.

Right after the ordeal, right after he went to jail, I spent my weekends going door-to-door campaigning for Obama in rural western Pennsylvania (Pennsyltucky). I walked up and down the streets of Saltsburg getting out the vote. The audacity of hope and all that.

When Soldier boy was born sick, I formed the Pittsburgh chapter of MOB ( mothers opposing Bush) and spent the fall going door to door with him strapped on my back. Little old ladies saying I should be ashamed to have a baby out in the cold and the rain. I thought they didn’t get that what I was doing, what I was giving him, was so much more important than keeping warm and dry at any cost.

But the election of 2012 came and went and I barely noticed. For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t care about the election. Not even a little.

My therapist asks me how I did when my husband went out of town this week and I tell her it was like it usually is. She asks what I did to try to raise my spirits and I tell her I was up late making buckeye balls for the cookie exchange at work and put on old Obama speeches from 2008 on YouTube to listen to to try to perk myself up. She tells me this is not a normal thing, not a typical way a person tries to cheer themselves up. And I remember going door to door after the trauma and I tell her. And I remember going door to door after Soldier boy and I tell her.

There was hope then, right after the ordeal. But somehow it has drained out of me since then. These seven years. I do what must be done. Because it must. I go through all the appropriate motions. Day in and day out. But… The world is infinitely smaller now. Duller too. Flatter. It’s kind of like a book you don’t bother finishing because you can guess the ending.

But therein lies the rub. One of the things I must do is give my kids the life they deserve. I cannot teach them the world is small and flat and dull. Because it’s not and part of me knows that in some small way.

When I was in the midst of my ordeal I found myself in an impossible situation. I told myself, for our children we make the impossible possible. And somehow I got through it and put the bad guy in jail. Now I’m in an impossible situation of another kind.

I am not the same person I was seven years ago and neither are my boys. The snow’s not the same either. But still it falls.

You’re Not a Good Little Girl, You’re a Warrior

28 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by in christianity, Evil, kids, love, marriage, PTSD, Rape

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I watched the first two episodes of a British show recently called “The Bletchley Circle”. It’s about four women who were code breakers for British intelligence during world war two who have now blended into civilian life seven years later. One is a stay-at-home mom, another a housewife, another a waitress, the last a librarian. They reunite when they realize they can stop a serial killer with their code breaking skills. They realize, too, that a piece of them has been suffocating all those years. Their minds, their hearts, their spirits, trapped in an ordinary life they weren’t meant for.

They pursue the killer. When the police aren’t very helpful, they take it upon themselves to go undercover. They visit the gruesome crime scenes before calling the police with the location of the body. They set a trap with one of their own as the bait. In the end, they get their man in a dramatic scene where he gets blown away by one of the ladies as he’s about to kill another one.

So, I like it a lot right up until the last ten seconds. I mean, what’s not to like: feisty, intelligent women banding together and protecting their sisters in a man’s world. Well written scenes subtly addressing the alienation of women in modern society and the problem that has no name. Recognition of how common rape and domestic violence are. Entertaining yet socially relevant. I could relate to them too. They knew trauma. They knew aloneness. They had seen the evil of the world, survived it. It made me feel a little less alone. More optimistic maybe. But then came the ending.

The main character is walking home after nearly being killed by a serial killer who rapes his victims after they’re dead. She went willingly to his house because he said if she didn’t, he would kill her children. If she came, he said, he would spare them. She did what we do for our children. She walked into trauma to save them from the evil. And after she nearly died and was saved and the police came in and she processed it all as well as she could with her three friends who’d gone through it with her, who’d saved her, she went home to her husband and kids. She opens the gate of the little picket fence that surorunds her house. She looks in the window at her husband playing with her kids. She’s going to tell him what happened. She’s going to tell him all of it. He doesn’t even know she was a code breaker during the war. He thinks she was a clerical worker. She’s going to tell him now. About the war, about what she and her friends have really been doing when he thinks they’re off gossiping, about the evil she’s seen and known. More than that, she’s going to tell him about the rush of it all. About how powerful she is. She’s stopped a killer. She’s saved countless women. She’s saved her children. She helped defeat the Nazis.

But then she pauses. She looks at them playing happily, blissfully ignorant of it all. She remembers what one of the other women told her. She can’t tell him, she said. She looks at them and she changes her mind. She does what good little trauma survivors do. She swallows it down and hides it away. It’s not enough to have saved so many lives, she must protect them from the knowledge of evil too. To keep them safe in body and mind and spirit.

That’s when they lost me. That’s when my heart sunk and I felt cheated. And I felt pissed.

I wrote in an earlier entry about sin eaters. About swallowing the evil down and keeping it away from the rest of the world. About how I didn’t want to tell anyone about the evil I’ve known because they couldn’t possibly understand. I wanted to be a good little trauma surivor and hold it inside but I can’t. I wanted to be like those war veterans who refuse to tell their families what happened, who maybe don’t even tell them they fought in the war at all. To be like the woman in London who pretened to be a clerical worker turned stay-at-home mom instead of telling her husband who she really was, a warrior. The pain of trauma, the thrill of saving lives.

I haven’t protected my husband from the evil. I have told him all of it in detail. He came to the perpetrator’s trial and saw the graphic pictures of the brutality and perversion. I have told him what he did and how it felt and how it has haunted me. I have been honest about my existential crisis that has started in recent weeks, seven years after the events that changed my life. That changed his. He didn’t even know me then. He was finding Jesus and doing missionary work and writing scripts and raising his beautiful son. It may be harder for him to hear the unholy thoughts I have had lately than the details of the violation.

But I have been brutally honest about those doubts and thoughts and feelings, about the rage I feel for God right now. About my daydreams of violent revenge on my perpetrator which have resurfaced. About how exhausted I am to be seven years out and feeling like I’m back where I started. This is PTSD, I tell him. Why can’t you just get over it, he asks. Why can’t it be over? This is PTSD, I tell him. It will get better, but it will keep coming back. I could go twenty years and be pretty good and then it could come back all over again. And living with that knowdlege in and of itself is cruel enough. We are married for life and so the PTSD is a life sentence for him too.

It is not right to want to violent revenge, he tells me. God calls us to forgive, he reminds me. I said I’d forgiven the perpetrator. I had prayed for him. I had seen him as a poor banished child of Eve. Like a good girl. But I am not a good girl now because I have come to realize I spent all these years being a good girl because I thought maybe if I was good enough, bad things wouldn’t happen to me. I’ve blamed myself all these years because it gave me a sense of control. I realized, really realized, a few weeks ago that it wasn’t my fault. He alone chose to do the things he did. I had no choice. I could not have been so good he wouldn’t have done what he did. I cannot be so good I am safe. And so, I am not going to concentrate my being into being good. I am going to feel the anger I need to feel, I am going to doubt the goodness and power of God as is inevitable with trauma, I am not going to hide from the reality we live in a patriarchy maintained through brutality of body, mind, spirit.

I bring this to him because he’s my husband. I bring it to him first. But I’m not planning to stop there. This is a series of events set in motion in that cold February of 2008. Set in motion by him. I used to think I had such a choice in how I responded to what he did. I used to think I chose to go back to his apartment over and over again because I had made the choice to save my children and to save that little girl. The only choice I had was my body and mind versus my soul. Something would be lost. There was no good choice. I have no good choice now either. Keep it all inside and go on living the nice external life we’ve built up for ourselves or speak the truth and risk losing that external life. Body or soul. Ignore my fellow survivors, the little girls suffering out there, move on and tell myself finding health and happiness is the best revenge. Or be honest.

He’s my husband and my fate is his. His is mine. And God with us. The three of us. And so the three of us have PTSD. The three of us had the good choices taken from us seven years ago on that cold winter day in that motel room in Appalachia.

I will tell my children what happened one day when they are older. It happened to them too. A piece of their mother stolen never to return. A warrior born. I will tell them of the evil in the world and of the not good choices it leaves us. I will tell them I chose my soul over my body and mind. I will tell them he took something from them too. I will tell them the no good choice between body and mind and your soul is at the very core of this fallen world. Because I cannot protect them from the truth of this world but only do my best to prepare them for it. You see, what those good little trauma survivors in the movies don’t know is that you cannot be a good enough girl to keep bad things from happening.

Stop being good and be the warrior you are.