About two years ago, I fell into myself. Or maybe my insides exploded outward. Everything in my life seemed to change on a dime; in retrospect, I started falling apart long before I broke down. Post traumatic stress disorder is a mercurial beast, popping its head up freely, randomly, and without warning.
Years of hiding who I am finally caught up with me. I’d spent so much time meticulously creating a new life for myself, and I allowed myself certain memories. The rest vaporized. Or so I thought. Once I broke down and my past came forward, my understanding of my childhood changed. Snippets of my history have always been available, but without context. I had random memories, here and there, but they were disjointed and didn’t make any sense.
The memories that have come to the forefront are vivid in a way that no dream could ever be. Sensory overload is the best way to describe my awakening. The few fond memories of my childhood, where thoughts center around celebrations or safe spaces, don’t feel particularly good either.
The snapshots contain the brightest colors my eyes have ever seen. It’s a blinding clash of hue and saturation, like my brain’s processor broke and every image looks like an overdeveloped Polaroid.
Smells are deliciously sweet or savory, yet overpowering and totally undesirable. To this day, when something triggers the olfactory from my youth, it harkens either intense, body stopping terror or waves of nausea . In my mind, I can taste my mother’s green chile as if it was made yesterday and slow cooked overnight. The harmony of cumin, garlic, and New Mexico green chiles is nothing short of pure bliss but the thought of it makes me physically ill. Nothing is bland in my memories. There is no in between.
The feelings on my skin are sharp and all-consuming, never dull. Things like sleepovers in bean bags and fluffy blankets make me irritated today…now. It’s like being enveloped in a cotton swab that’s constantly rubbing against your skin, chafing it until it is raw.
Sounds are the absolute worst. When I think back to loud or sudden noises, or hear them today, my body instantly goes into fight or flight mode. The adrenaline pulses through my veins, I can feel my heart pulsing in my tongue, and my vision reverberates to its beat. Sometimes my peripheral vision becomes distorted. When the child inside me awakens, it’s pure hell. She tried for years to break free, only I kept pushing her down.
In totality, my memories are inconsistent at best, and I suppose that is somewhat normal for kids. Nobody can recollect everything. I can sometimes remember explicit details, down to the color of my shoelaces and the stench of cheap beer, and other times I am stymied by huge blocks of time that are vast and empty. It’s as if I didn’t exist during these voids, like the entirety of my life was put on pause. Looking back, I now know that these blocks of nothingness represent some of my worst childhood experiences, cordoned off by my mind as a mechanism of self preservation.
Though I didn’t go voluntarily, part of me wishes I never went exploring the recesses of my mind. I got the slightest glimpse of my history and was driven like a modern day Sherlock Holmes towards my truth. My unearthing would uncover an evil I somehow always knew existed but couldn’t fully articulate. Perhaps I denied its existence until I stared it down, wrangled with it, and then embraced the ugliness of it all.
When this all started, I didn’t know these were memories or real events. They were nightmares, highly intrusive thoughts, and inexplicable fear when I’d smell, hear, see, or taste something that reminded me of my past. There’s a very clear and disturbing reason why the sense of touch was never the harbinger of these messages. I bumbled along like an idiot, until one day I stumbled upon proof – tangible, visible, and undeniable proof – that one of those recurrent dreams was, in fact, real. If one was real…oh my God, what about the rest?
My face-to-face came in the way of sought out family pictures, letters written in the hand of dead relatives, or conversations shared with distant cousins or old neighbors. The biggest chunks of my past were unearthed in two distinct time periods: immediately after my mom’s death and then my father’s. The worst of them pop out in a dream or fleeting thought.
It would be a hell of a lot easier to not pursue the past. The vacancy of recollection is terrifying, the constant wondering what-if. Problematically, it beckons me as if I’m a mosquito drawn to a light. I have to find the real me, the person that was killed off so long ago. The version of me that was never allowed to be. I’m in there somewhere and know I will get zapped, yet I fly straight towards that which will hurt me the most. All in the name of finding me.
The end of one memory is consistently met with the beginning of another in a completely different setting, as if disjointed by space and time. There is no temporal consistency and nothing dovetails in my mind. My memories have me miraculously leaping forward in age, awareness, interpersonal skills, and aptitude in school. Where one thought trails off with my innocence and awe, the other begins with harsh and very focused reality defined by mistrust and fear. Then, in some cruel twist of fate, I’m thrown backwards in time to unearth another memory that has me wondering what the hell happened in between. It’s a horrible, mashup game of cerebral tilt-a-whirl and dodgeball.
My historical record doesn’t advance in unison, either; which is to say, I may have only aged 2 months between my memories when I order them chronologically in my head, but my awareness of the world, the evil encompassed within it, and my place in this mess doesn’t seem to progress in tandem. My intellect, perceptions, sensibilities, and determination quickly jumped ahead of my years. It’s as if each memory is a stark reminder that there is a steep cost to being street smart at such a young age. Befitting of my circumstances, I suppose. With each seemingly minuscule event of my adolescence, I matured exponentially. It’s yet another way that abuse, neglect, and bad parental choices rob children of their youth. Or, perhaps, it’s my adult brain processing the events of my youth. The whole hindsight is 20/20 thing. Either way, it sucks. 0 out of 5 stars, don’t recommend.
Forget the physical, social, emotional, and intellectual atrocities that come with it all; when you hail from a household and experience defined by fear, you can’t just be a kid. There was no luxury of ice cream socials, languid summer days with friends, playing outside, dress up parties to be fully enjoyed, or wallowing in the butterflies of first kisses. Every moment of happiness was fleeting, and letting your guard down to savor moments inevitably resulted in pain. Why enjoy anything at all?
My judgments of others, along with unbridled rage and feelings of abandonment, all increased as my conscious mind repeatedly dove deeper into the mysterious depths of my subconscious brain. Quickly gone was my youthful naivety and freedom, only to be replaced with a level of hyper-vigilance and protectionism unmatched by anyone I’d ever met. That holds to this day.
With each deep dive, I surface with new memories that replay in my mind’s eye as if to purposely inflict pain on a slideshow that only I can see. It’s torture. It would be with much reflection, therapy, mental health hospitalizations, electro convulsive therapy, and antidepressants that would facilitate the opening of my eyes and acceptance of my history. It was also aided by a gifted psychiatrist. I certainly wasn’t a willing passenger on this journey. I was forced to face my past upon the death of my parents. Unwittingly sifting through boxes, looking at old photos, and talking with people I’d not seen in decades.
When my mother died some 15+ years ago, I was painstakingly sad yet somehow relieved. I’ve never uttered those words to anyone. I didn’t know why my emotions were so contradictory and explosive. I felt orphaned after her passing, as if the vessel that brought me to this earth was gone and somehow my legitimacy was being called into question. I miss her fiercely but my world is less scary now that she’s gone. I can say, with absolute certainty, that I didn’t mourn her passing in any traditional way. Although, I’m not certain there is a traditional way to grieve. I just know I felt haunted by a Heath Ledger-style joker from Batman after her passing and my world hasn’t been the same since. There was a deep sense of unease and skepticism about me. Who am I?
It would be 11 years later, when my father died from COVID-19, that my world exploded. My brain began waging war on me. I started hearing voices and seeing things. Because my mother was deeply mentally ill (we will get to that later), I was convinced that I shared her fate, certain I would be doomed to a life of institutionalization, homelessness, and delusions. There were days when I felt like I was a doll living in a playhouse and every one of my actions was orchestrated by nameless, faceless, giant toddlers who enjoyed tormenting me. Maniacal bastards.
I’m not quite “there” yet, in this grand historical dig through my emotional rubble. Though, I’m not certain there is a destination in this journey, one place to arrive upon where I will finally experience peace. Aided by the relentless passage of time, decades in triumvirate, and penning my thoughts on virtual paper, I hope to come to terms not only with who I am, but with how I became this person. I suppose I also need to grieve the life that never was, the one brutally taken from me. Along the way, I need to let go of the person that starred in my childhood dreams and aspirations; she will never be and I will never know her. Gone, too, are the hallmark adolescent experiences, like homecoming football and sleepovers, proms and dress shopping, senior pictures and silly photos. These things are wholly foreign and completely frivolous to my battered reality.
My youth was an experience I don’t wish upon my worst enemy. It was a place of desperately wanting to be loved but craving isolation for safety. Where I calculatedly befriended everyone in an attempt to avoid the ire of anyone. I was on a constant quest to please people, and I became quite good at placating other’s feelings, at the expense of my own. It was all in a futile attempt to buy some peace. I quickly learned that you keep your friends close and you crawl into the skin of your enemies so that you can identify their triggers and how to placate them. Get to know them better than they know themselves.
What I didn’t expect, and was never able to navigate with any success, was what to do when the same people were both family and foe.
