This is the hardest part of this piece to write. I want to yadda yadda yadda over it because I’m so embarrassed, so ashamed, of what I was capable of. And the thing is, I almost have to yadda yadda yadda over it because my memory of exactly how this played out, of how I tucked my wagging tail and submitted, is hazy, the lens clouded. The humiliation, though, rings loud and clear.
One Saturday afternoon my husband and I were browsing in a home furnishings store when I heard a familiar voice. I followed the voice to its source and discovered it was H. He was there with his partner, N (not his real initial). They had driven to this college town from our collective hometown for a day of shopping, sightseeing, and dining.
What is there to say except I made nice. I felt the awareness of what H had done to me rear its head in my consciousness. A part of me assumed that I’d behave accordingly, perhaps turn on my heel and storm off, maybe plant my feet, cross my arms, and shoot him daggers until he slunk out of the store. Or make a scene and spew at him all the words I should have said when he confessed, whatever those might have been. But I didn’t do any of these things. Instead, I resisted that awareness until it yielded and backed so far into the recesses of my mind that, over laughter and chit chat, my husband and I broke bread at a local restaurant with H and his partner that evening. At one point H said something—I wish I could remember what—that stirred my cognizance of what I was so diligently working to deny. H caught my reaction (and I suspect he said this thing on purpose to test the waters) and I don’t think it was my imagination that he was holding his breath to see if it finally would tip me to acknowledge the thing—the elephant in the room. I waved it away like a pesky fly; H looked incredulous. With that, the stage was set to take the Big Pretend to the championship level. Over the next couple of years, my husband and I would run into H and his partner while out and about and then dine with them several times. When my husband and I bought our first house, H happened to be in town and he helped us move in. When H and his partner moved to the east coast, we exchanged Christmas cards every year. And when social media came along, we connected there.
For two decades I kept H’s confession buried in my subconscious. The flashbacks would surface, but only rarely, and in them, the perpetrator was anonymous, blank-faced. Again, I blew them off as recurring bad dreams. The intense anxiety and terror they generated, I simply absorbed. Since childhood, thanks to multiple traumatic experiences and a family legacy of denial and avoidance, the everyday emotional terrain I navigated had consisted of anxiety, panic, depression, and free-floating fear alternating with dissociation. This was my normal. In my thirties, a psychologist would tell me that I exhibited symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—I wouldn’t be treated for it (for Complex PTSD, precisely) until I was in my forties. For someone like me, what was one more trauma shoved into the attic of my brain like a tacky lamp?
To be continued ….
This Must Be Normal 