I often have insomnia. I don't often have time to write... time to explore my thoughts and time to drift away in the nonsense that sometimes takes hold of my thoughts... Time to remember what was and what is... Time to believe in myself, that my past mattered....
It's in the silence that I truly understand myself, but after the silence gives way to chaos and noise of daily life, I forget again... Sometimes I remember things that once were, the girl I used to be and the adventure I had, the ups and downs, the sad-horrible parts mixed with the moments of pure happiness.
My life wasn't easy. There are moments that I really wish I could forget, moments that I wish I could remember, moments that I remember the little girl who was afraid of being alone and I'm her again, moments that I remember happiness, those rare fleeting moments when
I was happy. I remember moments that should probably seem sad, but something made it stand out as beautiful because, perhaps, it was sad. And now, my life is such that it is happy. It doesn't have tragedy as often and somehow seems less beautiful because of it. I love my life but I spent so much time around loss and death and wanting and missing that I've forgotten what life is like without all that. Is it possible I don't know what it's like to be a normal person?
In a way, I think it is. I'm twenty-four years old and this is the most stable my life has ever been. I'm married. I have kids. I have a dog and a cat. I have a house (one that we own in Louisiana and one we rent in Missouri). I have a truck. I have a family. I have duties. I have purpose. Before now, I'd been so many different things...
I was the girl that was abandoned by her birth-father, beaten by her mother, made fun of at school, from somewhere else, living on a Military Base with my alcoholic mother and my Dad (aka stepfather), a book worm, a band geek. I was the girl with that friend who committed suicide, the girl whose boyfriend died, the girl who wore hoodies in the summer and wouldn't say why. I was the girl who tried drugs just to feel something, who wondered about suicide and if that would be worth it (since I believed Suicide was selfish), who hurt herself out of the same desperate need that caused her to smoke pot and occasionally indulged on other things. I was that girl who held her grandfather's hand as he lost the battle against lung cancer. I was that girl who when she moved to Europe, reinvented herself by being herself, only more confidently, and expanded her horizons. I was that girl who went out with a Belgian guy and then a Texan, in the same year and realized how different two people could be. I was that girl with her mother in a coma and her father had turned to the bottle. I was that girl who was 17, all alone in a foreign country. I was that girl who decided not much mattered beyond who she was at any given moment. I was that girl who made friends with people she never expected and kept those friends as her truest. I was that girl who ran away and slept in a friend's bed, strictly platonic. I was that girl who worked at a hospital too young and saw too much hurt and pain. I was that girl who flirted with anyone just to ease their pain. I was that girl who saw her friend die. I was that girl who spent her last month in Europe with two weeks in the psyche ward for hitting a breaking point. I was that girl who during her trip to the psyche ward realized how relaxed and happy she was, being allowed to be crazy. I was that girl who made friends with the guy with schizophrenia and the other guy with severe PTSD. I was that girl who was the only girl in a psyche ward of 20 young, fairly attractive twenty-somethings males who had served their country but had lost part of their mind doing it. I was that girl that felt safe, even with their imbalances and chance they could freak out, she felt completely safe.
That was the last time I felt safe. I was in a psyche ward with about 20 Soldiers and Marines in Nov/Dec 2005. I remember all their faces but most of their names have escaped me... only two stand out, a Marine named Tim*, who I have never heard from again and a soldier named Charlie*, who last I heard in 2010 and was doing well. Tim was a funny, Northern California guy. He'd joined the Marine Corps because his Dad did it when he was 20 and his Grandpa had done it when he was 17. Tim had joined the Marines in 2000, as soon as he'd turned 18. This was his third deployment. What got me about Tim was his lack of shame. He wasn't sorry he couldn't handle what he'd seen and he saw no point in apologizing for something he thought proved he was a good person. He was diagnosed with Severe PTSD. From what I gathered from Tim, he'd seen one too many things while out on a mission. He knew that meant he'd have to leave his buddies, to get better, but he also said he'd be back to them in no time. I don't know what happened to him. I hope he got his wish. Charlie, on the other hand, never really wanted to be a Soldier, but signed up because he didn't have much back home. Back home for Charlie was the Reserves in Arizona. He's 100% Navajo and a wonderful artist. The words he wrote and the art he managed to do in the time that I knew him has taken my breath away a few times. Charlie wasn't made to be a soldier. He had deployed once and wanted out, but his enlistment time wasn't up. He started to get severely depressed and apparently tried to kill himself (I say "apparently" because this is what he didn't say, but in my heart I knew it to be true) and was admitted to the hospital the same night I was. The same night I did the very same thing. Charlie and I became close, perhaps because we'd shared something so tragic and both had failed which made it all the more tragic to us, or perhaps because we both saw the same thing in the other, a suffering in which there was no escape that we could see. Or perhaps it had to do with who we were, as people, as a boy and a girl, because at the time, he was no more of an adult than I was, yet we were both struggling with our lives, the suffering, the war, the entire loss of what life should have been if we weren't somehow apart of this life we'd both somehow chosen. We talked for hours and joked about this and that, never fully letting on about what we felt, because no matter how free we were to feel it where we were, there is something that doesn't change, that need to control yourself, as much or as little as you can. Control is a very basic human need. Charlie and I ended up being in the same "group" sessions, where we'd both discovered we suffered from the same "disorder" if that's the proper word for it, Disorder sounds so... civil. We found out we were bipolar, manic depressives. I was not that surprised to find out about me. I'd been mistakenly put on SSRIs by my doctor and had kind of lost my mind during the time I was taken them. My mood swings were radical and I'd go from crying to laughing to yelling to laughing to crying in about 10 minutes flat. I was literally being pushed over the edge by pills that were supposed to help me. As it turns out, SSRIs are a terrible idea for manics. We react badly, and it causes our only little bit of control to shatter like a piece of glass hitting a marble floor. Charlie told me that's what had happened to him, he was losing it on those drugs and I couldn't have agreed more that they were wrong for me. I ended up being diagnosed with PTSD as well, since what I'd seen and lived through already had driven me here, I was pretty accepting of that as well. I guess I had always known something was wrong with me and finding out exactly what was a relief. When I finally left the psyche ward, I promised to keep in touch with Charlie and to call Tim when he made it back stateside, but I only kept one, mostly due to Charlie emailing me and writing me these beautiful letters that could only come from another friend who had experienced exactly what you did, where you were safe and had the comfort of someone who wouldn't judge... His first letter to me had started out with twelve small words that have always been stuck in my mind. I might not remember another thing he ever wrote, although all of it was beautiful and tragic, as was our friendship, started on the broken pieces of two souls and growing stronger but still fragile, like a bone that has been reset. But those words, those twelve little words have carried me for seven years, every so often reminding me that my life is just that... "
Leah, Leah, Leah, my dear sweet Leah, how does your garden grow?" My life is a garden now, first it was full of weeds and now I have beautiful flowers in its place. So why do I fear the storm that isn't even on the forecast? Maybe knowing true happiness, knowing what it's like not to worry about being hit or screamed at, not worrying about food or clothing or electricity or even, at one or five points, a place to live, not worrying about if I'm safe, if my children are safe, not worrying about those moments that truly frighten you... Not worrying about fear except of the unknown... And what truly scares me... is that now that I know happiness, I have more to lose than I did when I wound up in the only safe place I'd really known til then.
I guess, sometimes honesty is lost in this world and people like me don't tell you their stories... like when they hit bottom, what they remember about how they felt, why... It all means something to someone else who has been the victim of an unfortunate life, but maybe it means more to me than anyone else, because it's my life, it's the life I lived. I saw and felt death near me, I thought I would meet death once, even happily so, yet here I am, in the midst of life with two beautiful children, a husband who knows all that and loves me anyways, a future with promise and hope, somehow happy and I'm afraid.
I think I'll always be afraid of what I remember. I don't even talk to my own mother because I'm afraid I'll forgive her and being abused and neglected by her for the majority of my life has become a pattern I never want to repeat. So I avoid her, I try to refrain from punishing my own children when I'm truly angry because I know a part of that monster I was raised with is inside me and I refuse to be like her. I try not to be angry anymore, about what is done, because it is in the past. I had one brief, but really beautiful chapter in the tragedy and I'd always been afraid that was the only one I'd get, where I was safe, where I could truly let go of the pretense of staying 'normal' and be myself. It turns out though, that wasn't true happiness.
She was black and blue and had cuts all over. She looked lost... No, she knew exactly where she was (Charlie in a blog about me 2006). I might have looked lost, and even been a little lost, but he was right, I knew where I was. I was a million miles from where I'd started with a few thousand to go... It just took me a while to realize that he was right all along. I'd always read that line (over and over in my mind, after I'd long stopped going to his blog) and thought how could he know me so well and yet only know me for two weeks. My husband is amazing and after two years of knowing each other, still loves me, but sometimes I wonder if he saw what Charlie saw, would he think the same? Would he see that girl who was black and blue and cut all over as a beautiful woman? Or would he see, as so many others have seen in my life: a lost little girl with a broken smile?
I think I've healed. I want to believe I have. From the pain and the sorrow and the loss of what was and the gain of what is now. I want to believe that darkness will never seep into my heart again. I want to believe that I am perpetually happy but even as I write this, I know it's not entirely true. I have darkness inside me, I have a part of my soul that is forever marked with finding the tragic somehow beautiful. I have something so deeply imprinted in my soul that I am comfortable in sorrow, secure in a loneliness that comes from being the only person who you can trust. That part of my soul hasn't been seen in a while but I know someday, it will emerge from it's cocoon and perhaps something beautiful will come of it... 'for when I am in the darkest parts of my mind, my most beautiful art comes out... Poetry that is symbolic and true to my heart. Poetry that I can't write happy.
And yet somehow, I feel relieved to know that in my present state, I've finally owned up to my past. To the part of me that I was afraid of. I am no longer afraid. These thoughts are dancing, from memory to memory, as if on some melody of a long forgotten song and soon they will be memories that I forget like some aged photograph, sitting upon a shelf, yellowing and fading as the years go by.
*Names changed to protect their Identities and their Privacy.
