Invisible Wound

First Entry.

July 21, 2020

As a girl, surviving in the quiet lull between abuse I chose to delete from consciousness and before the torture of memory began, I explore stories. The poet Sylvia Plath. The movie Girl, Interrupted with Winona Ryder. The photographs of Francesca Woodman. These girls, like me, lived in a world without having skin. I searched for clues about how to live. Was I destined to commit suicide like Francesca, jumping out of a loft building at 22?

The problem with being an abuse survivor is that all your bones are broken, you are hooked up to a ventilator barely breathing, your tongue only knows how to scream for help — and yet to the outside world you look like a regular human.

This means we are expected, also, to live and function like those who have not been abused. Living, working, and loving with broken bones makes us slow. We can’t carry as many things. We drop things. We get exhausted.

Plus, living among normies is like learning a second language. (Normies: that’s what I decided to call them.) I named them this when the worst of the memories were creeping out from their hidden places uninvited like NYC rats on a warm summer night. The non-abused. People for whom love is assumed, acceptance is a right and words work. Some days I hated normies, looking down on them for their lack of emotional range and fearlessness. Other days I envied them their easy ways and quick laughter. Always, I had to work twice as hard to understand how to have emotions that are like theirs…. how to pretend that I do have skin and hide that fact that every touch, every glance is like a hot iron searing my flesh.

“You are so intense,” normies like to say. “Stop overthinking.”

And it’s true. Normies are right. We overthink every glance, every word. You will notice us by the way we apologize. Quick, muttered “I’m sorries” to things that only an abuse survivor would think to apologize for — like interrupting. Approaching an empty chair at the same time. You know, apologizing for being alive. We will often miss the meaning of the words because we are conditioned to read energy and tiny nuances, scanning for safety. We get thrown by a single word, analyzing it’s intention. The abused have a hard time meeting another person’s eyes. We gaze slightly above another’s head when we explain things dear to us. Seeing someone hurting overwhelms us with shared pain.

Pete Walker explains that cPTSD means that the abused are actually reliving our childhoods over and over and over again. Our heads are in this time but our bodies are back there, watching for a way to dodge the belt loop aimed at our heads. Scurrying out of the way of a kick. Or worse — trying to escape the dizzying verbal destruction “you whore, you pig” that leaves us shattered.

“Oh c’mon, you can do it,” normies mutter. Annoyed with our fragility, our drama, our learned helplessness. And we can do it. We can do it during the day when eyes are on us at work, or out at night with friends. It’s what it takes to do it that is invisible. The days spent in bed crying when others are on vacations. Endless meditation, more yoga than anyone has ever wanted to go to, every all the rage therapy and healer that hits the internet.

“Have you tried breathwork?” they say.

Yes. And EMDR. And CBT. And tantra, vipassana, 12-step, psychiatry, praying to God, not praying to God, shock therapy, hypnosis, Jungian analysis, self help journals, and dating manuals.

The problem is that no one has ever created a therapy that can sew your skin back on to your body — or give you back your childhood. And so, at certain point, you declare yourself healed. As Gertrude Stein says, there is no there there. You simply decide, this is what it is. This moment. This sunshine. This view of hummingbirds feasting on flowers outside your window. And, this crying, this lashing out, these meds. You do not have to forgive — that’s the last I would ever ask of anyone. But accept, ah. This, now, is what the entire matter hinges upon. Healing is accepting the broken things that you never thought you could love.