I used to love male attention. I adored my breasts, the expensive bras that would push them up out of a shirt, straining against a blouse. I loved the validation that came with the male gaze, the way men turned in their chairs to notice me, to grin at me, to catcall, to seek my attention. Being sexy felt powerful.
Until it didn’t.
Like a light switch flipped, suddenly I despise sexy. Propelled by an anxiety awoken after the encounter with that random bat, the irrational fear happens abruptly, overnight, and suddenly I feel that gaze like an accusatory finger pointed in my face. Grins are now sneers, catcalls send me into a tailspin, and it all makes me uneasy; I’m suffocating and it’s my own fault. They can lift their noses like dogs and sniff out the dirty on me. I think of the night at a casino when the man next to me leaned in and I felt his skin touch mine, the sweat of his palm settling against my lower back, and I wanted to rip off all my skin then, ball it up and throw it away in the trash. I twisted away, mumbled something, but I wanted to scream, Don’t touch me! Why do you keep touching me? Brushing, stroking, converging, touching, as if I am a thing to be handled, examined, cracked open.
The thought of my breasts now makes me queasy. CrossFit adds tight muscles to my chest and reduces their swell. I revel in the loss. I begin to wear bralettes, ones that bind my breasts close to my body until they’re nonexistent. I change my wardrobe, going Bohemian-chic, my slender frame swallowed by fabric, the curves drowned out, well hidden, and I turn women’s heads, who love the fashion, the edginess.
I obsess over my diet, carefully restricted and regimented, giving up sugar for months on end, whittling down to a size two and loving it. I love the sense of power that comes with the discipline—the inflexibility that makes me thinner and thinner and this is mine to control. I devote myself to CrossFit and develop squared shoulders, trapezius muscles visible under a shirt neckline, a waist that thickens with muscle, my quads round and hard. “Men don’t want their women to look like that,” people whisper to me. “Men don’t like women who are too muscular,” they say. Well, good.
I read in a magazine that men don’t like short hair so I shave half my head. Women stop me to compliment it, to comment on my entire look, and I’ve found a way to be pretty, to be fashion-forward but also slip under the radar, because most men don’t notice the muscular girl with the flat chest and shaved hair, and fucking good. That’s the point.
“Oh,” Roman will say, when he sees the new haircut. “It’s short.” But that’s the most he’ll say about any of it, and the entire thing makes me feel safer. Safe from other men’s gaze, but still valued in Roman’s, because if he hates the hair or the clothes or the flattened body, he never lets on. Which is lucky because in my obsession to disappear from other men’s view, I never did consider his.
* * *
The exam table paper crinkles as I shift my weight. I don’t look the doctor in the eyes. “So you think you have HIV?” There is heavy skepticism in his voice.
“See, feel here?” I say, my shaking fingers pressing to my throat. “Swollen lymph nodes. And my throat is sore and I have a fever—”
“A very mild fever.”
“Yeah, but it can just start with flu-like symptoms.” That’s me, WebMD PhD.
“But you’re not having casual sex?”
“I’m not, I’m monogamous but…”
But. But men looking. Men touching.
“If you would wait here for just one moment,” says the young doctor, trying to be cheery although I don’t know why, because doesn’t he know I’m dying? And no one is going to believe me when I say I got it from a guy who touched my skin in the bar, they’re all going to say I’m lying, and Roman is going to leave me, because of course he is, and they’re going to say this little story of mine is just a way to hide that I’m a dirty little whore. All the same fears circulated on repeat.
My fingers flutter up against my throat, behind my ears, and in the time allotted I examine my nails, check if they’re strong, then roll forefinger against thumb, checking the dexterity of my fingers to make sure I don’t have ALS. The doctor comes back mid-ritual. I didn’t even get to check my balance yet. I’m annoyed at the interruption, file the habit away at the back of my brain to finish later, so I can feel well and hopeful for a few minutes, like I always do once a ritual is successfully completed.
The doctor stands to the side to let someone else pass, and an older woman strides into the room. She looks at me in my thin hospital gown. She sighs. I sigh. We know each other well. She’s the head psychiatrist of the women’s clinic, who had sat there with a slightly tilted head, listening to me cry over fears of rabies from a bat bite. Then when a puppy’s tooth had scratched my hand in passing and I didn’t ask the owner if it had its shots because I knew how crazy that sounded, and I thought I could handle it, but then I couldn’t. And she had sat me down eventually, after there had been the MS fears and the ALS terror incident, and said, “I think you need to be on medication.”
I had blinked at her, taken aback. I knew what kind of medication she was talking about: SSRIs, antidepressants, which are an intensely different beast from the anxiety-reducing benzodiazepines that don’t seem to be working for me anymore. “For how long?”
“Maybe forever,” she said as she collected her stuff and walked out the room, passing on that information to my regular psychiatrist.
I know she’s going to say this now, with that same tilt to her head, clinically sympathetic, and I don’t want to have to say that I’m a writer, that writers can’t be on SSRIs, or have to remind her that I’ve done my Google research and artists say it kills the craft, the need to create, and if I’m going to be a mindless zombie who can’t write, I’d much rather be dead. Let it kill me then.
We’ve had this conversation before, round and round we’ve gone, so she sighs. I sigh. Then I leave.
* * *
I know what PTSD is supposed to look like, and I don’t think it’s supposed to be like this. It should be a textbook response. Boom. React; hit the floor. I’ve seen it a hundred times in movies. I understand that, even when I don’t think it’s mine to have, a fear I didn’t earn. Standing in a bar, the press of people causing me to spiral inward, gripping my drink too hard, marking the exits over the masses of heads and bodies and hands and eyes, taking an extra swig of that drink because it makes it a little better: that I understand, too. They show this in the movies, on the television screen. This is what they talk about, when they display PTSD. But I don’t have this kind of PTSD, not exclusively. Mine has bred into something different, something far more insidious, and if I’m going to have PTSD, then goddamn it, I want normal-grade PTSD, the Hollywood version, not this batshit-crazy variety that has no lines running back to combat. It makes no sense to be terrified of bats and rabies, or MS and ALS. I was the girl who once dropped a cookie in Iraq, then quickly scooped it out of the dirt, dusted it off, and popped it into my mouth, sand and all. “A girl after my own heart,” one of the sergeants said with a wink, and I grinned, because it’s just dirt.
It’s just dirt, and now I can’t even run my hand down a banister without fear of contamination. The fears don’t add up. None of this can be PTSD, because I don’t see how it can be traced back to Iraq or the rape. Maybe I was always predestined to go crazy. Maybe when I was first formed, God scratched out the word insanity on a Post-it and stuck it to my forehead. I feel like a fake, sitting in the VA hospital women’s clinic office, recounting to a psychiatrist terrors that have nothing to do with the military. Fucking Dostie, soaking up tax dollars with a grade of crazy that was all her own to begin with.
And so I don’t like to show my crazy. If you saw it, you wouldn’t call it PTSD, so it’s better that you don’t see at all.
* * *
I graduate from the teaching certification program the summer of 2012, the summer of my mental breakdown. I start work as a long-term substitute English teacher in New Haven. I expect this to be like the infamous mental break of 2010—three months and done. I can buckle down and take this for three months, I think, even as I pace rooms in the dark, twisting, twitching, decomposing. But it’s not months. It’s years. There’s no interim, no moment to gasp for breath, a perpetual scream lodged at the back of my throat and I see no end to it, every day on repeat, everything on repeat, like a score permanently on loop and if I want silence, I think I’m going to have to kill myself.
I long for the fight in me, the rage that once made me so invincible. This fear has gutted me, chipping away at who I am, bit by bit, and I’m haunted by the terrifying awareness that silence can be bought with the Kel-Tec .380 handgun in the nightstand, nestled comfortably against loose pens and forgotten books—and the thoughts scare me. It’s too tempting. I don’t know how I avoided this in Iraq when here at home the thought trails behind me like a steadfast puppy.
I gobble down two milligrams of lorazepam—one prescribed, one extra just in case. I lie on the couch, curled on one side, hand dangling down onto the floor. If I could, I would muster the strength to run fingers through Freya’s fur. A little drool creeps out the corner of my lips.
My dreams are dead. I see nothing behind my eyelids as I sleep. I’m comatose but it passes the time. That’s all I want—for the time to pass. I am in purgatory, this place in between, and maybe if enough time passes I’ll finally make it to hell or heaven.
Roman comes home, accompanied by a cold blast of outside air and smelling of fireman gear. He takes one look at my mismatched stare, hears my words heavy and halting, then he goes into the kitchen to cook dinner.
My incompetence burns.
The lorazepam slows the whirling reel in my head, and I can sit on the couch, I can half focus, half see. I can eat, even though I don’t want to, I can speak, even though I have nothing to say. And when I go to bed, I down another milligram, knowing that it will block out the nightmares. I slice another pill in half, licking the white powder off my thumb with a dry tongue.
I bob and weave my way up to the bedroom. I don’t have to look for sleep; it slams into me like a sledgehammer.
* * *
The VA eventually gives me a 70 percent disability rating for PTSD, after all. Congratulations! You are this fucked up. It’s a victory and, also, most certainly not.
“It’s possible,” my psychiatrist says slowly, “that you might not be able to work full-time right now.”
I’m cracked in half, fingers digging into my eyes, elbows on knees. I groan.
“Stress both brings on and exacerbates PTSD symptoms,” he’s saying and I’ve heard this all before. My brain is no longer wired like everyone else. A few cords have popped free and overlapped, shoved back into the wrong places so that now simple stressors become overwhelming. I get how it works but can I not even do this? I’ve gone from ancient history professor to English teacher to…what now? I’m dragging myself across a crumbling road, reaching up for handholds and only getting fistfuls of loose brick and mortar dust.