there’s a dam in my throat

Sarah Fathima Mohammed, from "nocturnes in the rain"

I want to write about the dam I feel in my throat. The one that stops me from sharing my experiences. But even that is hard. I feel the avoidance of it. I feel heavy.

_______________________________

I started college out west. It was my first attempt of escape. I had been fantasizing about that freedom for as long as I had felt trapped: forever. To say it did not go as I had hoped would be a massive understatement. Within two weeks, I had to withdraw and move back home. For lack of a better descriptor, I had a mental breakdown.

_______________________________

The week before leaving, I decided to return to an old therapist I had seen during my eighth grade year. I went with the intention of telling her about a few of the experiences I had with my dad growing up. Experiences that I had kept on the periphery. I tracked these memories and their movements, but I never had turned to look at them in the eye. With the start of college looming, I wanted to share these stories in hopes that she could answer the questions I most wanted an answer to: why does it feel impossible to date? why am I not like my friends?

I thought that speaking these memories out loud would give me a fresh start when I moved. I thought I could leave them and their significance in that room once the hour was up. Mostly (completely), I wanted that therapist to validate what I felt in the pit of my belly: these memories were deeply significant and impactful memories of trauma. Of boundaries disregarded. Of abuses of power. Remembering that session, I can feel the desperation seeping from my bones onto her sofa. My questions to her were pleas: Please, please, confirm what I know to be true, what I am too scared to form with my own words. These are memories that leave me feeling slimy, embarrassed. I knew that there was something insidious about them. I wanted so deeply to be validated. To be seen. To be healed.

Instead, she pivoted.

I shared memories of my dad keeping me and my sister closer than he needed - physically and visually. The therapist countered my stories by saying perhaps he kept us as close as he did in order to keep us safe. Perhaps he was anxious, and maybe he had wanted to keep an eye on us. She said, more than likely, my fear of intimacy is rooted in the dynamics of alcoholism. That having an alcoholic father has made me fear vulnerability, made me fear getting to close to another. Which in some sense, is true. But it is a small piece of a much larger puzzle.

This was the first time I had disclosed the beginnings of the abuse to an adult. It was the first time I spoke the words aloud with the hopes that maybe help, validation, safety would meet me when I finished. I left that room believing what she told me. I left that room not believing myself.

I moved to California the next week, my psyche freshly broken open from disclosure with no buoys of support to hold fast to.

_______________________________

When my mom and stepdad dropped me off at college, I could not stop crying. I remember laying on my top bunk willing myself to stop. My roommate was moving in. Her whole family was there. Still, I could not stop crying.

I walked around campus, watching other kids say their goodbyes, and I was envious of everyone who severed ties without large swells of emotion. I could not understand how they were not sobbing. I was overcome with the urge to be by my mom. It was overwhelming. All my life, I hated being separated from her. My need for her was primal.When my sister and I would have a babysitter, I used to go into my mom’s closet and put on one of her shirts because it smelt like her. Because I needed her near. When she had to work nights and we had to sleep at my grandparents, I would howl with anger. This need, even during our emotionally distant years, never disappeared. I did (and still do) feel safest when I am by her. Those first few days at college, I felt like I was a child again. I would’ve crawled into her closet and lived there if I’d had the choice.

Our relationship had become strained as I had gotten older. I had long stopped relying on either of my parents to be who I wanted them to be. Something in my mom had changed a few years after she left my dad. She had begun to need too much from me, of me. I was her confidant, daughter, friend. There was no space for me leftover.

I used to sleep with her every night, because I was petrified of sleeping alone. When she started dating the man who would become my stepdad, I had to start sleeping in my own room. I used to scream and sob and beg her to come to me. She did for a while. But she grew impatient, irritated by my theatrics. She stopped coming to my door, in hopes I would learn to be on my own the way a newborn learns to self-soothe. (But this has been disproven, right? We learn to regulate through our connection to another. Something breaks in babies who are not tended to.) Eventually, I stopped crying. Not because I stopped needing her, but because I stopped believing she would come. I also stopped showing her affection, stopped asking her for anything.

As much as I pulled away, she would reach out. Sometimes in appropriate ways, other times in outlandish ones. And every time she did, I would go cold. I refused to give her what she wanted. I refused to let her see any part of me. I did not think she deserved my closeness. She acted like she needed me, but I did not feel she liked or loved me. Both of our resentment for the other grew. But my want for her to be in my proximity never left. Truly, my craving for her grew deeper. I still needed her near, and doubly, I yearned for the way we used to be.

In the year preceding my move to college, she handled it without grace. She would get drunk and cry, or she would get drunk and yell. She did not take well to me leaving, because she believed I was leaving her. I often wonder the foundation I would have started college with if she would have had more support in my decision.

_______________________________

The first morning waking up at school, knowing my mom was on a plane home, was the hardest. I called her crying. As the days passed, I kept calling her crying. She began to worry. Here was her daughter who never externalized emotions suddenly having a cascade of them.

But I remember myself getting better. Slowly, day by day, I stopped crying immediately upon waking. One morning, I was taking a shower staring at my caddy on the door and I thought I don’t feel it as heavy in my chest. Something feels lighter.

Maybe I jinxed myself with that thought.

The first Saturday football game was at the Rose Bowl against Stanford before classes officially started. It was a big deal. I was planning on going with the girls I had met on my dorm floor. That morning, my stepdad called me - which was a rarity. He said him and my mom had gotten into a fight the night before. She had drunkenly tried to beat him up. My aunt and uncle across the street could hear her screaming at him. He is a kind, sober man. He would never physically harm her, but when he tried to block one of her punches she started screaming that he had hit her. Eventually, he got out and went across the street. He called me the next morning because he wanted me to have the full story. He was scared she was going to tell me he had hit her.

I remember feeling nothing on that phone call. We hung up, and my demeanor didn’t change. I thought about what he told me, about how my mom’s outburst was likely caused in part my me leaving, but I had no emotional connection to the story. I went to the football game. There was excitement buzzing from everyone, but I really just wanted to go back to my dorm. My bones were tired, and everyone around me seemed to belong to another world.

Things got hard again after that. It wasn’t conscious, but that phone call shifted something in my nervous system. It overwhelmed my brain. I was at capacity. Between the disclosure at therapy, leaving my mom, and the call from home it was too much.

My mom never ended up telling me what happened. She still has no idea I know. I wonder, if I wouldn’t have answered his call, the cracks in my psyche may not have turned into such a chasm, and I may not have had to come home to the same place I had so desperately wanted to escape.

_______________________________

After the call, I stopped being able to eat meals. My stomach hurt constantly. I couldn’t sleep through the night. My brain wouldn’t shut off. Talking to anyone on the phone made me start to cry. I set up a therapy intake appointment at the student clinic. I sat across from the man in the small office and sobbed. I told him I just feel overwhelmed but I don’t understand why. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. He asked me if I had any suicidal thoughts. I said honestly no. Because I wasn’t deemed an emergency, I would have to wait until the end of October before I could see a therapist. Their schedules were full. It was only September. I thought to myself I can’t live like this until October. I can’t survive this way. I wasn’t going to kill myself, but I also wasn’t convinced my body could continue the way it was.

Facing each new day felt insurmountable. The effort to be around others and pretend to be interested in mundane activities was excruciating. The mornings were difficult, but nighttime may have been the worse. I would wake up in the middle of the night, and as soon as consciousness seeped in, I felt like my chest was caving in. It became hard to breathe. I would stare at the lights of the houses on the hill and feel a loneliness so deep in my bones. I would creep out of my room so as not to wake my roommates to call my sister at three am, praying she would be awake because it felt impossible to be alone with my thoughts. The darkness felt suffocating.

I had no conscious connection as to why I was feeling the way I was feeling. I have always been both anxious and regarded as anxious by my family. What was happening to me felt like it fell in line with everyone’s beliefs of me, including my beliefs about myself. I was always too anxious, too sensitive, too dramatic. At eighteen, I had no awareness that it was likely because my brain was overwhelmed. Too much had happened at once, and everything that I had tried to ignore for years was begging screaming stomping to be seen. My psyche couldn’t hold the dam any longer.

_______________________________

I did not have a plan. When I am in crisis, I put my head down and move through the days like a robot. I do not admit to myself how bad I am doing. The idea of withdrawing from school to move home felt like a fantasy until my uncle and mom told me I could. I did not want to retreat unless someone else had said that it was an option. Within a day, my ticket had been bought and I had to pack. I went to the office, filled out the paperwork and was done. It was too easy really. I told my roommates, and with kind words they supported me. I packed my boxes, shipped them off and ubered to the airport the next morning. I was headed home.

_______________________________

The transition back home was not easy. Those days I recall with a gray overtone. I do not remember talking about the actual experience of having to withdraw, of the heartbreak and grief I felt about it. Instead, I talked about my daily anxiety. I woke every morning with heart palpitations and racing thoughts. Yet, the intensity of the actual experience was never vocalized. I did not know how to speak of it, what to speak of it. I still did not understand what had happened. I did not know why I was back home, only that I was and I deeply wish it had gone another way.

_______________________________

In therapy, I have started to talk about this experience because I realized I have never metabolized it. There are many moments in my life that I struggle to articulate with words. This is typically one of them, but I chose to start with it because it feels digestible. It does not intimidate me as much as other ones.

_______________________________

I see mental images of myself back home after withdrawing. I saw myself lying in bed, and I see myself working as a cashier at the bookstore. I can sense the gravity of the experience I had just come from and the weight of my silence about it. Looking back now, it feels absurd to have had a mental breakdown and not speak of it. No one asked and I never volunteered. My jaw pain has been back since that session. The silence is everywhere. So much of my discontent with life is because there is a disconnect between how I present and how I feel. It feels like I am living behind a wall of plexiglass. All of these words want to scream out of me, but my jaw slams shut. To admit to these experiences is to welcome in the reality of their turmoil.

_______________________________

When I began seeing a new therapist after my return from college, I did not mention those memories I had disclosed to the other therapist a few months prior. The choice was deliberate, but I do not know what it stemmed from: a fear of being discredited again or a fear of someone telling me it indeed was abuse. Both, I suppose, weighed heavily on my brain. When I finally brought them to another therapist’s ears four years later, I did so almost flippantly. There was no emotion attached. I said them aloud as if I was telling someone about the weather. I was incredibly disconnected from myself.

_______________________________

I started to write last Saturday with the hope to post about this on Sunday. I quickly realized there was too much to write. Too much to say. I needed another week. I still am not done. I do not know if I ever will be done, but I wanted to post what I have so far anyway. There will always be time to add more.