I Choose Elena

by Lucia Osborne-Crowley

  Sometimes, under an extreme degree of traumatic stress, the body becomes so overwhelmed that it simply gives itself over to whatever is threatening it. In this bizarre counter-evolutionary state, we put ourselves in harm’s way to numb the feeling of helplessness.

  This has been noted in volcanic eruptions, when animals become so overwhelmed by the stress of the situation that they run into the lava. Once, a volcano erupted on an island off the coast of Indonesia and several species were tracked heading towards the danger, including sea lions, who had a perfectly safe means of escape by simply staying underwater and swimming away. Instead, they swam into the volcano and let it burn them alive.

  So there I was, sitting in the Uber, watching my dear friend’s worried text messages arrive one after the other, knowing as she did that I was swimming, full-tilt, into the volcano.

  When we got back to his house, he insisted on having sex despite my pain. In my head I was screaming in pain and distress, but my body was limp and my voice had jumped out of my throat and hidden somewhere. I distinctly remember feeling as though I was floating above my body again, watching myself relive a waking nightmare. I felt no pain in those moments. I just watched. I waited.

  When it was over I returned to my body and the pain was unbearable. I wanted so badly to get up and leave, but the pain in my stomach was so sharp that I could not move my legs. I willed them to muster the strength but they refused.

  I lay there and allowed the shame to envelop me, and I hoped I would somehow disappear. I wanted no one to see or hear from me again. In that moment, I wished for the mercy of a raging volcano; the swiftness with which it would destroy me and leave no trace of me behind.

  The next day I went home and tried to pretend it hadn’t happened, but when I turned on the shower, my wrists ached from the way he’d held them down. My legs shook for days. I lay in my room and wondered how I could have done something so reckless despite knowing how badly it would hurt me.

  I didn’t know, then, about those sea lions.

  But this was more than a confused evolutionary reaction to danger; it was a form of self-harm. I didn’t put myself in that situation in spite of how much it would hurt me, I did so because I knew that it would. I was so ashamed of my past that I punished myself by recreating it.

  Trauma research has proven the desire for ‘re-enactment’ in survivors. This means that people who have been traumatized and unable to escape develop a neuropathology in which they become attracted to situations that replicate their traumatic experience.

  We do this because in trauma our brain’s fight- or-flight response proves ineffectual and we become helpless. What this does to the body is create an extremely high level of energy in the muscles and the blood, ready for escape, but this energy is never discharged. So, physically and psychologically, we seek out, again and again, situations in which we might be able to discharge that energy and relieve ourselves from the physical damage it causes us.

  We seek to re-enact the trauma because we want to prove that it can end differently, because the body is evolutionarily conditioned to attempt to fix its mistakes for the benefit of the species. The problem is that the freeze response is not one we are meant to survive, so biologically, it is not well adapted to the process of re-enactment.

  This condemns traumatized people to a life in which danger seems to be ever-present. We internalize this. In Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, her protagonist, Jude, is an adult man who was sexually abused as a child and who finds himself in abusive situations in adulthood too. The character ponders:

  The axiom of equality states that x always equals x: it assumes that if you have a conceptual thing named x, that it must always be equivalent to itself, that it has a uniqueness about it, that it is in possession of something so irreducible that we must assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to itself for all time, that its very elementalness can never be altered …

  The person I was will always be the person I am, he realizes … a person who inspires disgust, a person meant to be hated.

  In Jude’s mind, this mathematical formula represents an entire life: x will always equal x. No matter how far you run from yourself, no matter how fast, you will always have the same irreducible, rotten core. When the character is much older and in a physically abusive relationship with yet another predatory man, his partner throws him down the stairs and as he hears his shoulder crack on the cement below, he thinks to himself: x equals x. x equals x. x equals x.

  I re-enacted my sexual assault by constantly exposing myself to men who would force themselves into me, by ignoring the freeze and the pain. I sought out relationship after relationship in which my consent didn’t matter because my body was conditioned to replay that same scene, over and over, to dress-rehearse death just to prove it could survive.

  My mind, confused by a hyper-vigilant sense of danger, was putting me in harm’s way. My body screamed in revolt but I kept going. At the same time as reconstructing these moments of helplessness, I was falling prey to my mind’s desperate desire to escape by self-destruction. I constantly found new ways to disappear.

  I built up an arsenal of destructive behaviours that would satisfy the part of me that wanted to be invisible but that would not put me at risk of serious self-harm. I chased men who thought nothing of me just to prove to myself that I was unworthy. I chased away people who offered me kindness for exactly the same reason. I never occurred to me that I might be the author of my own disappointment.

  Once trauma finds you it does not let you go. And so we re-traumatize ourselves, believing we are rotten because we are the type of people to whom bad things happen, when in fact it is the living, breathing memory of the first bad thing that keeps sending us back, again and again and again, into the volcano.

  It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Every time I had sex during that last semester, the pain would become so bad I often had to stay in bed for days; sometimes I even had to take myself to hospital because of the profound effect the invasion had on my body. And yet I kept doing it, kept chasing the shame and hurt I would feel after confirming to myself that I would never get over what happened to me.

  When I look back on this time now, it seems as though this was when the memory of the attack truly started to close in on me. I started having more detailed dreams about it. My pain became unbearable and almost constant. After sex I would vomit for hours to try to purge myself of the piercing sensation it left me with.

  And so it was that the shame I had always felt about being a sick woman, a failed woman, was compounded by my first conscious thoughts that I was also a rape victim.

  I made it to work at my law firm most days, but the nights were the worst part: too uncomfortable to sleep, too determined to turn up at work the next day to take proper painkillers, too exhausted by my illness to lose another night’s rest. In daylight I appeared as though I was coping, but it was during these nights that I realized the structure I had built of myself was crumbling; I could feel it breaking somewhere inside me.

  The pain kept getting worse, the vomiting, the shaking. The memories were catching up with me and I was losing the momentum I needed to keep running.

  The pain became unbearable and more difficult to hide. I lost seven kilos in four weeks. I was inexplicably throwing up half of what I ate, and I started shaking so much I had to get friends to help me put on make-up. I started missing lectures and days at work. My blood pressure dropped and I started passing out at random intervals.

  My tremors and weight loss became conspicuous enough that a close friend asked how I was doing. I told him I had lost control of my hands and I was collapsing regularly without warning. He looked concerned, and told me to call the doctor. I nodded, absent-mindedly, and stared into my glass of wine.

  Why won’t you call the doctor? he asked.

  In that moment I was so weak that I made an admission I had never allowed myself to make before, even in my own head.

  I’m scared.


  He held my hands and told me it would be okay. As we stood there, in his kitchen, I felt something I never expected to feel: I felt relieved that I had admitted to him that I was afraid. I felt relieved that he held my hands and I felt relieved that I let him hold them. I felt cared for. It was February 2018, and it was the first time I thought I might be ready to ask for help. I turned twenty-six later that week. I didn’t feel there was anything to celebrate.

  About a week later I left work mid-morning and collapsed on my bed. I woke up eight hours later, backpack and shoes still on, disoriented and afraid. I woke up in a daze, unable to move my arms and unable to feel my legs. The pain in my abdomen was blinding. Every joint felt so inflamed that I could not move a muscle. I had a law exam to prepare for but I couldn’t stay awake.

  It was early March 2018, only a few months shy of my graduation. I thought I could get through it. But I had pushed my body so far that I had once again become completely helpless. I had been swimming straight into the volcano and I hadn’t even realized it.

  I reached over and swallowed some codeine so I could return to unconsciousness.

  The next time I woke up was almost twenty-four hours later. I wasn’t sure if I’d overdosed or if my body really was starting to shut down. I called an Uber and went to the other side of Sydney to my GP. By the time I got there, I was barely conscious. My blood pressure was dangerously low. The doctor discovered I had lost five kilos since being weighed two weeks earlier.

  She called a taxi and sent me to hospital. The doctors wanted to put me on another course of steroids but I refused. A dietician came to see me and prescribed me a powerful supplement powder, telling me that I had a window of two to three days in which to return to a normal weight before my body would adapt to a state of malnutrition.

  When the doctors were trying to impress upon me the urgency of this situation, they kept using words like ‘collapse’ and ‘shutdown’.

  I notice now that these terms are used frequently in trauma studies. These doctors, of course, were not using these terms in this way. They were simply describing what they saw in me: a physical form that had degraded to the point of near-total dysfunction. But to me it seems important that these states are similar to those experienced in trauma; it betrays just how cunning the mind can be. No matter how far you run, no matter how fast, it catches you, and places you right back where you started.

  I have always tried hard to be a generous person, but at that time in my life I found myself being ruthlessly unkind to just about everyone around me. I said and thought cruel things about people who had never deserved cruelty. I was merciless in my approximation of the people who failed to help me, even though I continued to fail to help myself.

  I hated everyone because I could not bear the weight of how much I hated myself. It was as if I had to apportion the loathing before it buried me alive. Or perhaps I just became so practised at being cruel to myself that it spread to others. Perhaps anger bleeds.

  My weight dropped to 43 kilos and I looked skeletal. Another act of disappearance.

  As I stood on the hospital-grade scale one morning when the doctors were desperately trying to see if I was gaining weight, I looked at the flashing digital number, 43, and had a sudden memory of seeing that number on a scale once before.

  Years earlier, about five years after my sexual assault, I developed an eating disorder and began starving myself and throwing up when I broke my own rules. I hated my body so much I could barely leave the house. So I started to break it down, to destroy it, to diminish it until I could barely see it at all.

  I used to run the shower while I threw up my lunch, so my housemates wouldn’t notice.

  I got down to 43 kilos just before I realized how unwell I was and decided to get help. There it was, that same number again, all these years later.

  One way or another, the body keeps the score.

  By late March my tremors were becoming uncontrollable. I invited a new friend over for tea and accidentally poured boiling water all over my bare hand because I could not control my fingers. I’m so clumsy, I said to him, shaking my head.

  The people closest to me were alarmed: I was skeletal and my tremors were alarmingly obvious. I no longer had the stoicism about my pain that they had all become so accustomed to. I started having long episodes, days on end, of inflammatory joint pain so bad that I could hardly move a bone in my body. I just lay there, staring at the ceiling, hoping it would end, not caring how.

  The ulcers in my mouth caused by Crohn’s flares meant that I couldn’t eat solid food because my mouth filled with blood each time I tried. I started eating soup in bed for every meal. Every time I brushed my teeth, no matter how gently, it cracked open all the wounds in my mouth, and after about twenty seconds I would be brushing my teeth with my own blood. So I stopped brushing my teeth. Then I stopped showering. Then I stopped getting out of bed at all.

  I took extended sick leave from work and was in and out of hospital, while they monitored my weight and tried to figure out why nothing was working. I kept insisting on being discharged because every hospital admission felt like a brand-new failure. I knew I was too sick to be at home, especially in a Sydney shared house where no one was attuned to my comings and goings, but I couldn’t stand to admit that I needed to stay in hospital. Concerned doctors in fancy suits argued with me but eventually let me go home, only to find me back in the ward a few days later.

  One day I went to my GP to check in with her and after weighing me, she noticed that I was still rapidly losing weight.

  You need to be in hospital, she said.

  This is not safe.

  I thanked her for the advice but told her that one of my best friends was getting married that Friday outside of Sydney and I wouldn’t miss it for the world. She looked at me as if I was crazy, but I meant it. I loved my friends deeply and I wanted so badly to share their joy with them.

  Even though a huge part of me wanted to die, I wanted to be at the wedding more. I wanted to at least stay alive until then.

  I made it through the ceremony and I even made it to the after-party, but by then I really felt I was in danger. That morning I had been so desperate not to cause a fuss, not to make this happy day about my illness, and yet by the end of the night, I didn’t care if I died on the dance floor. I hadn’t met this version of myself – so selfish, so inconsiderate – until that night.

  That night the pain was so bad as I lay there that I really thought it might kill me. This is it, I thought.

  I remember feeling guilty about the two men I’d only met a few months before who were in the room with me, who would have to find my body the next morning. I felt terrible for my friend, one of my closest and dearest friends, whose wedding would be forever marred by my grand and dramatic failure. But for the first time in my life, that guilt was eclipsed: I just wanted it to be over.

  A few days later I was lying in bed making plans to commit suicide. It seems cruel that your mind convinces you that you want to die after your body has done so much to keep you alive.

  I lay thinking about how I would do it, how I could minimize the inconvenience to the men I lived with. I have never been religious but I found myself laying there, hugging my knees, repeating the same phrase over and over again.

  It’s a phrase I learned from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The main character, June Osborne, explains the etymology of the word ‘mayday’. It is an anglicized version of the French phrase, ‘m’aidez’. It means: help me.

  I found myself repeating this in my head over and over as if it were a prayer of some kind. It had a rhythm and it didn’t stop for hours. It went like this: first, the commonly used English version, then the French, then the English translation, repeated three times.

  Mayday.

  M’aidez.

  Help me.

  Help me.

  Help me.

  It was after that day that I started taking seriously the possibility that my physical disability was
, or could be, a consequence of the assault. It was then I realized that if I properly started to understand the relationship between the two, I might finally find some peace.

  I had tried everything I could to get better, and nothing had worked. I was finally ready to try anything. Even the one thing I swore I would never do.

  Realizing, after how serious I was about suicide that day, just how close I had come to letting this memory drown me, I kept thinking about another line from The Handmaid’s Tale. June, the protagonist, who is captured in a theocratic nightmare in which she is exposed to ritual rape on a regular basis, says to the reader: I intend to survive.

  It is this line that made me realize the true significance of the term ‘survivors’. It does not refer only to surviving the traumatic incident itself, but the everyday terror that follows. The days and weeks and years of indignity that follow. Some days I think that part came closer to killing me than the man with the knife did. But I intend to survive.

  V

  This home is what I came into this world with, Was the first home, Will be the last home, You can’t take it.

  Rupi Kaur, ‘I’m taking my body back’

  RECOVERY

  When I was fifteen, I was attacked by a grown man with a knife. I was a child. I was an athlete. I was fearless. Nothing mattered as much to me as the way my body worked, the incredible things it could do, the way it could fly like no one else’s. I was consumed by the audacity of self-belief. And then I came crashing down to earth. Into the gutter where I belonged, where I was powerless, where no one would notice me.

  The body I felt so comfortable in, the home I had built for myself, became a battlefield. Something that had always made sense to me became entirely opaque. I didn’t understand the way my muscles moved, I didn’t understand the way my bones ached, I didn’t understand why I had lost my balance.