Epiphany: Arhythm
[Long, overly personal, and possibly freakish and incoherent to anyone who hasn't had a PTSD flashback, or whatever hybrid I have.]
I can't get out of flashbacks by myself. I hate this; I hate being needy, I hate the presumption my brain jumps to afterward that I'm being a drama queen, that I'm acting out for the attention. I should be able to get myself back to the present - to only the present - on my own, by touching objects on a shelf, or the shelf itself, or the floor if I'm sitting, which I usually am. These things are in the present, and they should ground me, but they never do. I need someone's touch. I need a hand on my shoulder, a hand taking my own hand, a voice from here, from now.
Monday night I was alone. Actually, it started on the walk back home from the train, because I'd shut off that part of myself while I was at work, and tried to keep it off while I was on the train, but I could feel myself hovering above my left shoulder. I was cold on the short walk home, and I don't know whether the impending meltdown caused me to be colder, or whether it was actually that cold out and that added to the meltdown. I got in the door, sat on the kitchen floor to give the cats their dinner, and couldn't hold the kibble scoop still. I scooped the kibble out with my hand, a single closed-fistful for each cat, and then I sat, restlessly switching between lotus and having my knees drawn up further, my hands and arms doing the maddening thing where they are never still. How can I be a drama queen when I'm doing this alone? Of course, I could just be doing it now to convince myself I'm not a drama queen.
It lasted nearly an hour. After fifteen minutes or so, I was able to get up and move to my bedroom and sit on my bed, and rub the satin binding on my blanket, which soothes but does not "present" me because I had satin-bound blankets as a child; that's why it soothes now, because it did then. Peter jumped up at some point, and then Chess. She wanted more food, of course, and purred loudly in front of me, deep but trilly, importunate. She paced. She shoved her head against my knee, against my restless elbow, against my hand when I could offer it. That grounded me, finally, something about that touch. What's the point of being a drama queen in front of your cats? They don't give a crap that you're freaking out.
I dreamed about Kentucky that night, but Tuesday was my day off, and I was going to play in M's yard all day, and I was able to push the dream away and enjoy the day. That night there were other dreams, walking, searching dreams, part Kentucky, part post-apocalyptic. I woke with my father crying drunkenly and my mother cooking dinner and looking over her shoulder at me accusingly for making him upset, and I knew what was coming after his crying jag. A friend called, under the weather and having to cancel a meeting that day, and I was disappointed, and also worried about him, but at least the worry and disappointment were in the present. I expected a meltdown at work, but work was pretty good, actually. It was good to be busy - physically and mentally - and there's something grounding about being annoyed at the machines when they jam or malfunction, and something communal about going through the annoyance with your co-workers.
Then there was no more mail. I went with three other people to the other end of the building to set up machines there for a different mail run. I thought we'd be getting the mail to run as soon as we set up. We didn't. And minutes went by, and we still didn't. I get nervous when I'm not doing anything. Afraid I'm going to get yelled at for slacking off, being lazy. I don't actually get yelled at, ever; sometimes there's just a slow day and we stand around for 20 minutes, and that's just part of the ebb and flow. I killed some time by putting adhesive label holders on the machine I'd be using, because the ones already there were ripped and nearly useless, and it's a nice, soothing, anal-retentive thing to do, and it also feels like a nice thing to do, because it's not just for me, but for whoever else uses the machine after me. I did the front half of the machine, and then it was break time, and then we came back from break, and I expected mail to be waiting for us. It wasn't.
The supervisor down there didn't come by, and I wondered if he even knew we'd been sent back to his area instead of our usual beat. Maybe he'd only meant for us to prep and then go back where we usually work. I labeled the other half of the machine. I would have started on the second machine, but I didn't have any label holders left. The other three people were standing around chatting, and I sat down near them, safety in numbers. It had been probably 45 minutes since we'd come back from break, and we'd done nothing. This couldn't be right. The light seemed to get brighter, the ambient sounds and conversation louder, and I knew what was happening, I knew I shouldn't close my eyes, and for a while I didn't, but it was so bright, and then I was just crushingly tired, and then I stopped being able to follow the conversation, the words stopped fitting together, and someone was going to come yell at us, and I gave up.
I don't usually completely lose track of the present when I have a flashback. Usually, they don't even seem like flashbacks because the place where half of my mind goes isn't a single place or time or event, it's just a feeling, an "affect," a sensation, an impendingness. I'm nowhere. I'm in that place between worlds in The Magician's Nephew, where time doesn't exist and nothing happens but it's going to happen. I think this started off that way, but then I was in a place. But I was in a place where time hadn't existed: the floor of my closet in Kentucky.
I wrote about this recently, because it had been in my thoughts a lot in the past few weeks. When I was 16, and my father got drunk and pointed a gun at me and I got the authorities involved and got put in foster care, one of the stipulations of my parents getting me back was that they attend AA and Al-Anon meetings every week. Between the meetings themselves and the half-hour drive each way, it meant that I was alone in the house for two hours one night a week. I'd never been alone in the house; my mother didn't go much of anywhere, and if she did, it was usually to visit someone I'd want to visit, too. Now, for the first time, I regularly had the house to myself.
We'd recently added on to the house, and the bathroom and my bedroom were separated from the rest of the house by a door and a short hall. Every week, I started off in front of the TV in the living room, as usual, doing homework or reading. Every week, at some point I'd either need to pee or need something from my room. Every week, I went into the addition, thinking that this week wouldn't be like every other week. Every week, after I'd peed or gotten whatever from my room, I would turn around to go back down the short hall. And then I'd stop. You know that feeling you get when someone is standing behind you, being really quiet, and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and you become very aware of how quiet it is? I would get that feeling, only it wasn't someone behind me, it was someone in the other half of the house. I couldn't hear them, and the more I couldn't hear them, the more I strained to hear, and the more sure I was that they knew I was listening for them and were being very quiet.
I knew I was being ridiculous. It happened every week, and there was never anyone there. I knew, but the knowing wasn't as strong as the feeling. I would try to screw up my courage, but I just stood paralyzed, until finally I would give up and step silently to my room, and close the door, and put the chair under the knob. It was never enough. I pulled the shades; not enough. I turned off the light; not enough. Every week, with probably an hour left before my parents returned, I opened my closet door, sat inside, and closed the door. I sat each week for an hour, my mind simultaneously shut down and acutely aware of every sound. It was pretty much pitch black, but just light enough that my eyes played tricks, so I shut my eyes and stopped thinking and listened. My parents would come home, and I would wait until after I heard the car doors slam and the kitchen door open and my parents' voices. Then I'd come out into the living room and sit back down and finish my homework.
Now, on this night at work, I was again sitting on my closet floor in Kentucky. But I wasn't present-day me; I was my 16-year-old self. That was all who existed. I forgot that there was a me after that, that there was an "after that" at all. I wasn't in two places at once, trying to keep my claws in the reality of the present. I had forgotten the present. I couldn't hear anything, and it was loud with silence, somehow. And time stopped.
Someone said my name. I knew the voice, but I couldn't place it, and maybe I was imagining knowing it, a trick of the person in the other half of the house, only they weren't in the other half, they were there, and there was no door on the closet, and they said my name again, and for just a second, the voice belonged to F, my coworker. For a second, I had a coworker, and I was at work, and I was 41, and the relief of it hurt. It was a second, and then I thought - I heard myself think - "I'm making this up." I was still sitting in the closet, only there was no door, there were no walls, and people were around me, and I wanted so much for them to be people I knew that they couldn't possibly be people I knew, and I was trying to think my way out of this, but I couldn't tell what I was making up, I couldn't be sure, and I needed to be sure.
F said, "Do you want to take my hand?" And I did want to. I wanted something here to exist, and I reached out a hand maybe six inches, just short of where the door would be if there were one because I didn't want to touch the door and make that real. I reached out, and then I knew I'd made a hideous mistake, because there was no one there. There was no "there" for someone to be in. There wasn't even a closet and a threatening presence in the room. There was no one but me, nothing but me.
Then someone was holding my hand. And I knew it was real. My mind was still spinning trying to be sure, but somehow I was already sure, and finally my mind believed. I didn't know why I believed at the time, I just knew it had to do with that contact, with someone else being there to lead me back. As always. I hate that I need it, but I do. Nothing new here. But there was something about that moment that I kept replaying, something I could almost see, almost understand, and finally the next day, I realized what it was.
The hand brought me back, as touch always does, because I was rocking, and the hand that was holding mine was moving just slightly out of sync with my rocking. It was sometimes almost the same rhythm, and then almost syncopated, and then a slight gap like a skipped heartbeat, and then almost syncopated again. It wasn't predictable; the pauses and shifts were not consistent. If I were making it up, there'd be a rhythm. I'm not a musician, and I can barely manage syncopation; I sure can't imagine two different patterns at the same time. There had to be an "other" doing this.
Of course, it took longer to be sure who was there, and when I was, and to not second-guess and to believe in reality. Took a lot longer. But at that moment, I didn't even care who it was, because even the person in the other half of the house in Kentucky was better than nothing. I was not alone. I wasn't not dangling over bottomless space just about to fall but forever never moving.
I've noticed arhythm before, and how comforting it is, especially with my cats. I love having a cat groom in my lap, or groom next to my legs on my bed at night. Lick lick lick gnaw, lick lick gnaw, lick lick lick lick pause, lick lick. It's almost rhythmic, but with those unpredictable gaps, changes in the number of licks, longer breaks while the cat gets up, turns around, contemplates for a moment, and settles down on the other side, possibly to continue grooming, possibly to go to sleep. I always found that more calming - not soothing, but calming - than having a cat just sit in my lap. I felt sated, somehow. Now I think I understand: the constant, inconsistent breaks in rhythm are a not-quite-conscious reminder that I am not alone, that this place and time are real.
I didn't know I still needed that. It had been years since I hadn’t known what was real and what wasn't. Years since I believed I made up the world around me. I thought it had been years. What if it's not? What if each flashback, each meltdown, has that moment that extends into eternity when nothing is real, when no one is real, no one was ever real, and I will never be not alone, was never not alone? I don't remember that moment clearly each time; I just remember the touch and the stabbing relief that comes with the touch, flooding over me and almost drowning me with an intensity that makes no sense. But I remember that moment from Wednesday night, and I remember it the way you remember something that happens all the time, the way you remember taking your pill with breakfast or reaching for your towel after a bath. I remember other flashbacks recently where I was sitting in the closet, and then a loud, confusing, tornado-like shift and I'm back, and I'm crying with relief, and it the crying doesn't seem to have anything to do with remembering the closet. I don't know for sure what was in those tornados. But now I suspect, not quite trusting my suspicions, but still suspecting. I also don't trust myself to look too closely, not while I'm alone, at least, because if that blank abyss is there all the time inside me waiting to scream and swallow me, I don't think I'm ready to think about it. Not without a hand to lead me back.
Originally posted at http://violetcheetah.dreamwidth.org/71292.html. Feel free to comment there
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I can't get out of flashbacks by myself. I hate this; I hate being needy, I hate the presumption my brain jumps to afterward that I'm being a drama queen, that I'm acting out for the attention. I should be able to get myself back to the present - to only the present - on my own, by touching objects on a shelf, or the shelf itself, or the floor if I'm sitting, which I usually am. These things are in the present, and they should ground me, but they never do. I need someone's touch. I need a hand on my shoulder, a hand taking my own hand, a voice from here, from now.
Monday night I was alone. Actually, it started on the walk back home from the train, because I'd shut off that part of myself while I was at work, and tried to keep it off while I was on the train, but I could feel myself hovering above my left shoulder. I was cold on the short walk home, and I don't know whether the impending meltdown caused me to be colder, or whether it was actually that cold out and that added to the meltdown. I got in the door, sat on the kitchen floor to give the cats their dinner, and couldn't hold the kibble scoop still. I scooped the kibble out with my hand, a single closed-fistful for each cat, and then I sat, restlessly switching between lotus and having my knees drawn up further, my hands and arms doing the maddening thing where they are never still. How can I be a drama queen when I'm doing this alone? Of course, I could just be doing it now to convince myself I'm not a drama queen.
It lasted nearly an hour. After fifteen minutes or so, I was able to get up and move to my bedroom and sit on my bed, and rub the satin binding on my blanket, which soothes but does not "present" me because I had satin-bound blankets as a child; that's why it soothes now, because it did then. Peter jumped up at some point, and then Chess. She wanted more food, of course, and purred loudly in front of me, deep but trilly, importunate. She paced. She shoved her head against my knee, against my restless elbow, against my hand when I could offer it. That grounded me, finally, something about that touch. What's the point of being a drama queen in front of your cats? They don't give a crap that you're freaking out.
I dreamed about Kentucky that night, but Tuesday was my day off, and I was going to play in M's yard all day, and I was able to push the dream away and enjoy the day. That night there were other dreams, walking, searching dreams, part Kentucky, part post-apocalyptic. I woke with my father crying drunkenly and my mother cooking dinner and looking over her shoulder at me accusingly for making him upset, and I knew what was coming after his crying jag. A friend called, under the weather and having to cancel a meeting that day, and I was disappointed, and also worried about him, but at least the worry and disappointment were in the present. I expected a meltdown at work, but work was pretty good, actually. It was good to be busy - physically and mentally - and there's something grounding about being annoyed at the machines when they jam or malfunction, and something communal about going through the annoyance with your co-workers.
Then there was no more mail. I went with three other people to the other end of the building to set up machines there for a different mail run. I thought we'd be getting the mail to run as soon as we set up. We didn't. And minutes went by, and we still didn't. I get nervous when I'm not doing anything. Afraid I'm going to get yelled at for slacking off, being lazy. I don't actually get yelled at, ever; sometimes there's just a slow day and we stand around for 20 minutes, and that's just part of the ebb and flow. I killed some time by putting adhesive label holders on the machine I'd be using, because the ones already there were ripped and nearly useless, and it's a nice, soothing, anal-retentive thing to do, and it also feels like a nice thing to do, because it's not just for me, but for whoever else uses the machine after me. I did the front half of the machine, and then it was break time, and then we came back from break, and I expected mail to be waiting for us. It wasn't.
The supervisor down there didn't come by, and I wondered if he even knew we'd been sent back to his area instead of our usual beat. Maybe he'd only meant for us to prep and then go back where we usually work. I labeled the other half of the machine. I would have started on the second machine, but I didn't have any label holders left. The other three people were standing around chatting, and I sat down near them, safety in numbers. It had been probably 45 minutes since we'd come back from break, and we'd done nothing. This couldn't be right. The light seemed to get brighter, the ambient sounds and conversation louder, and I knew what was happening, I knew I shouldn't close my eyes, and for a while I didn't, but it was so bright, and then I was just crushingly tired, and then I stopped being able to follow the conversation, the words stopped fitting together, and someone was going to come yell at us, and I gave up.
I don't usually completely lose track of the present when I have a flashback. Usually, they don't even seem like flashbacks because the place where half of my mind goes isn't a single place or time or event, it's just a feeling, an "affect," a sensation, an impendingness. I'm nowhere. I'm in that place between worlds in The Magician's Nephew, where time doesn't exist and nothing happens but it's going to happen. I think this started off that way, but then I was in a place. But I was in a place where time hadn't existed: the floor of my closet in Kentucky.
I wrote about this recently, because it had been in my thoughts a lot in the past few weeks. When I was 16, and my father got drunk and pointed a gun at me and I got the authorities involved and got put in foster care, one of the stipulations of my parents getting me back was that they attend AA and Al-Anon meetings every week. Between the meetings themselves and the half-hour drive each way, it meant that I was alone in the house for two hours one night a week. I'd never been alone in the house; my mother didn't go much of anywhere, and if she did, it was usually to visit someone I'd want to visit, too. Now, for the first time, I regularly had the house to myself.
We'd recently added on to the house, and the bathroom and my bedroom were separated from the rest of the house by a door and a short hall. Every week, I started off in front of the TV in the living room, as usual, doing homework or reading. Every week, at some point I'd either need to pee or need something from my room. Every week, I went into the addition, thinking that this week wouldn't be like every other week. Every week, after I'd peed or gotten whatever from my room, I would turn around to go back down the short hall. And then I'd stop. You know that feeling you get when someone is standing behind you, being really quiet, and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and you become very aware of how quiet it is? I would get that feeling, only it wasn't someone behind me, it was someone in the other half of the house. I couldn't hear them, and the more I couldn't hear them, the more I strained to hear, and the more sure I was that they knew I was listening for them and were being very quiet.
I knew I was being ridiculous. It happened every week, and there was never anyone there. I knew, but the knowing wasn't as strong as the feeling. I would try to screw up my courage, but I just stood paralyzed, until finally I would give up and step silently to my room, and close the door, and put the chair under the knob. It was never enough. I pulled the shades; not enough. I turned off the light; not enough. Every week, with probably an hour left before my parents returned, I opened my closet door, sat inside, and closed the door. I sat each week for an hour, my mind simultaneously shut down and acutely aware of every sound. It was pretty much pitch black, but just light enough that my eyes played tricks, so I shut my eyes and stopped thinking and listened. My parents would come home, and I would wait until after I heard the car doors slam and the kitchen door open and my parents' voices. Then I'd come out into the living room and sit back down and finish my homework.
Now, on this night at work, I was again sitting on my closet floor in Kentucky. But I wasn't present-day me; I was my 16-year-old self. That was all who existed. I forgot that there was a me after that, that there was an "after that" at all. I wasn't in two places at once, trying to keep my claws in the reality of the present. I had forgotten the present. I couldn't hear anything, and it was loud with silence, somehow. And time stopped.
Someone said my name. I knew the voice, but I couldn't place it, and maybe I was imagining knowing it, a trick of the person in the other half of the house, only they weren't in the other half, they were there, and there was no door on the closet, and they said my name again, and for just a second, the voice belonged to F, my coworker. For a second, I had a coworker, and I was at work, and I was 41, and the relief of it hurt. It was a second, and then I thought - I heard myself think - "I'm making this up." I was still sitting in the closet, only there was no door, there were no walls, and people were around me, and I wanted so much for them to be people I knew that they couldn't possibly be people I knew, and I was trying to think my way out of this, but I couldn't tell what I was making up, I couldn't be sure, and I needed to be sure.
F said, "Do you want to take my hand?" And I did want to. I wanted something here to exist, and I reached out a hand maybe six inches, just short of where the door would be if there were one because I didn't want to touch the door and make that real. I reached out, and then I knew I'd made a hideous mistake, because there was no one there. There was no "there" for someone to be in. There wasn't even a closet and a threatening presence in the room. There was no one but me, nothing but me.
Then someone was holding my hand. And I knew it was real. My mind was still spinning trying to be sure, but somehow I was already sure, and finally my mind believed. I didn't know why I believed at the time, I just knew it had to do with that contact, with someone else being there to lead me back. As always. I hate that I need it, but I do. Nothing new here. But there was something about that moment that I kept replaying, something I could almost see, almost understand, and finally the next day, I realized what it was.
The hand brought me back, as touch always does, because I was rocking, and the hand that was holding mine was moving just slightly out of sync with my rocking. It was sometimes almost the same rhythm, and then almost syncopated, and then a slight gap like a skipped heartbeat, and then almost syncopated again. It wasn't predictable; the pauses and shifts were not consistent. If I were making it up, there'd be a rhythm. I'm not a musician, and I can barely manage syncopation; I sure can't imagine two different patterns at the same time. There had to be an "other" doing this.
Of course, it took longer to be sure who was there, and when I was, and to not second-guess and to believe in reality. Took a lot longer. But at that moment, I didn't even care who it was, because even the person in the other half of the house in Kentucky was better than nothing. I was not alone. I wasn't not dangling over bottomless space just about to fall but forever never moving.
I've noticed arhythm before, and how comforting it is, especially with my cats. I love having a cat groom in my lap, or groom next to my legs on my bed at night. Lick lick lick gnaw, lick lick gnaw, lick lick lick lick pause, lick lick. It's almost rhythmic, but with those unpredictable gaps, changes in the number of licks, longer breaks while the cat gets up, turns around, contemplates for a moment, and settles down on the other side, possibly to continue grooming, possibly to go to sleep. I always found that more calming - not soothing, but calming - than having a cat just sit in my lap. I felt sated, somehow. Now I think I understand: the constant, inconsistent breaks in rhythm are a not-quite-conscious reminder that I am not alone, that this place and time are real.
I didn't know I still needed that. It had been years since I hadn’t known what was real and what wasn't. Years since I believed I made up the world around me. I thought it had been years. What if it's not? What if each flashback, each meltdown, has that moment that extends into eternity when nothing is real, when no one is real, no one was ever real, and I will never be not alone, was never not alone? I don't remember that moment clearly each time; I just remember the touch and the stabbing relief that comes with the touch, flooding over me and almost drowning me with an intensity that makes no sense. But I remember that moment from Wednesday night, and I remember it the way you remember something that happens all the time, the way you remember taking your pill with breakfast or reaching for your towel after a bath. I remember other flashbacks recently where I was sitting in the closet, and then a loud, confusing, tornado-like shift and I'm back, and I'm crying with relief, and it the crying doesn't seem to have anything to do with remembering the closet. I don't know for sure what was in those tornados. But now I suspect, not quite trusting my suspicions, but still suspecting. I also don't trust myself to look too closely, not while I'm alone, at least, because if that blank abyss is there all the time inside me waiting to scream and swallow me, I don't think I'm ready to think about it. Not without a hand to lead me back.
Originally posted at http://violetcheetah.dreamwidth.org/71292.html. Feel free to comment there
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