#note at 10am i am in a lecture. i leave at 11 go home reach 12 grab mayne get hack at 1

[ravs6709]

Almost had a breakdown in the subway 🩵

[lxvxjxnkie]

Facing up

In January I broke up with the guy I was seeing, because it was going to take a ton of energy to bring him up to speed on my emotional history, and it was energy I needed for dealing with that history.

It was a seven month wait to see a psychologist who had the skillset I needed. I knew I was in trouble by June last year.  A couple of things stand out: there’s an aboutness to my experience of depression; I can trace it back to a trigger event, and there’s often a specific theme to my ruminations. Secondly, it doesn’t respond to medication. My mood, confidence, day-to-day experience of life is improved on medication, but I’m still stuck, avoiding a major decision and not getting any writing done.

I’ve seen a psychiatrist who said I’m not bipolar.

Finally, about four weeks ago, I had my first appointment with the psychologist. It went well, but we barely scratched the surface. He said, straight up, that he thinks there’s complex trauma playing out.

I knew that already. I have always avoided writing that I have primary trauma. I’ve talked about intergenerational trauma, paying deference to my primary parent’s experience of domestic violence in her childhood.

But now it’s time to face up to the primary trauma: a two year period, from year eleven at high school to first year at uni.

My brother left home after about three months of screaming.

My mum visited the daughter she gave up for adoption, about three years after they’d had a reunion, and the daughter had more or less blanked her. Mum came home and spent about a week catatonic with grief, and required a massive amount of emotional support after she finally started talking again.

I came out and that didn’t go well.

Growing up I was lucky to have a dad who paid child support, but every few years the agreement would be reviewed, and mum would come home from court spitting venomous rage about how he’d screwed her in court. When I turned 18, the agreement was up for renewal (it’s payable until 21), but I was now legally an adult and the case was brought in my name. Dad had offered to reach an informal agreement but Mum called me a fool for considering it and made me sue him. So in the middle of year twelve I was suing my father for child support. On our day in court, it turned out to be a negotiation process, not a contested hearing and not an opportunity for a court to hear and adjudicate all mum’s grievances. So she unloaded those on the Legal Aid lawyer, and when I asked her to stop that, she turned her rage on me. To this day, I still break into a cold sweat in small rooms with meeting tables.

After that, it was weeks and weeks of cold, silent, grit-toothed rage. In the end I decided to move out and started looking for places, and -that- got through to mum; she said to wait until I’d finished year twelve, and the cold thawed a little.

I did something stupid, deleting a file I’d created to layout a newsletter for Women and the Australian Church. Not sure how many kids in year 11-12 were laying out 4-5 editions per year of a 12-16 page newsletter for their mum’s church group. More of the cold silent treatment lasting for weeks.

I was also debating for my school and the state team, moot courting, public speaking, and editing the school newspaper. I honestly don’t know how I got through that year. I remember my teachers being pretty concerned for me, but I absolutely couldn’t talk to them about it; at the tiniest gesture of sympathy, I felt like I would start crying and never stop — just not done in an all-boys’ school. At the end of the year I had one conversation with the guidance counsellor, who faked a bunch of absence notes in my diary, because I’d missed too many days to graduate, otherwise. Then I graduated as Dux of the School, won a Premier’s Prize for English, school prizes for Literature and Debating, and an Australian Psychological Society Prize. Straight As and perfect marks in three subjects.

And I’ve written before about how it all fell apart in undergrad at Unimelb. More than any other university, Unimelb frames pastoral care for students as a service. Even if you’re failing all your subjects, nobody there will ever e-mail to ask ‘are you alright?’ You are required to model good help-seeking behaviour, framing yourself as a responsible service user, before you’ll get help. I didn’t even know there was anything wrong; I knew I was very, very unhappy, but I understood it as moral failure and laziness, and I really resented needing to identify as sick to get help. And still do. And if you have social anxiety, and you’re paralysed, well, good luck managing to ask for help. I enrolled there in 2000 and it was not until 2008 that I was dating someone and he said, you’re acting weird, what the fuck is going on? And he pushed and pushed until finally I said, ‘mum won’t stop calling me.’

My uncle Peter had died. I’d asked her to leave me out of the inevitable court battle over his estate. But one day I visited her and she was incredibly distressed over her other brother taking money out of the estate that should have been equally divided. So I wrote a letter laying out the legal duties of executors and threatening action for her to send in her name. But she forwarded it to him saying ‘this is what I would send you if I was really nasty.’ And it turned out that he was reimbursing the money he’d paid upfront to the lawyers, having mortgaged his house, to defend the estate against my uncle’s ex-partner. ‘What difference does that make?’ said mum. I was so angry with myself for letting myself get suckered into that game: mum presenting herself as the victim to get someone else to step in as rescuer. And seeing myself the way mum saw me — like the pitbull you let off the leash to intimidate someone — I felt stupid, and used, and ashamed. I didn’t talk to mum for a year, but she kept calling my phone, and until my partner picked up on it, I had no idea how much that ‘jack-hammering’ was winding me up.

All through my teenage years and once I’d moved out of home, it was normal to go to bed and have a flashback. I have an incredibly detailed memory and the flashbacks were vivid; they would leave me frozen and sweaty and exhausted. One every night before sleep, sometimes more. I would have them as well in lecture theatres, when something in the lecture cued the memory of a family experience.

Back to the present moment: late last year, I got that e-mail from my mum, ‘correspondence must cease’. But coming up to my birthday on Monday, I knew that she would get in contact. It’s just the most characteristic thing for her to feel like she’s got the upper hand so everything in the relationship is fine. There are people she has grievously wronged and she is still surprised and hurt when they don’t accept her overtures of ‘forgiveness’. Sure enough, 10AM, there’s the e-mail, happy birthday, thinking of you, love mum. And I smacked it back over the net so hard. I reiterated the line I’ve been saying, over and over: I am not trying to relitigate the past, but I am going to tell the story of it, and you need to acknowledge that your experience does not determine the truth and validity of my story and my relationships.

The hardest thing post-trauma is to tell a coherent story of self-survival, and anyone who deliberately tries to disrupt that process is morally akin to the Catholic lawyers demanding time and date specificity of people abused as children.

I knew when I wrote that post in August 2015 to expect a call; I stopped in at a supermarket to pick up a bag of glucose in preparation. Sure enough, it came, and it was the usual arctic blast of self-righteousness and the purpose of the call was fact-checking. ‘That’s not how I experienced that.’ No shit; you have every self-serving reason to remember it differently, because you were not the one getting hurt by it.

It was my birthday on Monday. I hid the date on FB and only my step-mother remembered it. I hid the date because I knew this e-mail was coming and I knew it would dig up a ton of baggage that I would have to deal with, and I knew that I was going to really struggle to field and enjoy and respond to birthday greetings. So I had a day of self-care instead, after replying to the e-mail. And when I went to bed that night, I woke up around 3AM straight into an intrusive episode, a flashback to that tiny room in the Mag Ct, reliving it for about 45 minutes until I was finally able to get up, stagger down the hall to the kitchen and get some water.

I haven’t done that for years. I had forgotten how exhausting it is; afterwards, even though I eventually got back to sleep, I woke up feeling like I’d run a marathon overnight. And that nauseous feeling in my gut, the interferon-y feeling in my muscles, the lactic acid build-up in my diaphragm. The tightness of breath all day until my boss suggested we go walk up a mountain and that unlocked me. Today, the day after — it feels like weeks later — I’m still tired. The next appointment is on Tuesday, so that will be a chance to debrief, but it’ll no doubt dig up new stuff to process. I need to make a decision really soon about whether to continue with my PhD or put it on hold while I deal with this stuff.