I AM: If Ever There Was A Time

Trigger Warning: This essay contains discussion of trauma, sexual assault, depression, and suicidal ideation. Reader discretion is advised.

REPRINT FROM JANUARY 2023

I had therapy today.

But the truth is, every day is therapy day. There is no border where treatment stops and living begins. Navigating all that I am has been my lifelong occupation. I have existed in a state of constant self-examination for so long that ordinary conversation feels foreign. While others talk about errands or weather, I am tracking my thoughts, monitoring my breath, replaying memories, anticipating collapse. I am always inside.

For more than ten years, I chased ideas instead of goals. I moved toward things without naming them, afraid that definition would expose how little faith I had in my own durability. I did not create plans. I mistook motion for progress and endurance for purpose. I told myself that survival was enough.

Every day is therapy day. There is no border where treatment stops and living begins.

In the earliest days of my adulthood, I lived in terror. Afraid of my thoughts. Afraid of my body. Afraid of people. Afraid of stillness. Afraid of movement. I felt alone in a way that had weight and gravity, like being buried upright in wet soil, listening to a world that continued above me while I struggled to breathe.

The first time I met what would later be the darkness was mid-January, 1994. I was eighteen, a senior in high school, grounded. I had lied to my parents, saying I was staying at a friend’s house, and went to a party instead. I was with someone who got caught trying to buy alcohol with her sister’s stolen ID. I remember thinking it was a terrible idea even then. None of that mattered.

I had been the victim of a crime. My life changed that night, not because of grounding or phone restrictions, but because something inside me cracked open and never sealed properly. I did not want to leave my house. I did not want friends. I did not want conversation. I wanted containment. I wanted quiet. I wanted to disappear without dying.

The first two weeks of January I lived entirely in my bedroom. We were still out of school, so I did not have to perform normalcy. I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling for hours. Time stopped behaving properly. Minutes stretched and collapsed. I tried to study. I could not read. I could not follow a paragraph. I could not write sentences.

When I picked up a pen, I did not write words. I drew lines.

My notebooks filled with architectural shapes. Boxes within boxes. Words trapped and sometimes violently crossed out. Page after page. No progress. I stopped eating without deciding to. Hunger seemed irrelevant. Outside my window the snow had been churned into muddy slush. I watched it and breathed out slow, exasperated sighs as if my lungs were tired of participating.

At some point, I negotiated a short trip to Blockbuster Video. I do not remember if I needed a sibling escort. I probably did. Across the parking lot was a pay phone. The metal was cold. The cord was heavy. The receiver smelled faintly of something sour and public.

I called the person who hurt me.

I do not know what I believed the call would give me. Closure? Proof that I was not insane? I was traumatized, disoriented, saturated with guilt and shame. I had no self-respect left. It was like being granted temporary freedom and immediately using it to hurt myself because I had no tools for anything else.

I do not remember the exact words I said. Who do you think you are. What were you thinking. How could you do that. What am I supposed to do now.

The response came sharp and efficient. You wanted it. You got what you wanted. This is not my problem. Leave me alone.

The dial tone arrived like a scream.

“The dial tone arrived like a scream. It obliterated any illusion I would be helped or spared.”

—

I became acutely aware of my body. The cold air swirling around me. I was dressed for a quick errand, not for standing outside in January. The cold slipped through my jacket, through the buttons of my shirt, and bit my skin. It felt deliberate.

That was the moment the blackness arrived. Not sadness. Not fear. Something heavier, absolute, that did not negotiate or argue. I would meet it again and again over the years, so many times I lost count. That night it swallowed me whole.

The world did not end. Cars passed. People went in and out of the video store. Families argued about which movie to rent. Life continued without me.

It felt as if someone had lowered a glass bell jar over my head and sealed it tight. Inside it, everything sounded muffled and warped. My own breathing felt too loud. Outside it, life continued untouched.

I carried that bell jar home. Through high school. Into adulthood. It appeared and disappeared. Sometimes light slipped in. Sometimes it descended completely, and I forgot there had ever been another way to breathe.

Looking back with decades of therapy behind me, I can trace a line from that pay phone to everything that followed. The fear of my own mind. Hypervigilance. Self-blame that felt familiar. The compulsive need to understand myself in order to survive myself. A long apprenticeship to endurance.

“December is a door that swings wide, inviting the darkness back.”

—

Perhaps survival is the work. Not eradication, but witness. Not cure, but endurance. To live under the bell jar while remembering that air once existed beyond it. To keep writing. To keep naming. To keep standing in the cold long enough to feel it and still choose to walk back inside.

I had therapy today.

Tomorrow, I will have it again.