Part 3 of 4:
In my worst dissociative episodes, I had never felt so deeply without myself
I am familiar with (and very grateful for) dissociation. It has protected me in chronic and extreme circumstances. Dissociation and I are at peace, having decided together that it will always be an option and will show up as needed, but I vow to address the source, too. The invisible brain damage I experienced was like dissociation, but in my worst dissociative episodes, I had never felt so deeply without myself.
During the final discard, I barely felt my body. It was symptomatically congruent with certain kinds of brain damage, especially due to an extended lack of oxygen or recovery from light torture. My motor skills suffered; my coordination was unrecoverable. Although he once told me that he would “put his hands on me if it weren’t illegal,”… no, my abuser never hit me, but I had more bruises from misjudging depths, not clearing corners, or falling downstairs. (My lack.) It was like there had been a partial sever, and even while I knew it was happening, it made complex decision-making impossible and my relationship exponentially harder to escape. When I could barely put two and two together, everything felt like a trap, each choice a weapon. I hated myself for wishing he had hit me so someone might understand.
Each choice a weapon
This was dissociation to the absolute extreme: underwater, depersonalization, muffled sounds. Left to die by the side of the proverbial road when I was no longer useful or sexy to him, he then came back for one last round, mocking me for how easy it was, but I was just happy he wasn’t screaming at me, and loved him so much from the beginning I kept thinking there must be a misunderstanding that we could clear up to get back there. He told everyone we knew that I was begging him back when, behind closed doors, I was begging him to stop. (For any uninvested parties, there were surely two sides to the story. He said/she said.) I was black-eyed raged at our “incompatibility”, then told that we had “hurt each other enough” and that he “wished me ecstatic peace”. After months of begging him to stop doing certain things to my body, and because I wouldn’t shut up about it, he blocked me because I wasn’t respecting his boundaries. I “needed to check my blind spots.” He said he needed to take better care of himself.
My brain glitched. Every waking second that I didn’t have a direct distraction, my mind raced through this irony: even the symptoms were covert, though real, intense, and chronic. Even the symptoms were invisible. It brought up comments from friends like, “Yep, that’s heartbreak! Happens to the best of us.” Or “You must have misunderstood; nobody is that manipulative… You’re overreacting. You don’t understand the gravity of the words you’re using. You need to be more empathetic…” Salt on the wound because they were paler versions of the comments from which I was healing.
I hit my head up against a brick wall of illogical violence
I was called obsessive and mocked for how much real estate the discard took up in my brain. But my brain was doing that which thousands of years of evolution had primed it: trying to make sense. The glitch came because there was no sense to make (no matter my math), and so I hit my head up against a brick wall of illogical violence. I wrote out details of impossibly complex traps to remind myself that I hadn’t made it up.
Back in my physical body, I didn’t have the life force to stand up straight. I had severe fatigue and inflammation, the kind of symptoms that make every waking moment longer but are hard to confirm through a doctor. Much like their covert cause, they were hard to pin down and this made my bones hurt more. (My lack. If only I would let myself let it go.) How do you relax when you can feel yourself drained of the adrenaline that you depend on to up-and-run should it happen again? How does one safely sleep?
When his idealization of me wore off, and the devaluing began, the convolution made it hard to even know where to begin to address anything. Plus, I had been strategically made to forget everything I believed in. Most days I was just glad he wasn’t screaming at me, taking the calm where I could; wondering where that wonderful guy I’d met had gone; and trying to find safe moments to bring up my needs (again). It was incredibly disorienting.
Being raged at that something you saw with your very own eyes didn’t happen, then shamed for daring to suggest that it did (never mind incrementally punished over the next few weeks in seemingly unrelated ways) … is disorienting. Not finding one’s keys where one’s hands last left them and then being mocked for being late for work and shamed for being “always in crisis” (even with a decent lifetime record of managing unspeakable ills) … is disorienting. Being screamed at to be humbler for apparently having a look on one’s face that was inferred to mean “Are you talking to me like I’m ugly?” when one is pretty sure their own face reflects the sentiment “Are you talking to me like I’m a toddler?”… and then screamed at for being condescending and making inferences about one’s best guess amidst silent treatments… is disorienting. Being made to watch movies, he knew had triggering content, then mocked when upset, and deathly afraid of sharing intuitions that there’s no way he couldn’t have known… is very disorienting. Being unable to prove any of it and having your community tell you you’re misinterpreting things… is maddening.
Suddenly, and for every second of the next year, I was a cave collapsing on itself: I could neither lie nor tell the truth. I could not find the words to express the critical level of disorientation I was experiencing because of that very disorientation. It wasn’t safe for me to be alone while I hourly reaffirmed my will to live, but to be around humans, I had to water down or omit the truth. I was caught in an illogical loop and had never been less able to reason my way out of it. I cracked. Meanwhile, in a separate space known as my body…
Photo by Blake Connally on Unsplash
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Bonni Benton is a multimedia artist and student. She has a BA in Theatre from Hunter College (CUNY) and will hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from UNM at the end of this year. She put her roots back down in her home state of New Mexico in 2020, where she and her two rabbits currently live in a tiny house in the mountains.
