The weeks after Oliver Watson’s suicide faded into months. Nothing could shift the endless pit of black that had become my home. While I never thought I would be someone to rejoice in the death of another human being, when I heard he had killed himself, I couldn’t help but feel a rain of relief washing over me. It didn’t last long. Soon, it was replaced with anger, and that threatened to swallow me more than the darkness he had left me in.
When the initial relief that I was no longer going to have to think about his release faded, I was engulfed with a resonating loathing that he was now free of what he had done. He was able to simply disappear from this world and not face the daily struggle that his actions should have left him to deal with. Instead, like one final slap to my face and an even more lingering stab in the guts, he got to escape it all. I genuinely scared Alice with just how bad my rage became. I wanted so much to bring that man back, just to have him die by my hands instead of his own selfish act.
His cowardice ate at me. His ability to have everything just go away infuriated me. I spent the time with my counsellor, pacing the room, bubbling over with a fury I had no outlet for. Tim tried to get me to work through it. He coaxed me to talk. He tried to talk me out the other side of the feelings I was having, but I just couldn’t find my way out.
Six weeks later, I broke down in our regular session. The bubbling stopped and suddenly overflowed, my rage coming out as frustration as I sobbed in a collapsed heap on the floor.
“Josh...” Tim prompted. “You’re letting him win.”
I stifled a sob and looked up at the blurred him I could see through my tears. “I...” I struggled to find the words I needed to explain how I was feeling. “He left me,” I blurted out. Tim’s face badly hid the shock at my statement. “I can never escape what he did, and he has.” I wiped my nose with the tissue Tim held out to me. “I’m still here. I’m hanging on by this shitty little thread, and he gets to walk away from the responsibility of his actions. He will never have to truly suffer like I will forever. He’s taken everything, Tim. My trust, my faith in people, my very sanity.”
“Why are you letting him?” he asked me.
“I’m not!” I stammered.
“Aren’t you? You’re giving him control over you, even in death, instead of grabbing for it yourself and holding on to it,” he stated. “The only person we can ever control in this life is the person within us, Josh. Life isn’t really about what other people do to us. It’s about the power we allow them to take from us or that we strive to cling to ourselves. Right now, you’re in a heap on the floor, lost, because you’re making the choice to let him strip you of any kind of life. You’re letting him because you’re giving him control over your reactions. Since when did he deserve to have that power over you? Why isn’t that power in your hands, Josh?
“He takes and he takes, and you keep on giving. You’ve been raped. You’ve been stabbed. What will it take for you to take control of your actions and reactions?”
I looked at him blankly. I hadn’t ever thought of it in those terms. I couldn’t see past my anger. I couldn’t see past my hopelessness and despair. It had been almost eight months since Oliver had attacked me. It was almost ten months since he raped me, and there I was, still letting him control how I reacted to life. I didn’t know how to process the thoughts going around in my head, but for the first time in months, something had changed. I started to see that perhaps there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Even the tiniest flicker of the faintest candlelight of hope.
“How do I take it back, Tim?” I asked him.
Tim put his hand out to me to help me up from the floor. I tentatively put my hand in his and allowed myself to be hauled off the floor. Tim smiled and let go of my hand. I had achieved something I had been unable to do in the almost full year I had been seeing him twice a week; something as simple as a man shaking my hand or having almost any kind of physical contact with me had been enough to make me flinch. I moved away if any male got too close; it triggered panic within me. There had been three occasions when my panic attacks were so bad that I had to be sedated. This time, I had broken out in a cold sweat at the thought. I had been timid, but I had also managed to make contact.
Progress after that was steady. The panic attacks were something I couldn’t work around. Tim tried several different emerging ideas in cognitive behavioural therapy to attempt to break the cycle of fear and panic that would seize me, but nothing helped. In the end, we settled on a strategy to deal with them when they arose instead of trying to avoid them altogether. The hope was that if they were managed more effectively, that would hopefully have the added benefit of diminishing their hold over me. I longed to have them gone for good, but the ability to cope when they did strike was another step in taking the power back and having control.
I started to take yoga and meditation classes. A local rape and abuse support group ran them; they were all victims like me, and there were clear contact boundaries.
Months passed, and slowly but surely, I began to take control back in my life. My sessions with Tim dropped back to once a week. My panic attacks, while still frequent, dwindled in magnitude, and I started to feel like things were finally rolling forwards for me. I wasn’t stuck in the same spot or backtracking into despair.
By the end of the summer, Alice had encouraged me to think about talking to my college tutors, so I could finally finish my course in business management. The thought of that terrified me more than anything else had so far. It was one thing to be progressing in a life away from the world Oliver Watson had been in, but it was a whole other thing to go back into the very buildings where he had been, to be haunted by visions of him everywhere I turned. Alice came with me to have a meeting with the course coordinator, as it turned out the course was now being held on a different campus within the college. I wouldn’t be around the areas I had been in with Ollie. They offered support, they offered understanding, and with some love and support from Alice and some encouragement and preparation from Tim, I accepted the help and went back to college.
There were times when I thought I wouldn’t be able to cope. I thought I was making too big of a leap forward. I had a major meltdown one day when I saw one of Oliver’s friends in the corridor. Panic gripped me like a vice and tore me open. I was worried he would blame me for what happened. I thought he would confront me about it. Looking back on it, some of the notions that entered my head that day were simply ridiculous, but fear is never rational.
By June a year later, I had finished my course and walked away with my head high and the best marks in the class. Sometimes, I would think I had seen Oliver or someone who was friends with him, and my anxiety would spike beyond control. But the time between each darkness-enshrouded attack became longer and longer.
Once I had qualified, I needed to put my hard work to good use. I registered with a few temping agencies. That gave me the freedom to refuse work on my bad days and work hard on my good. I built up my confidence. I built up my experience, and when Alice mentioned a job she thought would be perfect for me, I didn’t hesitate in applying.
Matthews’ Architecture was looking for a personal assistant-cum-office manager. They were a relatively new company. The head architect and owner of the company was still incredibly young, barely out of university himself, and I looked forward to the challenges the role would bring. I relished the idea of starting with a new company and being able to make my mark there.
I squealed with delight after Alex called me to tell me I had got the job. I felt free. I felt powerful. I felt hope. Going into the business when it was so fresh and new was exciting, and Alex turned out to be a great boss. He was young and energetic; he wasn’t set in his ways and welcomed my input on how to do things. I thoroughly enjoyed going to work every day. That was until about three months had passed, and then something monumentally fucked it up.
I was sitting at my desk, busy doing things I don’t even recall, when the phone rang, and I answered. I chatted to the new client; he was interested in Alex’s work. He had heard great things about the company, and he wanted to arrange a meeting. Everything was perfect until I asked for his name.
“Sure, it’s Drew Watson.”
I dropped the phone and gasped. I don’t remember making a sound, but I must have because Alex bolted out of his office and stared at me. I couldn’t breathe. Drew Watson was the name of Oliver’s father. Bile rose in my closed-over throat. I started to choke and sprinted for the bathroom, leaving Alex behind wondering what the hell was going on.
Panic attacks are bizarre. They take over, and when they do, even in your acute, sensory state, you don’t remember what happened. You literally blank things out of your own mind in an attempt to protect yourself. Alex called Alice, explained what happened as best he could, and she told him how to help me. He knocked on the door of the bathroom.
“Joshua?” he asked gently. “Josh, I’ve been talking to Alice... How bad is it on a scale of ten?” he asked.
I blinked, barely registering my surroundings, wondering what Alice had shared with him.
“T-t-ten,” I stuttered through the door.
“Josh, there’s just me here. You’re going to listen to me, and we’re going to breathe through this, okay? Can you do that with me?”
“Okay,” I panted.
“Good. Deep breaths, fella. In through your nose, out through your mouth,” he reminded me, followed by a long prompt of, ‘in and out,’ several times. After a few minutes of deep breathing, I was more conscious of what was going on.
“Can you open the door now, Josh?” he asked me softly.
A random thought almost had me back in the clutches of blind panic. He was going to want to know what the hell just happened. I would have to explain to him why I had reacted in the way I had. I didn’t know if I could face that.
“Josh. You don’t have to say anything. You can just unlock the door and let me see that you’re okay.” There was something dominant in his tone. I let it wash over me, blanketing my fears, holding them back.
I slowly got up from the floor and opened the door. When he opened it and looked at me with that commanding face of his, I did something that surprised us both. I threw my arms around him and hugged him with all my strength. He instantly wrapped his arms around me in response and stroked my head. “Shhh,” he murmured. “You’re safe. I’ve got you.”
One of the office juniors appeared with a glass of water for me, and Alex managed to pry me off him long enough to put it into my hand and lead me into his office. He closed the door, sitting me down on the sofa in the corner of the room, parking his butt on the hard coffee table in front of it.
He looked at me with his big, dark brown eyes. I felt a level of trust that I hadn’t felt with anyone, aside from Alice and Amy, in a long time. I didn’t mean to tell him everything, but in the adrenalin-fuelled haze the panic attack left me with, I just couldn’t prevent the verbal incontinence. I poured out every last detail of everything that had happened to me, and why I had reacted the way I did.
Alex just sat there and listened. To my complete surprise, when he looked at me, I didn’t see the pity or the other looks I usually did at the mere mention of my journey up until that point. Instead, I saw what could only be described as pride. I asked Alex about it later, and he confirmed that it was indeed pride. He told me he had been proud of the amazing strength I had within me, not only to deal with the cruel hand I had been dealt so bravely, but that I had trusted him enough in that instant to pour out everything without reserve.
He never once said that he was sorry to hear it had happened. He didn’t try to comfort me. He just accepted it all, like he was listening to the list of key features a new building had to have and the owners couldn’t live without. When I was finished, he put his hand over mine.
“Tell me what you need. We will find a way to make this easier for you when it happens here at work. Alice told me you have a scale to use, one to ten?”
I nodded. “I rank them. The worse they are, the closer to ten they are marked,” I explained.
“Okay. And the breathing. Does that help a lot?”
I nodded again.
“Well, I know you probably aren’t thinking clearly about it at the minute, but when you are, you will sit here with me again, and you will give me your plan. If this happens again, I’ll be right here with you. We’ll sort it out together. Deal?”
I was astounded by his reaction. He took it all so completely in his stride while maintaining an air of control.
That day, several things happened. I knew I would never want to work anywhere else, I cemented a firm friendship with the man I worked for, and I felt like the hole that had frequently felt like it would swallow my soul got a little smaller. From that day on, my world was just a little brighter.