TRIGGER WARNING: ABUSE
I have a bad phase approaching, I can feel it. I guess I need to get used to these ups and downs. How can I imagine a life without them when I still have vivid memories which are hard to swallow? How can I not expect to have days when everything just feels so bleak and worthless when I have no idea of how to process my past and my future? I don’t cry very often, I’m ashamed by my tears, embarrassed, irritated, angry. So, I crawl further inwards, get lost in my own head, and make everything worse for myself.
I want to talk. I want to sit with someone who won’t look at me like I’m broken, who’ll convince me I’m not broken and cry to them. I’m tired of being lost in my own head. I’m exhausted by telling myself I’m not broken. I’m drained of having dialogues, trialogues, monologues all by myself. I’m simply tired.
I have been trying to identify my triggers for the past few days and I am resolutely ignoring them. It’s not just masochism, it’s not just a way of punishing myself for surviving, for making myself alone, for not reaching out even when I want to or for wanting to reach out at all.
Over the weekend, I watched the new season of Marvel’s Jessica Jones, I love this show. Apparently, I relate to Jessica Jones except she was mind controlled by her abuser. What’s my excuse? I understand her; I understand her anger, her inability to be anything but alone, her need to simply do things, her ability to detach, all the blame she takes on herself for no fault of hers. The guilt is no fresh news, but I understand how it plays out in her, the anger, the silence. I get her constant need to escape. Hers is drinking, mine is different, but we escape. We feel damaged and we keep on working to put ourselves back together but somewhere, we know that it may never be possible.
So, Jessica Jones was trigger number one. I watched the whole damn season though. I don’t really allow my triggers to stop me from doing anything. I had vowed that I won’t let fear dictate my actions. I refused to let the creeps in the city change the clothes I wanted to wear or the time I left at night. If I can survive to be myself in Delhi, after I survived him, then, can I really let a show stop me?
There’s this author I love, who writes these wonderful mysteries. Her books have always captured me; I loved how she spun her characters more than the stories because I could always just understand them. Writing a good story is important, but it is always the characters which dig their way into my brain and make little homes. I started re-reading one of her books again, this is the only book of hers that I’ve read only once before. It’s about a girl turned victim turned survivor turned vigilante turned victim turned survivor. If you take away the ‘vigilante’ aspect, I see myself. It’s about her and this detective who gives zero shits, who’s unstoppable despite injuries, who is strong, angry, determined, and a complete force. She’s who I’d want to be.
Parts of the book are in first-person, with the survivor-vigilante narrating parts of her abuse. Abuse faced by this character and what I did isn’t particularly similar. As any survivor would know, each act of abuse is different, even when it looks exactly the same on paper. She starts talking about herself, about things she felt, thought and believed post her abuse. And suddenly, it’s like I’m reading words I wish I could have written as they seem nothing less than being stolen from my brain. I’ve written about how the hardest aspects of abuse aren’t what he, they, did to me, but how I felt, what I did to survive, how it felt to survive. This book, this author, this character said words I didn’t know how to say or even write. Reading them wasn’t enough for me this time. I needed to hear them, I needed to hear someone say them. Hello, audio book.
I’ve spent the last few days listening to the book. I hear the words while walking down the street, sitting alone waiting for friends to come in, while cooking or while bathing. I’m drowning myself in these words because they hurt. They’re like taking splinters out of a deep wound. That shit hurts, I know, but it’s needed what I don’t know is, whether this is actually needed even though it feels like it is. It feels important to hear words I can’t say; which I don’t think I’ll ever be able to say.
It’s striking how much this book; these sections reflect my experience. How can two experiences with such vast differences have such similar feelings? How can a fictional character and a real one exist in such similar ways, varying only in levels of extremity?I want one of the people in my life to read this book to me, maybe they would understand a small portion of my brain where I restrict myself to wander. I might be unable to write, speak or read it, but the safety of fiction protects my reality.
This is my trigger number two. I’m obsessed right now, with those words. I’m listening to them before I sleep, I even slept off to them once. I thought that maybe my brain would dream of someone else’s traumatic event which would be better than reliving my own nightmares again and again. In a way, it was worse.
I feel the bad phase approaching. I feel the need to punish myself for things which I logically don’t deserve punishment for. Jessica Jones and this book may be triggering, but there was something invisible which came before them: a new memory is coming to the surface without any trigger.
I’m trying to be healthier; I’m trying to be less avoidant. Thus, I am writing about it, I don’t know how to talk about this yet. I don’t know who I’d call to say – “Hi, I had a new completely horrifying nightmare, can I tell you all about it and horrify you too?” I go through the list of people I’d want to call, that I know would listen, who may not even be horrified and be there for me. But, I’d feel tremendously guilty, embarrassed, self-conscious during and after. What is the point of talking about things which happened so long ago and should have been buried already? I know the likelihood of talking to someone is still low. So, I write.
I wrote over 3000 words about that one nightmare, of being trapped in a storage drawer under a divan. I tried writing about how it felt. My hands started trembling so violently as if my brain was revolting against my hands to write it. Writing makes everything feel real!
Does it help me to get lost in stories which feel too real? Does it help to connect with a character so much that I feel like I seep into her, that my mind merges with hers? Does it help to lose myself in my own head, swimming through all of the memories, writing writing writing, because maybe if I write enough of them, then I’ll be able to tell if this one was real or made up? Does it help to know whether it’s real or made up? Does it change anything?
I know the bad phase is approaching but I don’t know how to stop it. I’m sick of it; I’m tired, I’m angry, and I’m so damn hurt that I deserve an award for breathing. In these phases, I wish so hard I had never survived. Maybe the parts of the book which hit home the most are about the guilt, the anger survivors feel at surviving, how sometimes it doesn’t feel worth it, how sometimes we miss our abusers because they had the power to kill us, they had the power to take all the decisions and then survival was not a choice, it was forced, and that was easier.
The book said that the hardest thing for survivors to realise is that survival isn’t a destination, but a journey. In these phases, I can’t help but ask why to bother with the journey at all? I’m good at reminding myself that the phase fades, it always does. And then I hate myself less for being on that journey, I pride myself on it. That reminder is strong enough to get me through the phases, it always has been.