For the past year, I just couldn't.
I've always been a light social drinker; nothing crazy, nothing crutch-y. Almost immediately after the rape, I began drinking heavily, daily. A functional near-alcoholic. Class, work, home: I'm positive that I reeked of vodka. Every now and then, I'd crack: break down weeping in the car on the way to work, or silent, seething rage at classmate hijinks. A friend later told me, of that time, you scared us; you were always drunk, somehow so desperate; we didn't know why; we didn't know what to do. I truly don't even remember doing it, though I don't remember much of anything about the four months between when the rape occurred and the stalking began.
It all just happened so fast. One crushing event after the other, shutting out the rape completely from day one, trying to contain the stalking as though I were dealing with a civilized person and eventually realizing I couldn't; then leaving Florida for Pennsylvania in fear, then leaving Pennsylvania for West Virginia in more fear, then a job which rendered me exhausted and unable to think (which I was extremely lucky to get, though), then moving back to Florida.... All in thirteen months. Thirteen months. Until today, I hadn't realized how short the timeframe was.
And next month will mark thirteen months in my house.
I returned to Florida with all intentions of jumping right back into school. Picking up exactly where I'd left off. I returned to the scene of such an abrupt exit to expectations that I didn't realize I had: that my life was here waiting for me, that the spaces which held the person I'd been had frozen, and that I could just slip right back into the hole I'd left in the frame, like a digital photo with a person-shaped cutout. That nothing would have changed. That I was fine. I am not going to fail at this. I am going to finish this. And I tried. But I couldn't make myself be in that building.
So I didn't.
I got my job stuff settled, I moved into my house, and I began unpacking boxes which still smelled like my living room in Tennessee; out of cardboard and newspaper, baubles which had brought me pleasure and comfort clanked against my bones, and I set them up on shelves and looked at them as they expectantly occupied bits of space. Piece after piece, vases and books and sheets and dishes and an entire life-ful of items.
Do you do this, too? - When I enter someone else's space, I'm always interested in how they've chosen to make the space reflect themselves. All the little details they've purposely chosen to display for themselves, knowing that other people will see them, too. Family photos, old childhood toys, books, media, particular pieces of furniture, maybe a wall color reminiscent of a grandmother's kitchen. I looked at the walls of my new house and didn't know what to do with them, purchased furniture I didn't want to touch to fill a space I didn't want to know me. I may as well have hung from the ceiling to sleep, as displaced as I felt. I functioned through work every day to escape those walls, then returned to them every night as the dread built in me, as the evidence of how destroyed I felt continued to build, as I tried to incorporate items from the past into this space where they absolutely did not fit, as I tried as hard as I could to just make it okay now. You're fine. FORWARD already. Get going. In my father's Pastor Voice, no less, urging us into the car on Sunday mornings: c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, let's get this show on the road.
I threw it all back into the boxes and stacked them in the garage, and after the last boxes were packed away, I pulled the garage door shut behind me and looked at what I'd done. I didn't know what needed to happen, but I knew I needed to see my house as it was: full, but mostly packed away, disheveled, a denied space with no windows in the middle. It was the first time I could breathe deeply, and the sound echoed against the walls. It was the first time I was alone with everything that had happened, the first time I was in a space with everything without urgency or fear driving me to focus three steps ahead. I could look at my walls and know that this sadness was real, and that my brokenness was more than in my head, that I could shut the door behind me, in this space, and let it come. The more I fought it, the more it took me away; the more it took me away, the less I cared to fight it.
I fell apart.
I was on my deathbed. A wonderful therapist who retired four months into our work; a second try, with another therapist which didn't work out. The immobility and inability were terrifying. I remember sitting in my bathroom, not really thinking anything other than I need to clean this bathroom but knowing I couldn't make it a priority, and feeling so tired, so confused about why something as trivial as clean your damn bathroom was fundamentally impossible, and I started talking, to God, in my bathroom, while I was peeing: I'm just done, man. I've been done. I don't know what else to do. I know that I'm sitting here in limbo. I know that I have to decide whether I'm going to live or die. I can't inflict my choice to leave on my nieces, but God, I can't imagine living anymore. I can't live with all this. I can't. Help me. It was a turning point; I was realistic about how much I wanted to die, and then I determined that I would not die until I could do more for myself than just stay alive.
For the past thirteen months, those words: I can't. Help me. It wasn't self-pity; it was reality. It was neither negligence to engage in positive self-affirmation nor determination to remain a victim; it was my umbilical cord, my total, honest, naked, destroyed soul learning how those words felt in my mouth for the first time in my life. And you know what? I'm a little defiant about this: I'd love to not care if it sounds like self-pity or lack of effort to anyone outside it, but I do. That's both the rock AND the hard place: it will look like laziness or wrongdoing to lots of people, but sometimes, self-care just can't happen, whether it's showering or eating or sleeping or therapy or cleaning your bathroom. But I am better now at being supportively helpless with someone than I've ever been. God's presence in tragedy - a truth that still makes me deeply angry, and I don't know if it ever won't - teaches us all over again not just what it means, but how it feels and what it costs us to weep and mourn with the broken and dead. God never said FALL YE NOT APART, nor did he ever say MAKE IT SNAPPY IF YOU DO. So shut that noise down, noisemakers.
I also drizzled some bacon with honey and rubbed it with garlic, then shoved it under the skin of a chicken and roasted that sucker with some broccoli and whole garlic cloves today. And if THAT doesn't make you happy, then.... well, that's okay.
*puts some in the freezer for you*
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