The Straw That Broke My Back.

It was 2011 when I first started feeling that way.  I was flooded with repressed memories from my childhood, things that no person should ever endure.  It wasn’t just one or two, it was more like 20.  Twenty people reached out to me from the time I was an infant till my teens and took my innocence.

This number is seemingly random, even to me.  I still don’t remember the details, it’s just a feeling, a feeling deep down that you know to be true.  I have told few people, and some who I thought were wise and wonderful would insensitively ask “How do you know it’s that much? How do you know for sure?”

The same way a memory of your childhood comes to you in spits and splatters, you just know the story behind those pictures, you just do.

The scary part is, that number is only up until my teens and I have experienced more.  The last one was just under a year ago.  As if I have a sign, invisible only to nice people, that says “I am easy to use, please rape me.”

In 2011 I was living in the States, that was where I started getting the memories.  I was in a ministry school that changed my life, but also didn’t know how to deal with someone like me, trying to pray my trauma away.  I felt less than good enough.  Nothing seemed to work, and I blamed myself, not God.  So I pushed it all down, pretending I was ok, what else could I do?  No one could help me.  I was completely alone with this.

When I returned to New Zealand, I moved a couple of times, trying to look for help.  Each time I told a person I thought may help me, their eyes glazed and they offered to pray for me.  Now I just want to take a moment here to say I don’t hate prayer or God, or well meaning people.  I do, however, hate being brushed over or put in the ‘too hard’ basket.  It feels too much like rejection.  So no one could help me and since I was also chronically ill I decided to move, once again, to Auckland.  I had not had a diagnosis at this point and it was clear to me that in order to move forward, I must move cities.  There is one thing about Auckland that made this more difficult than I envisioned,  the housing crisis.  I could not find a permanent place to live, no matter how many places I looked at.  As one does in these situations, I turned to Facebook to see if anyone could help, and I lucked out with an acquaintance I knew from many of the hardcore music shows I attended.  He lived with an older woman who cooked and cleaned for him and only charged a relatively small price to board there.  I was sold, someone cooking and cleaning for me?  Perfection!

I was living there for a couple of months when it started.  After a night of deep and meaningful talks this acquaintance hit on me.  I was flattered, but also afraid, after a lifetime of abuse and rape men can be extremely scary beings for me.  I shook that feeling off believing I was being paranoid.  I wasn’t though.  I won’t go into detail, I don’t want to cause pain to any of my readers, but lets just say he used me and psychologically abused me as well.  I have depression and anxiety, that is something I knew I had, but I am not one to jump to suicidal thoughts.  One night after a particularly bad encounter I disassociated completely.  The next morning I was in hospital after I had apparently paired dozens of sleeping pills with my flatmate’s expensive scotch.  That was the straw that broke me, and I was sent to live with my parents as I was told by my landlady that I was unsafe to the children she took care of.  As is the story with many abuse survivors, I was painted the villain, not the victim.

He as not my first perpetrator, but he was the one who led me to a diagnosis, for that I am oddly grateful.

C-PTSD, looks different for everyone but for me I get overwhelmed by seemingly random events. My traumas have not been singularly based around sexual assault, but of a bunch of cataclysmic events throughout my life.  It has possibly always been there as I look back, I can see it popping up from time to time but now it feels constant. What used to be fun, can now be so overwhelming I will space out and go blank or have a panic attack.

It looks like me being outgoing and bubbly one moment and with a sentence I can be on the floor pulling at my hair and wailing while my eyes stare at nothing often chanting something along the lines of  “I can’t be here, I can’t exist, it’s too much.”  It manifests in words I should never say in a fight, things worse than anything I would say if I were just angry.  But at the time it feels so incredibly true.  It looks like smoking cigarettes in your bed with your knees tucked up because you had a fight with someone you love days ago and you can’t forgive yourself.  It’s knives and cutting, sleeping pills being popped and duvet covers being torn because your feelings are just too much.  It’s over-exercising so you can feel better, or under-eating so you can feel in more control, or over-eating because you don’t feel in control.  It’s nights awake till 5am staring at a TV screen but unable to understand anything that is playing.

One time I had a date.  A gorgeous man from the North Shore who looked like a mix of Johnny Depp and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, equally as handsome, equally as lanky.  An accountant by day, he plays in a band at night and had a serious sense of style.  We had got together a couple of times but it was mainly just sex, something that can be dangerous from someone with my history so I insisted on a date. We had planned on getting hot chocolate and talking down at a beach after one of his gigs.  I waited till 2am before I freaked out.  I was dressed nonchalantly but equally sexy, and had waited to hear from him before putting my lippy on.  But I didn’t hear from him, and I didn’t hear his Italian leather boots walking up to my door.  Every noise I held my breath.  Until a friend text me to say his band finished 2 hours ago and I was stood up.  I lost control, I grabbed a cigarette and went outside smoking while crouched in the corner, I text a man from tinder.  I knew the risk that he would just use me and not help was high but I needed to stop feeling.

I was right, he firstly acted concerned but ended up using me for sex and I was in no state to fight it.  I thought I couldn’t feel worse but I did.

After that I went on date after date with strangers who wanted to use me and I felt worse after each one, but I felt like I couldn’t stop, I was starving for comfort, until I had a breakdown and couldn’t leave my bed.  I rang people I thought would not judge me, who would listen and lay in bed with my cat for more than a week before I brushed myself off and went out with a friend for coffee.  Of course that was closely followed by crawling back into my bed.  I wrote, sang, cried, and binged watched TV shows.

I dated someone special for a year after that. We only ended because of cultural differences we couldn’t change.  I wish I could tell you that I no longer have episodes but I would be lying, the fact is C-PTSD isn’t something that can be healed, but you can grow to deal with it.  There are still cigarettes, duvets and binge watching weeks and I still have a tendency to date inappropriate men, but I am growing.  I have a greater sense of self.  The best thing we can do is believe that we are worth more than the episodes our mental illness puts us in.