The Bad Things, not naming them, and how I've been coping

Read if you're also unwell.

What I find effective, when things really start to go sideways, is rage-wallpapering. That’s what I did today, when something in my body needed — and I mean needed — to hold an edge against another edge and align them perfectly. The roundish white flower next to the butterfly that leans left, not the butterfly that leans right, needed to lie very still on my laundry room wall, while I lined up the curving dark line which becomes its stem when I sweep my hand over the long strip, smoothing left to right, top to bottom. It was so satisfying.

My new therapist, during appointment number one, gave me a new diagnosis: complex PTSD. I called him because I needed someone to talk to anyway, and something bad happened that forced the issue. It’s usually how it goes with therapy. We all know we need someone, but we don’t make the call until we feel afraid enough of ourselves. What I want to say is that I haven’t had the words; maybe you’ve noticed or maybe you haven’t. But trauma kicks the brain offline, and I’ve been wholly uncreative. Most of me has wanted to stay non-verbal, in a writing sense. A small part of me has been trying to resuscitate her. This essay is me resisting myself or reviving myself, I’m not sure which.

I was always good at Tetris and geometry and those test questions that measured what was called “spatial reasoning,” remember them? Here is a weird-looking shape. Which of these other shapes can be rotated to fit? I never missed, because my brain took each block and turned it around and around, dropping the ones that would never work. Feeling a delicious satisfaction finding the one that did, like the right key fitting a lock.

I can get on okay in my life knowing that every lock has a key and every wallpaper flower gets a stem. Which is a problem. Keys get lost, and after buying five rolls of that wallpaper, I didn’t have enough to cover the final few weird spaces with the proper pieces. I had plenty of scraps. Just not the right sections of the pattern. My methodical smoothing shifted. Rage-wallpapering makes its own rules: it starts flying through the project, has to crumple up pieces that irrevocably stick to itself, yells Fuck! at least once per roll. Rage-wallpapering takes the box cutter and slashes wrong parts together and smashes stems onto butterflies while standing on the washing machine, having a vague sense it would be very bad to fall off the washer with an open blade in hand but doing it anyway because everyone has at some point in the game wanted to force the wrong Tetris pieces into the wrong spaces and yell, “Why does it have to be this fucking hard?”

I’ve never had a Bad Thing shut me up like this before. It’s much more my habit to process even the hardest things through writing, to share my stories. I want to be gentle with myself here; I know I don’t owe anyone details of my personal life. And yet not writing about what happened feels like I’m wearing a coat that doesn’t fit, but I can’t manage to take it off. Something about the coat, though very itchy and not at all my color, feels safe.

It’s tempting to tally up the rest of the bad things happening in the world to prove I don’t need to share mine in granular detail to be relatable; we are microdosing trauma on a global scale every day, if we stay up on the news. But let’s not name the horrors this time. Just this once, let’s unname them and let’s agree we are all bearing more emotionally than we can healthily bear, we are collectively unwell, and the world feels exceptionally out of control. We are standing on washers with razor blades. It was also midnight when I did this.

My stomach’s been hurting again, like it used to when I was married. I had stomachaches for about ten years. Back then, I saw a gastroenterologist three times because I couldn’t pinpoint or get rid of the ache. Once, she asked me how my home life was. I said the marriage wasn’t great, but I didn’t yet have the language to detail years of emotional abuse. She suggested I try eliminating certain foods. I took allergy tests. I took way too many antacid pills. Still, so many health professionals don’t understand how health is impacted by trauma. Thank God for people like Gabor Mate, shining invaluable light on the way our bodies repackage trauma into disease and chronic conditions.

Turns out I just needed a home without an angry man inside of it. My stomach hasn’t hurt like this in the six years since. This time, instead of seeing a specialist, I’m listening to it tell me the truth. My body is pulling old volumes off the shelf and reading my story back to me. I am in the fetal position recounting the years I lived knowing my heart wasn’t safe. And those feelings are back. Safety feels further away than it did last year. I feel less hope in recovering it. I am pasting the wrong pieces of the pattern together, standing on the washer with an open blade. I have lost the plot, and I am not writing.

But also, I am writing this, because I suspect you might feel like I do, like there is a safety you are starting to forget you once had. Like it was a mirage in a desert, wavy and blurred and gone once you got a bit further. I think the main thing is not to spend too much time wondering whether safety is an illusion and trying to land hard on an answer. Whether we are safe cannot be answered in the way I want it to be. Maybe the main thing, or even simply the first thing, is to climb down off the washer and put down the blade. Call the therapist. Order another roll. Patiently wait for pieces that fit. Or leave empty space in the picture and call it good. Not everything fits. We can survive the not-fitting.

What we might not survive is ignoring the stories our bodies are reading aloud to us in the night. Self-compassion is the cup we can sip from when the ache starts. I am only one small woman. I can’t make all the pieces fit. I can’t predict what’s to come. I will speak kindly into the unknown, unforeseeable spaces ahead. And I will try to forgive myself for what I didn’t know, what I missed, what I tolerated, what I accepted as the truth when it wasn’t. I will use the f-word more and more because it gives voice to an anger I buried for decades.

What’s satisfying about the right key turning in a lock is not getting the lock to open. It’s getting the door to open that was kept closed by the lock. And walking through doors is sometimes vulnerable. I just moved, and that feels very vulnerable. My door is white and I have two keys that fit. There are no angry men in my home, and I sometimes have a stomachache. I also have one beautiful laundry room with a writing desk and a window AC. This means I plan to write more. Again.

You are the Beloved,

Leslie

P.S. The wallpaper, peel-and-stick of course, deserves a mention.