That was how I had put it.
I doubted whether I still had a self. Whether what I took to be my self could offer protection from the world around me, from my own thoughts most of all. I felt a deep longing to heal. To be healthy again or perhaps for the first time, a single whole with clear boundaries between outside and in.
We went through a door, then another door, and into an anonymous room with a sheet of paper stuck to the wall, a list of rules, obligations, expectations. I looked at it and thought, this can’t be happening, not to me, not really. But my friends left and I stayed behind in a room that held nothing personal. In an optimistic attempt to make the best of things, someone had brought along a guitar. In the room, the instrument seemed alien, it did not belong. As a student, I had worked part-time in care homes for the elderly and that’s what the room brought to mind, complete with grab rails by the toilet. We had passed a rec room on our way here, gray and empty; it’s the weekend, the nurse said, not many people around. She sounded almost apologetic but I was afraid to meet the others anyway. The only patient I did see embodied all the clichés: shuffling along in jogging pants, turned in on herself. Not that I was looking much better, pasty and drawn, dark circles under my eyes and—another walking cliché—dressed in black from head to toe. The nurse said I should be glad to have a room of my own.
Earlier that week, when after stumbling on for years it was finally clear that I could no longer cope, I had discussed my few options with a friend. I remember us trying to paint the rosiest picture we could. I might be able to work when I was inside, maybe even keep up with the theory classes at drama school, where I had just started my second year. I don’t know if Trish honestly believed these hopeful plans, but for me it was necessary to convince myself that this moment—a moment I had been trying to fend off for years—was not as ominous as I’d always thought it would be. Hospitalization was not a disaster, not a crushing defeat; it was a hiatus, a chance to find peace and start anew. But one look at the room, at the A4 list of rules, and it was clear that even that forced optimism was far-fetched.
One thing becomes instantly apparent on being admitted to a clinic, perhaps on every first encounter with a mental healthcare specialist. Your sorrow, your pain and despair are nothing special. No matter how acute, how life-threatening they feel, you have to go to the back of the line, wait for the next available spot, abide by the system.
This place was not concerned with the need I felt, but with what was expected of me. Whoever had written these rules took no interest in who I was, who I wanted to be or what I thought I needed. And of course, I was here for a reason: I no longer knew who I was, or what was left of the girl who, only a year ago, had signed up for drama school with the brightest of intentions.
Two sentences were all I needed to sum up what had thrown me clear of my own existence:
Feel like I’m locked in a room with the past and the room is getting smaller all the time. Scared I’ll never get out.
The psychotherapist had another way of putting it: chronic posttraumatic stress disorder.
Trauma. Wound.
We use the word trauma so often, so casually today that much of its meaning is lost. To most of us, trauma is a thing of the mind. But not so long ago the term was in the hands of surgeons. Trauma was entirely physical: a wound or shock to the body, a rending of the skin.
My despair was physical too. Perhaps that’s why my words fell so far short. They had too little substance, too little body. The same went for me. The body I did not have had often been touched when I was not present, by men who did not know me, in ways I did not want. Until the essence of what remained was not. My body took up space, but nowhere near as much space as it needed. It did not resist, did not know how. I abandoned the bulk of my body to others, withdrew into my brain, inhabiting the attic confines of my skull. I made attempts to expand my territory, to take possession of my arms and legs. Now and then I even dared to have a belly, buttocks, breasts. Sometimes I succeeded, mostly until someone else came along, someone who did not know me but touched me when I was not present and was unable to resist, who once again substituted my body for a non-body.
A long time ago, the philosopher Avicenna carried out a thought experiment: he imagined a floating man. The man cannot see or stand. He is suspended in midair but unable to feel the air that supports him. His arms and legs never touch. The floating man has no way to make contact with the world outside him, no awareness of the boundaries of his own body. And yet, Avicenna maintains, this man still has a self. Though he is oblivious to his own height and weight, and may not even have a concept of his own hand—certainly not as part of him—the floating man still has a sense of himself as I. For Avicenna, this sense of I is proof of a soul separate from the body. In his philosophy, having a non-body is not a problem. The same is true of much of Western philosophy, but then philosophers have their own reasons for becoming thinkers.
In reality, our certainties and uncertainties are deeply rooted in embodied perceptions. Someone with a strong sense of who and what they are—and more importantly what they are not—has both feet on the ground, not their head in the clouds. We follow a gut feeling, stand tall, show some backbone, shoulder our burdens. Upheavals catch us off-balance, we lose our footing and are no longer ourselves. When we meet a stranger, it takes us only a fraction of a second to gauge the kind of person she is, before she has spoken a word. Without even realizing it, we observe the space her body takes up, register her breathing, which may be deep or shallow, note the posture her body has assumed through time. Wherever You Go, There You Are is the title of a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of the mindfulness movement. Depending on your outlook, the title either suggests that you will end up where you were heading or, more hopefully, that you can be wherever you are, that even in the act of going you can simply be. It’s not something we tend to do—wonder where we are. There’s much more emphasis on who we are; how to be our best, our authentic selves. Where we are is a question we can leave to our satnavs or Google Maps.
Or so we think.
Language thinks differently. The Dutch word for “experience” is ervaren. It comes from irfaran, meaning to travel through. As you travel through a region, you learn the lay of the land; especially if, as in medieval times, your journey unfolds slowly, at the pace set by your own footsteps or at best a horse’s hooves. Gradually, ervaren took on a wider meaning: from traveling through to learning the lay of the land, to acquiring knowledge in general (to come to know) and from there to ervaren in its present sense (to experience). To find your way through an unfamiliar landscape, you need to know where you have come from. Navigating with map and compass is a hopeless task if you have no idea whether the contours on the map correspond to the hills around you. In our urbanized world, losing your way has become so unlikely that it carries a hint of romance. But the charm soon fades when you really are lost, when you find yourself walking in circles.
Why don’t you ever write about people who are happy? It’s a question I’m asked sometimes. I usually answer that enough has been written about happiness. Or more to the point, that happiness is often written about too simply, as something you can pick up along with that new sweater, that home, that car or that course on philosophy, should you be so inclined. The predictable happiness of Hallmark cards and Hollywood movies. Sugarcoated happiness that rots the teeth. Complete in and of itself, invincible and everlasting. It’s the happiness you often find in the closing lines of memoirs written by people who have gone through a terrible ordeal, words in which they take stock of the things that—in spite of it all—now make them happy and successful. Those lines might be true, but I always find them hard to swallow. Life’s loose ends are rarely tied up that neatly. It’s lives we live, not novels. There’s another reason why I seldom write about happy people, a fundamental of literature. Without longing to set things in motion, people stay where they are. Nothing happens. Plot is what the writer visits upon her characters. But a fictional plot is never as involved, never as fickle as life itself. Stories have a structure, a rightness you seldom encounter in the real world, an architecture in which nothing is left to chance. This is best seen in fairy tales with their time-honored ending “and they all lived happily ever after”: the story ends where longing ends. Which brings us to the third and—as is the way with fairytales—most revealing reason: I’ve never been much good at happiness. All too often the ground beneath my feet crumbles without warning and the map I put my faith in seconds before becomes suddenly useless. When this happens, I can no longer see straight, no longer have a clue where I am. I might try scrambling around to regain some perspective, attempts that are mostly futile or only make things worse.
Too many stories about violence are written as fairytales, like the following book about abuse:
And so here I am. Still just twenty-six years old and married to the most amazing man, with two beautiful daughters and a newly born son who completes our family. I know I will meet many obstacles on my life road, but I feel strong and prepared to face whatever life throws at me.And they all lived happily ever after.
That’s how it goes in fairy tales. Cinderella and Snow White emerge triumphant as the only true princesses. Because at the end of the story, after the fact, it’s okay to look back and talk about these things. But not until you’ve proved there’s actually nothing wrong with you, that you’re not really insane, that your breakdown was a blip, a misstep. It’s the kind of book you write once you’ve held your ground in this world long enough to show you can remain standing. Or at least give that impression. That you’re over it. That now it’s all behind you.
Because we don’t want people returning from the abyss without bringing something back for us. And the last thing we want to hear is that there’s nothing there but darkness.
