The Long Story: Part 4: Visualization

If you haven't already, please first read the introduction,
Strength comes from refusing to be shamed.

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There is a theme, for me, that runs through all the incidents I've written about in the previous entries. I mention this briefly in the first entry, Petrification, about how my experiences at six seemed to represent how I reacted to the rape at sixteen and traumatic situations beyond that. Not fight or flight, but freezing. Mentally becoming invisible. Hoping it goes away on its own. Absorbing it all silently. That bunk bed becomes representative of all of it, the reactions and the emotions and the fear. The petrification.

Finding my own place, working, and being independent was invigorating once I graduated from college. I didn't miss all the hanging out and the parties. It freed me in many ways. I felt stronger. A cycle was broken. Simplified, a cycle of "slipping", petrification, shame, drinking, and slipping again that just fed on itself. I took this to mean that I may have "gotten over it".

Here's the thing.

The cycle wasn't broken because I learned to "deal" or because I "healed". It was just my environment that changed. Like my senior year in high school, I had no interest in social situations, alcohol, or drugs. In high school this meant I was numb. After college I didn't have the luxury of numbing out and going through the motions. I had to find a place to live, a job, and create a life.

The shame was certainly still there. Somewhere deep down I was still suffering. It had to be expressed somehow, and I realize that in general I've dealt by taking it out on myself. The old ways of coping were no longer a part of my new life, though. They now represented being out of control, and I gladly left them behind.

I don't know how many times I've felt like if I were to release all this outwardly, to stop taking it all on myself and relieve the pressure, I'd somehow destroy the world. My world. The world where at least I functioned and did my best not to hurt others. It felt like if I were to express outwardly and not inwardly, it would come out in this uncontrollable rush that would truly destroy me and people around me. And it would be all my fault. My fault for not keeping it under control.

So, how did I cope?

I don't know how it started. It was a minor thing I did unconsciously that slowly built up over the years. The worse it got, the better my ability to deny it became. By the time it got so bad that I realized what I was doing, it had been going on for about a decade. I was expressing it, letting it out, but not in a healing way. Quite the opposite. I turned my outward expression immediately back upon myself, taking what was inside and displaying it on the outside. Making the emotional wounds real, physical. It became a compulsion.

This may be as far as you need to read. It continues, though, because you just never know who else deals with this and thinks they are the only one. I know I did for a long time.

7 years ago, I got out and wrapped the towel around me as I stepped out of the shower, my arms crossed along the top. I was not mentally prepared when I caught myself in the mirror. I saw the whole me reflected back, all of it. And what I saw, really saw for the first time, were red sores and scabs, all over my face and arms. There was not an area of skin in my reflection that wasn't bombarded. I was mortified.

I really can't even bring myself to name it, and the idea of defining the condition kicks up the anxiety to a level I'm not willing to deal with. Since anxiety is what freaking contributes to this very behavior, I leave you with these links instead.

Until this point, I only allowed myself to see small parts of myself. I was very good at denying the reality of what I was unconsciously doing. I could slap on the concealer and foundation and powder, focusing on one small area at a time, put on long sleeves and pants in 100 degree weather, and step out into the world. My masterful self-denial was the only way I could do it. The avoidance allowed me to convince myself that I was presentable, that no one noticed, that it didn't look that bad, all so that I could bring myself to walk out that door.

That moment in front of the mirror shattered the denial. The realization didn't bring it to a stop, it just made me feel more ashamed. It was a deeply ingrained compulsion by this point, and now I was just more aware of it as I continued to do it. Aware of how often I did it, how I didn't feel pain but relief, being disgusted with myself, watching it get worse.[1] I only left the house, showered, brushed my teeth and changed my clothes to go to work. The rest of the time I hid. I did not run errands. I did not walk down the driveway to get the mail or take out the trash. I panicked and hid when the doorbell rang. I avoided social situations and family get-togethers because of the anxiety brought on by the very thought of going. I became depressed, tired, apathetic, unmotivated, a prisoner in my home. I slept more and more in what seemed to be an effort to escape from myself, my family, the world.

I eventually gathered up the courage to see my primary care physician, the first outward admission of what I did, which was damned hard to do. He gave me a depression quiz, graded it, declared me depressed, said it was like OCD, and prescribed an antidepressant, Paxil, 20 mg. I felt lost and somehow cheated, but it was a lot for me to just go in there in the first place.

The Paxil made a dent. I felt less depressed, and as it is with these things, don't realize how depressed I was until I began to feel it lift. My compulsion was still going strong. My dose was increased to 40 mg. I started trying to learn more on the internet, but 7 years ago there was pretty much squat. I began to feel more anxious and edgy, and attributed it to frustration over lack of information.

That's not what it was.

When my dose was increased to 60 mg, the compulsion was reduced so much that I cried with relief. Then, for the first time in my life I became manic. The next 5 years were the worst in my life, where I took up to 6 meds at once, never feeling like myself at best, living a near-psychotic hell in my own mind at worst. Paxil, Neurontin, Zyprexa, Klonopin, Geodon, Celexa, Wellbutrin, Topamax, Lithium. The true relief from the compulsion lasted only as long as the initial mania. In the end I took charge, and declared, based on 5 years of hit-and-miss experimentation and reading, that what I needed to do was go off the meds that were causing all this in the first place. No anti-depressants means no bipolar and thus no stabilizers and sleep aids, either. This was a year and a half ago.

The fact that I still deal with the compulsion, although not nearly as bad as it was back then, is a small price to pay for having my mind back.

The scars take on a whole new poetic meaning. The shame is no longer hidden, it's exposed. It's permanent. They become the shame. Always separating you, always making you hide a little bit, instinctively pulling down your sleeve when you notice someone looking at your arm, lying about the "bug bites" and how you really don't want to take a dip in the pool. No matter how much progress you make healing the inner self, the outer evidence never completely heals. It becomes a shield. The body is imperfect, scarred, even morbid. No longer can you fool yourself into thinking that desire for your body has anything to do with desire for you. If there's desire, it cannot possibly be for your body, so it must be for you. This irony doesn't escape me one bit.

It took me days to write this. Feeling quite a bit of anxiety over writing about my anxiety! Days where I had to look up old message board postings to get the timeline straight, where I was reminded how one Doc who frequented a board would blow me off when I said the SSRI was helping the compulsion, and he'd just go on about his statistics and his damned book. Funny how today he gives SSRIs some credence. Being reminded how I went through some of this same crap with my psychiatrist. Feeling desperate and dependent and not always being listened to. Feeling your crumbling, real-life sanity is at the mercy of the average, negligible effectiveness of hit-and-miss drugs.Taking five years to get up the nerve to say hell with it all, all your damn drugs, I want my life back, and you're not part of it. It's not at all unlike taking charge of other things in life.

And with those that final rant I end the series, and hope to find lots of mundane crap to post so that this moves off the front page. Thank you for your support and kind words, which helped a lot toward me being able to make this final entry.

[1] Hidden way down here at the bottom of the post is what "worse" is, a photo of my legs from 6 years ago (the internet is forever!) So, you know, you've been warned if you really need to look. Although I didn't submit it to trigger others, it could be triggering.

last updated 4/09/06