This is what it came down to. I had to leave much of what I’d known, much of what had been my life, behind. The entertainment reporting, the fancy hotels, the semi-high-profile position, the parties, the people who said they loved me but really did not, the people who didn’t say that they loved me and really, really didn’t, I left them all behind. And I took a fellowship at Columbia University, and for a year I lived a very quiet life.
I went back to the gym and I wore only workout clothes for a year and sort of got back into shape and I went to no parties and hung out with very few people and spent nights reading to my daughter instead of drinking on the couch, and once during that time I saw a baby be born, and also, then, I wrote. I wrote and published another book of poems a year after I’d lurched toward this self-transformation, all the contents of which were about violence against women. Not that I was aware of this.
I realized it only after a reader pointed it out, and because I had not recognized it myself, the content of my own work, I could no longer ignore how removed I had been from the details of my own life, which is probably what made me do it, made me take the big step. I told a friend in a voice well above a whisper, I really need help.
I told her about the three years in the bottle and the violent relationship and the depression and the guilt and losing Rashid and losing my marriage and I told about the mean boss. I told everything and I told it without seeing myself as a woman who was violating some Black-girl rule.
I told it without the sense that I was, as someone once said to me, whining about “my tortured life” or embracing a “victimization motif.” I told it without looking to self-flagellate, and, most important, I told it because I believe in bearing witness to our own lives and when I had not done that myself, I disappeared.
I did not want to be a disappeared person. And I told because Gloria Morrow, a psychologist who practices in Pomona, California, and whose patient roster is ninety percent Black women, said simply, “There’s nothing worse than suffering in silence.”
Morrow talks about the imposition of sexism and racism in our lives, how it plays out in our homes and in the workplace, and how both of these victimized, yes, victimized, us and finally we had to be able to say it. We had to say it even at the risk of being told to shut up, or stop complaining. We had to say it because not saying it, not facing it, was a direct route to anxiety and depression and all the ways each of these impacts our total well-being.
Given my choices, the self-defeating choices I made while grinning and meeting deadlines and pretending everything was fine when nothing was fine, I knew that she was right. So I told.
And then I went back to therapy.
MY DOCTOR WAS THE real thing, a psychiatrist who did not just hand me some pills and send me on my way but was one who talked. A tall, imposing genius of a woman originally from Detroit, she was plain-spoken, and blunt, and she came to me at the recommendation of a dear friend. It’s funny how life works, why I believe all time exists all at once. As it turned out, my doctor is also the first psychiatrist I ever saw, back when I was a sixteen-year-old student struggling at Howard University.
I can’t remember how much time—one session, two—lapsed between my recounting of the last few years, the recounting of a lifetime, and her half looking at me, half pulling down one of her books to confirm what it seemed she already knew. She peered at me over her glasses, and directly, “Ms. bandele,” she said, voice calm and sort of midwestern flat, “you have post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Post-traumatic stress disorder? The war disease? The Vietnam legacy?
Yes, she said, but it doesn’t affect only soldiers emerging from combat. It can impact anyone, she explained, who has lived through a traumatic and life-altering experience, one in which grave harm occurred or was threatened. Nearly eight million Americans suffer with it, albeit in varying degrees. And while symptoms of PTSD often show up within three months of an incident, often it can take years. It affects women more often than men and is characterized by a person who startles easily (check) or who abuses substances (check, check), emotionally distances themselves from people to whom they used to feel close (oh, God, Rashid, check, check, check).
For some, the condition is chronic. I was lucky. I was treatable. I had access to treatment. For many of us, bent under the weight of either depression or its more intense relative, PTSD, there is nothing, no one to explain to us what we are dealing with, and explain that it may be the result of one thing or perhaps the result of many things. It may not be the childhood sexual assault, in other words, that sends you reeling headlong into the netherworlds of PTSD or depression. But that experience, that violence, retriggered by, say, a boyfriend who breaks you up, hospitalizes you two decades on, well, that can do it.
For me, for many, it was everything added up together. And none of it ever fully attended to. It is no different than if you have a broken leg and the bones don’t get set quite right and afterward you keep falling, you keep reinjuring that leg. Each time you fall, the breaks, the hurts you endure, may not all be of the same severity, but taken as a whole, the result, the cumulative result, is devastating.
Still it was a big name, a big diagnosis. It sounded bigger than me, more important. I said this to her, that people who got this had lived through really horrible events. I talked about the men and women in Iraq, our soldiers, and also the Iraqi citizens trying to make a life in the middle of a war zone. “That’s who’s been through something for real, for real.”
“Like survivors of abuse, Ms. bandele,” she said, again in that matter-of-fact voice I came to rely on in the time we worked together. And just like that, there they were: my wounds, without recrimination, without minimizing, without excuse, simply acknowledged.
I would argue that that was when we really began to work.
We worked in ways I had never worked before with a doctor. We worked until I was well enough to manage my own care. We worked for months that long winter into spring. We sat in my doctor’s home office until we developed a clear plan about what to do going forward. We worked until I had no more money to afford the sessions and then she allowed me to barter with her—I did some editing for her—so that the work could continue.
We talked about why I needed to exercise and why I needed to stay engaged with my routine even on the days I most wanted to just sleep. We talked about strategies to help me sleep at night without any substances. Who knew that getting into bed with Nisa and reading stories with her at night was more relaxing than red wine? Who knew what I needed had been there beside me?
We talked about friends in my life whom I found hurtful. We talked about the right to release the people whose words and actions diminished me rather than strengthened me. She reminded me that I had no obligation to remain close to them. We talked about the right to say, No, a word that I, like so many women, struggle with.
“I feel bad if I let someone down,” I said. “But you’re letting yourself down,” she reminded me. “Don’t you count?”
She said guilt, as my mother has often said, is a useless emotion. We talked of shame, another corner of my depression, another part of myself that kept me from taking care of myself. Why take care of something you’re ashamed of, even if that thing is the woman in the mirror? Shame is not positioned to help or heal anyone, though I know how we lean toward it, run toward it, wield it like a knife.
In the days before prison, long ago, on another continent, shame was the center point of punishment. An entire village might turn its back—physically—on an offender (or perceived offender). It was, in some places, the worst punishment one could receive. Of course too, we know it here, in the American system of jurisprudence: from the seventeenth-century stockades to the twenty-first-century perp walks, shame is still very much a part of who we are.
And in some ways it is effective. It can elicit an immediate response. The shamed one offers an ocean of tears, a head hung low, followed by a deeply passionate and public apology. But it does little to transform much in any lasting way. If it did, of course, we would not see the same people making the same mistakes over and over. Shame may stop a particular behavior in a given moment but it does not move a soul, and when you want to shift something in a person so that it doesn’t shift right back, there is only one tool to use and that tool is love.
It is the only proven method, the one that lasts. Cruelty and fear and shame work only until those who have been cowed get their own weapons. I was no different. Feeling ashamed of my behavior, my self-berating, the berating by some of the people I pulled around me, did little to make me a stronger, clearer—sober—person.
And now I look realistically at the people of this nation, realistically at myself, and know addiction and self-abuse and self-destructive behaviors are as American as apple pie. We may excoriate some and not others, but all that acting out begins at the same source, in the same river of pain, of disconnection.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse reported in 2004 that some twenty percent of our population—48 million people—have used prescription drugs for nonmedical reasons in their lifetime. And these are licit drugs! Not coke or weed or meth or dope but the stuff that is in our parents’ medicine cabinets. But for just the prescription stuff alone, 48 million! What, then, are the numbers when we consider all those who struggle with health and other issues, because from McDonald’s to meth, from Vicodin to Valium, from weed to wine, from caffeine to cocaine, from shopping to sex, there’s something out there, some vice, we cannot leave alone or moderate?
Working with my doctor helped me to finally begin to see myself without anger or recrimination and as just one thing: fully human.
“That’s a good place to start,” my doctor said flatly, and then pushed me further. We talked more about Rashid and more about Nisa. She met Nisa. She led me to understand that feeling guilty about the breakup or not living up to some fantasy idea of the perfect mother was not going to change past actions. “You can feel guilty all you want, but are you going to get back together with Rashid?” she asked. “I can’t see it,” I confessed, “not with the deportation order.” Admitting that brought me to a greater truth, a good one, if not an easy one.
I couldn’t see being with anyone right then. I thought about all the years I’d spent, from fourteen to thirty-seven, involved, engaged, or married. “I feel good about being single, about getting to finally know myself as my own woman, not a woman inexorably bound to a man. I want to know Nisa better too,” I said, and then set about the business of making that happen.
Because when I looked at all of it, when I looked back through all of it, I had no choice but this one, this one that required my real sweat and my real, real labor: not only the work of dealing with my own fears and demons, but the work of taking those observations and using them to change long-standing patterns of behavior.
In my own life, the war on terror has not been about distant shores or cultures, not about planes and buildings or suicide bombers. The war on terror was a battleground inside myself that I have fought on and fought on so that I could stand here now—not broken all the way, not broken so much that I can’t be pieced back together, not broken to the extent that I would be rendered an ineffective and useless mother to my Nisa, my child, my bright light in the big city. I will never be that broken. I will never come even close to it again.