I tried to bargain it in my mind just to make it bearable.“If I do all my chores here, say the things in group and therapy that make it seem like I’m healing, and don’t cause any trouble,” I told myself,“maybe they’ll sign me out early.” But Hawthorne Ridge Rehab doesn’t care about bargains. Hawthorne Ridge Rehab cares about whether you’re breathing and telling the truth, and I’m actually bad at both apparently.
The panic attacks and shut-downs still sneak up on me.I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine. Thensomeone drops a pan, and it’s too loud, and I’m on the floor with my hands over my ears, back on the gravel outside of his car that night. Or someone’s cologne will be a little too musky, and I’m back in a bedroom I never want to see again, locked doors, not being able to move, breathing raggedly. Sometimes it’s quieter triggers, just the way a staff member says my name and my body answers on command, freezing up like I’m in trouble. Then my mind leaves my limbs, and I watch myself from across the room, getting smaller by the second, wanting to escape whatever is happening.
They’ve tried all the things. Giving me rubber bands to snap against my wrist when I start to float. Sending me outside to name shit I see and smell and feel and hear. Making me read a letter I wrote to myself when I first got here, like it’ll do anything but remind me that I’m probably in a worse state right now than I was when I arrived.
When Simone was finally able to come visit, she’d sneak in my favorite snacks because she knew the only five foods I’ll touch when I’m depressed. She talked to me like we weren’t here, like I could just walk out of those doors with her and go shopping like it was a regular Saturday afternoon together. She doesn’t make me feel broken, even if that’s allIfeel.
Nights are the hardest. No one can keep you safe from your own head at two a.m. I lie there and count the lines in the ceiling tiles. I recite stupid song lyrics to get my mind to focus on anything else but the awful way I feel. I try that 5-4-3-2-1 thing that I can never get fully through without still feeling like I was on the verge of a panic attack. Sometimes I have to go to the night nurse’s station and beg for Trazodone just to get some sleep.
Some days, I feel like a person under construction, and not in a cute way—caution tape everywhere. And some days, I feel like I’m kind of a person again. I don’t know which scares me more.
57
Lydia
Dr. Raina is not at all what I expected a therapist to be like. She’s sweet and not pushy or overtly fake. She makes it feel easy to trust her. She’s always sitting cross-legged, leaning back in her chair like that one cool teacher you had in high school.
The first time I met her, I thought that I could hide from her by smiling and saying all those pretty words I learned looked good on paper, but I was wrong. Somehow, she knows how to make me willingly hand her the mask I keep on and stop faking it like I’ve been doing since I got here.
I’m sitting here wearing the same sweatshirt for the third day in a row because I haven’t had the energy to take care of myself recently. I’m just in one of those low waves lately.
“You look tired,” she says, which stupidly makes me get choked up anytime someone shows the smallest amount of care towards me. All these emotions just sit on top of my chest now because there’s no drugs in my system to cover them up.
“I am,” I say.
We always start off with some small breathing exercises I pretend are annoying but secretly have realized help.
“I was thinking we could do a little timeline work,” she says. “We’ve been going over a lot of the big things and have made some pretty good progress, I think. Maybe today we can work on forming a timeline of your memories. Start at your childhood and—”
“I don’t remember a lot,” I say before she can even finish the sentence. “Before the accident. Before like…eight? There aren’t that many memories. There’s just flashes of things or feelings or sensations, but it’s basically all just a fog.”
“That’s okay,” she says, trying to reassure me. “Trauma can mess with memory sometimes. Sometimes our brains store certain memories and information away to protect us at the time, and then it kind of just stays that way if we never address it and try to bring them back out. It’s a survival skill of the mind in a sense.”
Hearing that it’s not my fault I don’t remember, and that I’m not broken or going crazy because I can’t pull out any earlier memories, gives me some relief.
“It’s not uncommon for early memories to be sparse,” she continues. “We can still work with what we have. Sometimes when we bring a piece up, other pieces come too. Sometimes they don’t, and that’s okay. They come when they’re ready to come. Whenyou’reready for them to come.”
She draws a line on a sheet of paper and hands me the marker. “We can mark anchors,” she says. “Make a timeline of the bigger events you can remember, turning points in your life, the good and bad. Pick whatever feels doable today.”
The marker feels heavy. I don’t want to writeany of those words. I also don’t want them to keep owning dangerous space in my mind, so I put dots where I can manage them and leave space where I can’t. By the time I’m half way through, the paper starts to look too small, like there’s not enough room for all of the shit I could put on it.
“Okay,” she says. “Can you tell me one small thing from before the accident?”
“I don’t really know,” I say automatically, like my brain already wants to reject this exercise.
“Close your eyes,” she suggests. “If you want. See if your mind can carefully pull out anything for us to work with. It can be small or big, and then maybe we can use it as a starting point to pull other pieces that connect.”
I do it, and after doing a couple of her techniques to trigger suppressed memories, the first thing that comes to me is a smell—wood chippings and metal, like from a playground. Then a feeling—being pushed on a swing. Then sound finally—my dad’s voice…behind me…laughing.
I shake my head, quickly pulling back out of the memory.
“What did you see that made you retreat just now?”
I’m quiet for a moment, trying to still fit the puzzle together in my head, thinking that must be the wrong piece. “Um, it was my dad and me…at a playground…laughing.”
“What part of that scared you?”
I hate that she knows it scared me. How does she always know?
