A lot of you who might be reading this are people I know personally, so you might have some of the pieces of this story already. Let me just say that at the beginning. But read this anyway because I've never told the whole story before and I'm not going to again (at least not in this way, for everyone who might give a damn.)
I was raped. Twice, actually but the first was so long ago that I'm not going to go into it. It matters, but it also matters to me to not hurt people, so it's not part of this story. The second time was date rape by my boyfriend who was breaking up with me. He said, "I have a rape fantasy. Do you want to do it? No means yes." I was terrified at those words, and I knew there was no way out, no matter what I said. So I said "No!" You decide. It was violent and scary and he forced fellatio as well.
After that, I blocked out the memory for several months, maybe years. I lost contact with reality, but my mind was telling me the whole time there was something that had happened that I needed to face. I thought I knew a secret code that would ensure that this guy, my rapist, would propose to me. It's humiliating to say this, but it is true. I did crazy things, like try to burn the sheets that were on my bed at the time of the rape, and open a window that had been painted shut, even breaking the handle loose of that window in the process, and wade into the Arkansas River waist deep (a river with a strong undertow that drowns people despite its calm, lake like appearance).
So my parents and sisters tried to intervene, several times. To no avail. So then my parents took a desperate, drastic step that saved my life but changed my personality completely in the process. They got a judge to court-order me to undergo psychiatric evaluation for seven days in a Crisis Stabilization Unit. I landed in this place with a huge room with beds in it along with homeless men, drug addicts, and prostitutes. I wasn't on any drugs. There were magazines. I read the magazines and befriended the caretakers, or whatever their titles were.
Let me go back a step. Standing in the courtroom, made all the more embarassing by the presence of a schoolmate from high school (still don't know why he was there), I felt like I was on trial for living. For being no more than my subversive, God-created self. I had no idea what was wrong with me. That moment the judge asked me, "So what have you been doing lately?" I will never forget. I had been suffering for years with symptoms of depression and euphoria, but there had been ok times too. That person I had been simply is no more, even now. I am not the same.
From the Crisis Stabilization Unit, which was pointless because I never saw a psychiatrist until the last half hour I was there, and not even by the doctor I was assigned to see, my dad convinced me to go to the hospital for rehabilitation. Again, I wasn't on any drugs, just a lack of food and sleep. There the doctor who had been assigned to me did make an appearance, and became my advocate over the next couple of years. He diagnosed me with major depression with psychotic features because I denied any symptoms of euphoria.
Once inside the rehab unit, I refused to leave. For two weeks. I was reeling from the shock of what had happened with the judge and from the realization that I had indeed been out of my mind literally at many different points over the past year. Yes, it had gone on for almost a full year. I was out to sea in a dinghy with no oars and no desire for one. I contemplated living out my days inside the walls of a hospital. I was completely humiliated and confused. I had always been complimented on my mental acuity. I felt I could no longer trust that, that my mind had betrayed me. It was a fall of epic proportion, a setback to the nth degree.
Over the next few years, while my friends (or those who I used to think of as friends, many deserted me during this time) were finishing up their higher education and climbing their career ladders, I was climbing out of this deep well of betrayal, loss, and insanity. By some miracle I had decided as an act of defiance to take all the pills that were ever put in front of me, and never stop taking them, even if I felt after a couple of weeks that I really didn't need them, anyway. I overcame that obstacle of cognitive dissonance that comes with taking psychotropic pharmaceuticals. I overcame a lot more shit too, and it was shit. It was all shit for a while.
Because my psychosis had come and gone over such a long period of time, there was not an alley or avenue in my hometown that I could drive down without re-living some humiliating aspect of what I had been through in my life. I had no social life left, my weight had ballooned due to one of my medications (yet another vanity stripped from me), and I had stopped working due to the staggering number of jobs that I had been asked to leave (to put it more humanely). I had a boyfriend who came from a family of mental health professionals, so he tried to help. There were issues that I was having with troubling, violent thoughts that even he couldn't deal with though. His friends understood even less.
My level of care at that point, while 1000% preferable to no care, which was the alternative, was definitely lacking. I had a different doctor who was younger than I was and cared more for the paycheck than for his patients. The center where I received treatment only allowed short-term therapy, for which I finally got on the list after about three and a half years. It lasted two weeks, about four sessions with an intern in all. I was limited to one topic so I chose my relationship with my sister. This relationship had suffered collateral damage from the incidents in my life yet was still very important to me to repair. I made no headway.
That is basically what sums up everything from this time, I made next to no or no headway in repairing my damaged-goods perception of my life. I only succeeded in stopping making more damage, and that is something, after all. That is what you have to do first.
To be continued...
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