“Some people’s lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. . . . It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.”
—Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror
The first time my life stopped I was 3 ½ years old. I remember being nudged out my brothers bedroom door, the click of the latch as it slid into place. There was no going back. I stood in the hallway amid the winter clothes line hung heavy with drying sheets not knowing how to go forward. It seems like an eternity standing stock still breathing in the scent of detergent before I could move toward the stairwell and down the stairs.
Life went on, yes, but the me I knew was gone. I wondered who I was now after that horrid thing happened. I never found that little girl again except in times of great pain and chaos.
Life became a series of stops and starts, every time I had a flashback or a vivid nightmare straight from childhood, or a new sexual event like the flasher at the City Island Library in Daytona Beach, or sexual harassment at work that cost me a job. Each time I shattered the job of picking up the pieces fell to me. And life went on, until it stopped again.
In the spring of 2017 I made a decision, well several decisions, that have brought me to a healing place in my life. I came back to North Carolina to try one more time to live here without falling apart. This time I came to Raleigh. A new start. The Charlotte area had become for me a maze of anguish and stumbling blocks and painful memories triggering me left and right.
It has been difficult still for many reasons. For one, I brought me and all my baggage with me, unaware how much I still carried. Add in the uncertainty of not having any fixed foundation beneath my feet and I was again on my way downhill. I arrived at my friend Maria’s house in the spring, and by September 2017 I admitted myself for my 12th psych ward stay since I was 20 years old.
I was frantic, frightened, and on the edge of hopelessness.
The rest of the story later.
The Road Forward 