Truly, it was a day like any other. Nothing remarkable about date, weather, daily schedule, or tasks. I’d taken a break from work to sit in my living room and read while I ate lunch — an attempt to care for myself. I sat in my armchair and settled into an alternating pattern of my right hand bringing a bite to my mouth, then turning a page. Another bite or two, then another page. And that’s when it started.
When people who have experienced trauma are triggered, we sometimes disassociate to cope. It helps to separate us from the feelings until it subsides or we can regain enough control over our faculties to “right the ship.” I started thinking about Edna Pontellier in The Awakening. When I was in 10th grade I thought it was so brave that she would just walk into the sea instead of live a life she didn’t want and as an adult, I reflected on how much of a choice it wasn’t, in retrospect. And then I remembered the time we went to Grand Isle, and I snapped right back. Every vacation a one act play, every smiling photo a prop. A desperate attempt to hit the reset button and be a family. The pull of that water is undeniable.
I was at first only vaguely aware of my breathing speeding up and stuttering. No sooner had I realized that than I began to feel the heat behind and around my eyeballs. A lump in the throat that felt like a bramble. A betrayal of my foolproof composure, which was an acquired skill. My eyes, now on fire and blurring my vision, darted around the room to find a focal point; an intangible reason for panic. The color that I could feel draining from my body was repurposed to bring vivid hues to the memories that ricocheted, unannounced and unwelcome, in my head. Show announcements, one of the many omens of abandonment. A hushed but hostile phone conversation about an STI panel. “Family day” at the Brooks, that capped off a weekend of begging for answers to “why” and what else I could possibly do to be good enough to make it stop. A chance meeting of mutual friends at a garden center during the pandemic, where it was clear that no one was going to ask how I was. Like, how I really was. That’s one of the things about working through trauma is that you can’t possibly anticipate how much you’ve buried until you step on the right landmine and watch it all shoot up into the sky.
My therapist said I needed to allow myself to feel all of my feelings in order to start this work, so I decided to betray my instinct to push it down, finish lunch, and go back to my spreadsheets. I thought quickly about a place in the house I could go to feel my feelings without alerting my 9 year-old, blissfully ignorant in their room, that something was amiss. I darted to the guest bathroom on the other side of the house, shut the door, and sat on the toilet. And I waited to feel something, in very much the same way I waited on a different toilet across town to feel something after every pregnancy test, many years ago. My breathing was more akin to a crappie plucked from Grenada Lake than that of a professional, middle-aged woman with an investment portfolio and proper outdoor furniture. It was the type of cry that, were it on video, people would fumble for the mute button because you looked like you were screaming. But I wasn’t. I wanted to, but the pain from feeling for the first time in 3 years felt so deep and old and primal that it betrayed any expression known to me. I wasn’t sure if it was pain from death or birth. But then, I let Grief and Anger crawl out of my open and silent mouth and cradled them gently — grotesque, infernal newborns. My next steps felt familiar in that moment as they would to any mother. I knew to nurse them, carry them, and eventually they’ll walk on their own.
The rhythm of memories, breathing, and tears mimicked the choppy, salty waves of the Gulf. The ringing in my ears like the ocean. The high and low tides of expression and soothing. I remember quiet nights wondering how many weeks or months or years we could go before we would need to hit the reset button again. How many more I could take.
I am standing on that shore still, fixated on a point in the horizon and unsure if it is water or sky. I am still alive.
