Getting Real About Trauma
Ok, so that title is a little bit misleading, in a way. But only in a small stretch kind of way.
Long story short, in 2017 I lost my favorite job, the only place I really felt at home in, the only job that made me feel complete as a person and gave me so much to look forward to. I was the scapegoat for a mistake by the theatre director’s daughter who was being paid under the table but when a shareholder says fire someone, they had to fire the only other employee on the scene- me. And that killed me. For years.
But that’s not the trauma I speak of. That’s just some backstory to jump ahead with to the year 2019. I had been away from theatre for very nearly two full years by then and felt lost still, searching for something else to make me feel necessary. My back had been to theatre of any kind besides patronage for two years. But here I was, walking around Manhattan by my lonesome, reading Unbroken and listening to music for days on end when I headed into the Public Theatre to see Jake Gyllenhaal in a one act play. And the kernel started popping. This play was about the trauma of losing a parent. I was in NYC mourning the 5 year anniversary of losing my mom. Still not the trauma. A little, but not for this story.
Seeing Jake up there, the way A Life was written out, it gave me hope despite it’s content. I decided to write my own play. I chose to write about the damage my teen years had on my entire life. Something I live with and a story I know all too well, a story that could hopefully shed light on some topics that would help another. And I tell you, as I am staggering to finish draft 10 tonight, on my 37th birthday, the trauma still hits hard.
When I was younger I was victimized by my boyfriend. Physical, mental, sexually. Manipulated to feel like I was worthless, watched almost helplessly as my friends were manipulated to turn their backs to me. I was destroyed as a person. Nobody could help me because I asking. I lied a lot. I hid a lot. I felt like it was my fault for letting it happen to I stopped myself from getting the help I needed because I didn’t need anyone else telling me it was my fault. Not again. So most of my stories and scars, well, I bottled them up and lied about them for roughly 16 years. My own husband didn’t know. Almost nobody knew. I got so used to internalizing it that I didn’t know how to tell people I loved about trying to jump from a moving car down Hall Road one night or the time my arm was grabbed to fiercely that it popped every blood vessel and I couldn’t put weight on it and wore hoodies for months to hide it. So I started talking about it in the most meaningful and inspirational way I know. Live theatre.
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It’s a short play, a dramatic one, that started out as a single speaker that morphed into two players. Myself. And him. It took me from New York until this very night to carefully build the final ten pages of story. And it’s a story of warning that needs to be told, not just for myself, but to hopefully be a teacher to someone else, a teacher that I never had growing up. It’s hard enough to be a rape victim and live with that forever. It’s another to have it be done by someone who is supposed to love you and protect you, and then because it was him, having nobody believe you because “you can’t get raped by your boyfriend”. We were all so limited at the time because it was taboo to discuss. So nobody did. And I fell victim to the silence for nearly two decades.
Until now. This year I have focused a lot of attention on not only writing it, but writing some exact instances from my life, engorging a few memories for impact and vehicle and really taking every opportunity to speak with people from my past who may remember something that I hadn’t. I took stock of myself. I first sat at my desk after work and did some free writing of everything that I could remember about him- I would up typing 45 pages of memories in two days. Every fight, every slight I could recall, every time he put someone else above me in our relationship. Every hit. Every vindictive and hateful act of a sociopath.
Because that’s what he is. A sociopath. My first lesson in demons both evil and internal. People think they know what crazy is when they watch a bad guy be taken down on Criminal Minds or something, but it’s not as easy in real life. It took me years to see it and get away. And I almost didn’t. He is an attempted murderer on top of everything else. So you can imagine that revisiting all of this has really fucked me up. Sometimes I don’t sleep and when I do I dream of him. A lot of it is we’re back together for a short time as adults and I’m looking for ways to leave him again. I’m always trying to leave him. I’m still trying to. Writing this play may have screwed with me more than I initially thought he had when I was 19. This is extremely difficult. Nobody can really understand unless they lived it, but every wound I have ever had- from being told I was too stupid to go to college all the way to having my own cousin turn her back to me and choose him (still she chooses him) has been reopened, examined and still bleeds. The main thing keeping me going is knowing that someone, somewhere needs to hear these warnings so that they can save themselves. As I say in my play, to get away before that fateful day when your boyfriend tries cutting off your hair with kitchen shears just to tell you how ugly you are.
I just needed to get some of this out. I’m trying to turn in my draft tonight to Naked Angels for a reading with real actors so I can keep working on it. But in order to do that I need to focus and finish this draft. But for the life of me tonight I can’t get past the idea of how difficult this whole process has been. So I think I just needed to type out maybe 2% of how exhausting and painful this all is. Let alone the fear that people will read it and know my shames. Because, oddly enough, I still feel ashamed by all of it. Mostly of how stupid I was to let it go on for so long because I was broken so often. I knew it wasn’t right but convinced myself that I was still loved behind the manipulations and fists. It seems so cliche, and it is, and even at the time I knew that I deserved better and to leave but it took me about a year to finally do. And in that year I still felt embarrassed by how long it was taking me to feel safe on my own. I know it’s a little silly to feel ashamed of something you couldn’t help, but to this day I still feel like I could have helped it, I just didn’t. I tried, a few times, but that’s the thing about sociopaths- they will make you feel like garbage for staying or leaving because they need it to be about them and their choice only. I didn’t even know what a sociopath was until college. Why does nobody talk about this stuff??
I’m ready to get swiftly past my woes and shames in order to grow and achieve something, and so I have my Red Bull here and I am ready to keep working until I finish this bitch and send it to Joshua in Chicago by midnight. My face is red but I think that I feel on task enough to keep going.
Wish me luck, nobody. Happy birthday to me.
