Coming Back Up

On a perfectly miserable February afternoon, I walked out of a Michigan psych ward, clutching my plastic bag of possessions in one hand and my mother’s arm with the other, and blinking like a baby animal in the snow-gray light. My retinas burned. It was a significant change from the sterile fluorescents that had been my only source of light for the past several days.

Limited light at that. Rationed light. The library of the ward (a sad stack of books, board games, and magazines in one corner of the common area) offered a couple historical fiction paperbacks that I’d eaten entirely through by my second night there. I was ravenous for escape, but the lights in my room were turned off at exactly 9:30pm by the nurse who stenciled her eyebrows on, sharp and exacting upside-down V’s – the sharpest thing, without a doubt, on the ward.

The tranquilizers that I’d been given in the emergency room were strong. I couldn’t stand without help for a while, and so it was a full day before I was permitted to shower. I wasn’t allowed to have a razor. This hadn’t occurred to me, and as my request was denied, I thought it would bother me, to not be able to scrape the errant fuzz from my shins and armpits. I wanted to be clean, damnit. Clean and new and smooth. Actually, I wanted to skin myself alive; since these are not the things that you say to the nurse in the psych ward, I shut my mouth and took the proffered sandpapery towel.

But the quick bliss of getting under hot water undid me. I stood on the dingy yellow tile, letting the water flow over my matted hair, down my body, anointing me with warmth and disinfection. I hadn’t taken a shower since I was raped. I also hadn’t cried. Facing the shower wall, away from the nurse who sat angled away from me reading a magazine, but always within earshot – I sobbed as quietly as I could manage. The scalding water took my tears and coaxed them down my body, down the death spiral of the drain. I hadn’t felt like a human being in weeks. I’ve never taken a hot shower for granted again.

I’ll be good now, I promised myself in that shower. I will fix what’s broken inside of me, and I’ll take my meds and go back to school and make my parents proud.

As it turned out, these were not promises I could immediately keep. I left the psych ward and had some more destruction left to go. I wasn’t able to deal with this particular wound or that deep pain, and so it dealt with me. Fast forward a few years, and I was working as a server at a restaurant in my hometown. I’d dropped out of college. I’d recently been engaged to a very frightening person. I was drinking too much and having careless flings with guys I met at the bar. I didn’t think about the future, because I was too tired. I sort of just assumed that I would die soon. I was 22 years old and matter-of-factly acknowledged to myself that I wouldn’t see 30. Maybe not even 25.

Eventually, the restaurant hired a cute, moody boy who played guitar and wrote me songs. He did way too many drugs, but he wasn’t frightening, and I often managed to sleep next to him without any nightmares. We moved into a tiny apartment together, and I told myself that I could fall in love, and that everything would be all right.

It wasn’t. One busy Friday night around Christmas, while greeting a six-top, I turned and almost ran directly into another guest – a very tall, very pale young man who looked at me unsmiling and asked a question. Probably where the bathroom was or something. I still don’t know, because all I could hear was the pitch of his voice: low and thunderous, landing in a vice grip on both sides of my spine, sending terror ringing through me entirely. All I could see was the face of the towering, pale man from four years ago, who’d been the first one to introduce me to those triplets named fear, shame, revulsion. A reunion that would be repeated without mercy. One that would live in the haunted house of my numb, scarred body until I could figure out the necessary ingredients for exorcism.

I don’t remember screaming and I don’t remember dropping the tray of water glasses all over the six-top. I do remember sitting in my manager’s office, both fists stuffed against my face, concentrating on not screaming. I don’t remember my mother coming to pick me up from work. I do remember looking at her beautiful, worry-etched face and thinking: I am killing my mother. I am killing myself. This shame will kill me. This fear will eat me alive.

My coworkers covered my shift the next day, and the next. On the third day I got up from bed and spent the morning researching treatment facilities. I called my parents that evening and explained to them what I wanted to do, and that I would need their help with insurance. I called my boss next and explained to her, too. When the cute guitarist got home I let him know that I would be leaving in the morning. He protested. Couldn’t I just take a little time off work to chill out? This seemed dramatic to him. Just stay here, baby. We’ll figure it out together.

I was single when I boarded the train to rehab. The place I was going only treated women, and specialized in addiction, eating disorders, and PTSD. The day was the same snow-gray that I remembered from the psych ward, and it made me panic a little. When I arrived, I sat for a long time outside the welcome center, thinking about what had brought me here, and if there was still time to go back. Would the guitarist have packed up his things already? Would my parents understand? If I went through that door, would I ever come back out?

The next morning, my assigned case worker asked me to talk a little bit about why I was here. I don’t want to die, I told her. My life has become unmanageable. All I know is fear and shame. I don’t want to live like this, and I don’t want to die. I need help.

In a dance movement therapy group session, the therapist asked us to imagine what our lives would look like as a dance: before trauma, the moment of that trauma’s deepest pit, and what recovery from the trauma might feel like. After the session, I went up to talk with her. She wore rows and rows of thin gold bangles on her wrists, like gauntlets, and her dreadlocks were laced with bright glass beads that caught the winter sunlight coming in from the studio’s windows. Why do you do this? I wanted to know. Is this always what you wanted to do? Her movements in the session had looked to me like a professional dancer’s. I was curious.

She smiled at me and thought for a moment. No, not always. At some point I realized that what I really wanted was to help women heal themselves. And that was because I spent a long time trying to heal the world in bigger, more abstract ways. But I understood eventually that by sending out a woman who has been given a good mirror to her own power and resilience – sending that woman back out into the world and into her community, with her new weapons and knowledge and her own peace – that she would begin to heal other people, too. And that one woman becomes five people seeking healing, and those five people become fifty, and pretty soon – there’s just less pain and sickness and war going around.

She touched my hand lightly, and I left the studio, holding those words carefully to my chest, and never saw her again. The next day my parents’ insurance called to inform the center that since I wasn’t presenting with immediate suicidality anymore, I’d have to either check out of treatment or begin paying a daily fee of almost a thousand dollars. A few hours later, I was headed in a kind staffer’s van to my sister’s apartment close by, so that I could catch the train home that night.

Six days in that place had taught me how to stay alive, and made it possible to re-inhabit my body. I was grateful and exhausted and feeling emotionally like I’d been run over by a truck. I drank tea in my sister’s kitchen and watched her cube sweet potatoes for a stew while she told me about her day at work. I felt myself get free a little then, honestly – something inside me rumbled back onto its tracks. I’d spent six days in a crucible made up of other women. All of us were there because we didn’t want to die. That commonality, of just stubborn refusal to give up, bound us to each other; in six days I’d cried and screamed and sang and prayed and danced with them, all things that living people do, all things that we do when we haven’t given up on this gift that is our life. Not today. Not yet.

It occurred to me on the train home that freedom isn’t always freedom from fear. Freedom exists where there is space for healing, and often fear lives there, too. I was watching the moon above the railroad tracks, thinking about the very different kind of fear I’d felt on the way here: would things be the same? And the answer: no, never again.

I am always carrying the answer I was given by the dance therapist in rehab. That one free woman makes five. That five free women makes fifty. That we bring healing for the world and hope for the end of every war back with us, from those journeys through the underworld, answers and poems and stories unfolding from us the minute we hit the sun, still blinking – shocked, frankly, that we made it out alive. And intent on sending ladders back down for the others.