He allowed himself to sit in fight-or-flight mode for as long as he needed, and then it was over. Levine did not develop any symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the accident.
Levine’s groundbreaking research about healing trauma has been used in hospitals across the world. Thanks to him, it is now widely understood that if the first moments, or perhaps hours, after a traumatic event are managed properly, it’s possible to prevent the majority of long-term symptoms.
What Levine figured out was that if you allowed yourself to be scared, to process the memory in its immediate aftermath, to let the body hurt until it doesn’t hurt any more, the memory no longer stays alive inside you.
In 1965, a young man named Tom graduated from high school and joined the US armed forces. He thrived in basic training and looked forward to a career as a lieutenant.
In 1968, Tom was deployed to Vietnam. He witnessed a group of his close friends die. When he returned home, he pretended to live a normal life but soon became plagued by nightmares. He would replay the moments preceding their death again, and again, and again.
If he abandons them – if he stops having the nightmares – then his friends will have died in vain, Tom told Bessel van der Kolk, the psychiatrist who wrote The Body Keeps the Score. He couldn’t let the memory go because he thought staying in that moment would keep his friends alive.
Ten years later, he barely recognized himself. He began having to sequester himself from Fourth of July holidays because the sound of fireworks would send him into a rage that he could not control. Whenever this part of him was triggered, he became uncontrollably angry. He became violent. He began hurting his wife and two children.
That’s when he found Dr van der Kolk. After just six months of highly specialized trauma therapy, Tom’s rages vanished. So did the nightmares. He says that since he finished his treatment, he has never felt afraid that he might hurt his children.
It is a cold night but I am on fire. I am shaking so much I feel as though my physical form is dissolving. My friends rush to my side and hold me. I do not try to catch the sobs in my throat. I howl.
I breathe the only words I can muster: He hurt me.
Instead of rolling my dress between my legs, I let myself bleed on the pavement. When I try to stand up I clutch my ribcage in agony and stumble. I hold on to my chest as if it might snap, I feel the bruises and tears, the ripped muscle, the broken bones.
I don’t know what to do next so I say it again: He hurt me.
I let my friends climb into the taxi with me and direct the driver to my tree-lined Sydney street. I am still screaming but I am only faintly aware of it.
When we arrive my friends on either side of me help me out of the cab. They take one arm each and help me hobble to the door.
We ring the bell and I hear my parents’ footsteps from the living room down the hall. I hear the hum of the ten o’clock news.
By the time they reach the door, I am bent over double, sobbing, unable to catch my breath.
What happened? my mother says.
A man attacked her, my friend replies.
Call an ambulance, she says over her shoulder, and my father picks up the phone and begins to dial.
I am distracted by my reflection in the glass window when a man walks up and asks me my name.
Lucia, I say quietly, still distracted.
He steps closer to me and I know I should run. He takes my hand in his and pulls me closer.
I do not freeze when he touches me. I do not slip into my practised state of disembodiment and wait for it to be over. I do not become limp and compliant. I do not stare into space as he leads me away. I do not steel myself against his touch.
I rip my hand from his and I run.
I am the frog who jumps straight back out.
The taxi is dark and smells like vomit and the road ahead of me is spinning. I am digging my nails into my stomach so hard that I break the skin. I bite my bottom lip to stop my cries from escaping. I draw blood.
The driver does not ask me for an explanation and I do not offer one. We drive in silence. His organic, mine manufactured from tight jaws and fingers like daggers and a bloody tongue.
He pulls up in front of my house. I live on a quiet street and there is no one around. My bedroom is right at the back of the house, like an extension. I have my own bathroom. I also have my own side entrance that allows me to slip into my room unnoticed.
I limp down the side path and duck when I reach the living-room window, so my parents do not catch a glimpse of me behind the ten o’clock news.
I can feel that I am bleeding down my legs and I pray that none of it reaches the pavement. The last thing I need is a trail, drops of blood leading back to the gingerbread house.
I turn the key in the side door and push it silently. The TV is loud and my parents don’t sense my arrival. I duck into my bedroom and stand there for a moment, just staring. I suddenly become aware of the blood again and I limp into my bathroom and lock the door.
I turn on the shower and wait for it to run hot. I try to stand underneath the jets but I am too weak. I let my back fall against the tiles and I slide onto the floor, blood pooling around my Dove soap bar and collecting near my upended bottle of conditioner. I don’t know what to do with my hands.
I let the water wash over me for many long minutes. A cracked tile catches my eye and I think about the dull sound that thick glass makes when it smashes.
I make the shower hotter and hotter until it numbs me. I stand up sheepishly and wrap myself in a towel. With the towel still around me, I crawl into bed and lay completely still. I wake up cold and damp, wrapped in a towel and, on top of it, a duvet. I feel disoriented. I smell cigarette smoke and immediately jump back into the shower to wash my hair.
I have to make sure no one can smell it on me.
The difference between me and the accident victim, me and the veteran, is one of kind, not of degree. Their trauma was addressed, not because it was more harmful than mine, but because those men had access to words to lock their experience inside of; words they weren’t afraid to say out loud. Words that landed softly on the ear, that did not invite discomfort or disgust; words that ushered in unbridled sympathy.
Words like ‘car’ and ‘accident’. ‘Gunfire’. ‘Veteran’.
Words like ‘call an ambulance’.
These men’s experiences had a language, a dialect. Mine was unspeakable.
There are so many predators in the world, but silence itself may be chief among them. It is deadly. When it comes to recovery, silence is the knife edge between illness and health. Between dignity and indignity. For some, between life and death.
I cannot eradicate violence. I cannot protect all women and girls from its ubiquity. I cannot even protect myself. No one can. Violence is indiscriminate. It is impervious to vigilance and contingency plans. It does not care that you took the long way home to stay closer to the high street.
Violence lives outside its victims. It is endemic and self-sustaining and probably permanent. I wish I could cure us of it, but I can’t.
Because the truth is that if I had stayed home that night in 2007, it is more likely than not that something like this would have happened in another time and place. If I had stayed home that night, it is more likely than not that the man with the knife would have assaulted someone else. Changing our behaviour will never change the fact of violence. As victims, we cannot eliminate violence because we did not create it. It existed long before us, and will continue to exist long after.
There is nothing I could have changed about myself or my life to stop this from happening to me. That is the one thing I finally know to be true.
But there is one thing we can change: the words we wrap it inside of. The words we use to fill the silence.
I have spent ten years wishing I could disappear. I have tried every way imaginable to erase my life, to outrun myself, to make a sacrifice out of myself, always searching for the most profound
and permanent act of disappearance. But I cannot, and I will not. Because to be invisible is to give up the only tangible thing I have to offer: this cautionary tale.
I’m a writer. I can’t change the world. What I can change is the size of silence. The weight of it. The way it pulls us under.
Trying to erase this experience was the surest way to let it define me. I wish I had known that. But I didn’t, and so I said nothing. When I did find a way to tell the truth, it was too late. My intervention was impotent against a body frozen with fear and decayed by disease. Full recovery will never be possible for me because no one, least of all me, wanted to struggle with the listening or the telling. Because no one, least of all me, wanted to face the possibility that it was real. Because of my silence the damage done to me is irreversible. The truth of my life was expressed best by Chelsea Williams during the trial of Larry Nassar: There will never be a time when I am not recovering.
This is not the story I would have chosen. It’s not the story I would choose for anyone. But it’s the one I’ve got, and it’s too late to rewrite it, and I’ve found a way to live with that. All I can do is tell it, and hope that being honest about what I’ve lost might help women and girls speak up while recovery is still possible for them.
Acceptance is a small, quiet room.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Armstrong, Ken and Miller, T. Christian, ‘When Sexual Assault Victims Are Charged With Lying’, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/24/opinion/sunday/sexual-assault-victims-lying.html.
Atkinson, Meera, Traumata. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2018.
Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Anchor Books, 1998.
Ayers Lawson, April, ‘Abuse, Silence, and the Light That Virginia Woolf Switched On’, London: Granta Magazine, 2018.
Backman, Ann-Sofie; Blomqvist, Paul; Lagerlund, Magdalena; Carlsson-Holm, Eva and Adami, Johanna, ‘Characteristics of non-urgent patients’, Scandinavian Journal of Primary Health Care, 26:3, pp. 181–87, 2008.
Baird, Blythe, ‘For The Rapists Who Called Themselves Feminist’, Button Poetry/YouTube, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJRKJ_z9iAk.
Bolin, Alice, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession. New York: HarperCollins, 2018.
Borysenko, Joan, Minding the Body, Mending the Mind. Carlsbad, California: Hay House, 2005.
Brown, Brené, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. New York: Gotham, 2012.
Brown, Brené, Listening To Shame. TED/YouTube, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psN1DORYYV0.
Butler, Octavia E., Parable of the Talents. New York: Warner Books, 2001.
Chen, Esther H.; Shofer, Frances S.; Dean, Anthony J.; Hollander, Judd E.; Baxt, William G.; Robey, Jennifer L.; Sease, Keara L.; Mills, Angela M., ‘Gender Disparity in Analgesic Treatment of Emergency Department Patients with Acute Abdominal Pain’, Academic Emergency Medicine, 15:5 pp.414–18, Wiley, 2008, doi:10.1111/j.15532712.2008.00100.x.
Coulter, Kristi, Nothing Good Can Come From This. New York: FSG Originals, 2018.
Day, Elizabeth, How To Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong. London: Fourth Estate Books, 2019.
Dick, Kirby and Ziering, Amy, The Hunting Ground: The Inside Story of Sexual Assault on American College Campuses. New York: Hot Books, 2016.
Edwards, Katie M.; Turchik, Jessica A.; Dardis, Christina M.; Reynolds, Nicole; Gidycz, Christine A., ‘Rape Myths: History, Individual and Institutional-Level Presence, and Implications For Change”. Sex Roles, 65:11–12, pp. 761–773, . Springer Science And Business Media LLC, 2011, doi:10.1007/s11199-011-9943-2.
Falley, Megan, ‘Holy Thank You For Not’, YouTube, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFo1_KAoM0w.
Fenton, Siobhan, ‘How Sexist Stereotypes Mean Doctors Ignore Women’s Pain’, Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/lifestyle/health-and-families/health-news/how-sexist-stereotypes-mean-doctors-ignore-womens-pain-a7157931.html.
Ferrante, Elena, My Brilliant Friend. New York: Europa Editions, 2012.
Ferrante, Elena, The Story of a New Name. New York: Europa Editions, 2013.
Ferrante, Elena, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. New York: Europa Editions, 2014.
Ferrante, Elena, The Story of the Lost Child. New York: Europa Editions, 2015.
Foster Wallace, David, Infinite Jest. London, Abacus, 1997.
Gay, Roxane, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. London, HarperCollins, 2017.
Gouk, Anna, ‘Only One Rape in Every 14 Reported in England and Wales Ends with Conviction’, Mirror, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/only-one-rape-every-14-11323783.
Healthline (contributor), ‘Is There a Gender Bias Against Female Pain Patients?’, Huffington Post, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/is-there-a-gender-bias-against-female-pain-patients_b_589b6b3ee4b061551b3e06ab.
Herman, Judith, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 2015.
Hoffman, Diane E., and Tarzian, Anita J., ‘The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain’, Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 29, pp. 13–27, 2001.
Hunt, Kate; Ford, Graeme; Harkins, Leigh and Wyke, Sally, ‘Are Women More Ready to Consult Than Men? Gender Differences in Family Practitioner Consultation for Common Chronic Conditions’, Journal of Health Services and Research Policy, 4:2, pp. 96–100, SAGE Publications, 1999, doi:10.1177/135581969900400207.
Jamison, Leslie, The Empathy Exams. London: Granta Books, 2015.
Jamison, Leslie, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2018.
Kaur, Rupi, Milk and Honey, New Jersey, Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2015.
Kaur, Rupi, The Sun and Her Flowers. London: Simon & Schuster UK, 2017.
Khakpour, Porochista, Sick: A Memoir. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2018.
Krasnostein, Sarah, The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in Death, Decay and Disaster. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2018.
Lee, Bri, Eggshell Skull. Sydney, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2018.
Levine, Peter, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2010.
Levine, Peter, Sexual Healing: Transforming the Sacred Wound. Louisville, Colorado: Sounds True Publishing, 2003.
Levine, Peter, Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past – A Practical Guide for Understanding and Working with Traumatic Memory. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2015.
Levine, Peter, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Old Saybrook, Connecticut: Tantor Media, 2016.
Lifton, Robert J., History and Human Survival. New York: Random House, 1970.
Lutz, Tom, ‘Victim Impact Statements Against Larry Nassar: “I thought I was going to die”’, Guardian, 24 January 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/jan/24/victim-impact-statements-against-larry-nassar-i-thought-i-was-going-to-die.
Mailhot, Terese Marie, Heart Berries: A Memoir. Berkeley, California: Counterpoint, 2018.
Maté, Gabor, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. London: Vermillion, 2019.
Nelson, Maggie, The Argonauts. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015.
Nelson, Maggie, The Red Parts: A Memoir. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2016.
Rogers, Annie, The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma. New York: Ballantine Books, 2007.
Rooney, Sally, Conversations With Friends. London: Faber & Faber, 2017. Smith, Zadie, Swing Time. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2016.
Strayed, Cheryl, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar. London: Vintage, 2012.
Taylor, Natalie, Juror Attitudes and Biases in Sexual Assault Cases. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2007.
van der Kolk, Bessel, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Transformation of Trauma. London: Penguin Random House, 2015.
/>
Wolynn, Mark, It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. New York: Viking, 2016.
Yanagihara, Hanya, A Little Life. New York: Doubleday, 2015.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing this book was the most difficult thing I have ever done, and any words of thanks to those who supported me through it will seem inadequate. But I will try my best: Thank you to Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, for taking a chance on me, and to Ellah, Susie Nicklin, Alexander Spears and the rest of the team at Indigo for supporting me through this process, keeping me going and making me a much better writer. Your help, support and guidance changed my life in so many ways. My gratitude is endless. Words fail.
Thank you to my family, without whom I could never have chosen Elena. I couldn’t have done any of this without the support network I have, without the family members I also get to call my best friends, and that fact will forever humble me and make me incredibly grateful.
Thank you to all the dear friends who kept me afloat during this difficult year. To FBC, and everyone who read early drafts of the essay and early drafts of this book. Thank you to those same people, who taught me everything I know about bravery, and who taught me everything I needed in order to start – and finish – writing this book.
Thank you to my doctors, whose support and dedication taught me, again and again, that it is okay to ask for help. That it is okay to ask for more help. This is the lesson I took from this process that will stay with me the longest. So to Kamal, Tanya, Surya and all my other treating doctors and specialists.
Thank you to all the dedicated writers, editors and artists who made the original piece what it was. Very special thanks to Justin and Jini at the Lifted Brow for staying up all night with me. Thank you to Hayley Gleeson and Julia Baird at the ABC, and thank you to Amani Haydar for the illustrations that brought the original piece to life. Thank you to Michael Salu, who created the cover artwork for the first UK edition of this book. It is an image I will never forget.
And, of course, thank you to Saturn.
I Choose Elena Page 9