Crap

I’d like to say that the past week with my friends has been nothing but awesome. However, life isn’t often the way you would like it to be. It started Saturday night. My friends and I were spending the night at one of our friend’s houses, playing board games, watching Harry Potter, laughing, drinking coke, and eating cookies. Just like any other of our awesome sleepovers. But this one was different. I was hanging out with my friends when all of a sudden something happened that I thought and hoped would never happen again. Remember how I said that I no longer have PTSD, well, apparently that only means that my symptoms aren’t constant enough to be diagnosed as PTSD. I still have symptoms, just not to the extreme that warrants a diagnosis. That night I started to have body memories again. There’s no nice way of putting it, body memories suck. Body memories are physical sensations of trauma. Nobody will be touching me; I could be all alone in a room and feel hands gripping my wrists or a heavy weight on top of me. To put it bluntly, it’s like being sexually abused all over again without a physical person doing the abuse. Imagine a weight that you can’t push off of you, hands that wander that you can’t fight. Yeah, it sounds scary and disturbing. I know it’s my body remembering what was done to it but it freaks me out. I feel like I’m being hurt again, I feel horrible, invasive things being done to me and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. And it’s not limited to just the sexual abuse. A few times I felt the pain of being hit in the head. I fought my abuser. I bit him, kicked him, scratched him, punched him, did all I could do to get him to stop. His response: he hit me. He’d hit me in the head, the shoulder, arm, face, it didn’t really matter to him. He was a football player and weightlifter at the time. He was just careful to not hit me hard enough to leave a mark, didn’t want any incriminating evidence. Can you imagine how hard it is to pretend that you’re fine and laugh and joke with your friends when you feel hands moving up your shirt? You feel all alone. You feel like you’re a freak. You feel like you could burst into tears at any moment and you want so desperately to numb out the feelings. But if you numb out reality will get fuzzy and you find yourself in his room again. You blink hard and shake your head and your friend’s room comes back into focus then flickers back into your abuser’s room. You want to tell your friends, you want to reach out for help but you’re afraid they’ll think you’re crazy.

Nothing I do makes the body memories go away. They come and go as they please. When I feel them, I want to scream, I want to cry, I want to fight. With body memories there’s no physical person to fight off of you, no way you can run away. What do you do with the fight or flight response? How do you act normal if you’re with people? I don’t know and the best I can do is try to hide it, clench my fists tight, breath, and look around the room I’m in to try to ground myself in the present. What I really want, and this is really really hard to write, I long for someone to just hug me and tell me it’s going to be okay. Nobody told me that after I told about the abuse. Neither of my parents reassured me or hugged me. They asked me endless questions and watched me cry and I didn’t understand and still don’t understand why they never comforted me, not even a pat on the shoulder. I guess they were in shock, I mean nobody expects one of their children to abuse the other.

Sorry this isn’t a very cheerful post. I can’t hold all of this inside indefinitely. It has to come out and how do you go about having a conversation about body memories with a friend? It sounds like it would be really uncomfortable for the listener and I don’t want to burden someone like that. Sometimes, when this PTSD crap happens and I feel crazy . . . it’s really lonely. Crying alone is one of the worst things ever.

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-Jerelle