For two months this past summer I spent hours of most days trying to manage debilitating panic attacks. Some days were significantly worse than others, can’t leave the apartment days, have to lay in bed in the dark days, feel so nauseous I can’t eat days. Lots of crying and piles of snotty tissues on my nightstand days. But it wasn’t always that bad, and even if I had to stop what I was doing for a bit or go home to calm down, for the most part I was functional despite the constant buzz of anxiety, the lump in my throat that never went away, and my attention always partially elsewhere, unable to focus or be fully present with myself and others. The people I told knew I was having trouble (a Godsend of a friend called me every day to check in), but I think I managed to go about my life well enough that nobody else caught on.
While I can’t remember a time I didn’t struggle with anxiety, it’s been years since it was so bad, years of therapy and meditation and a lot of work to understand and address the feelings and situations that trigger such intense physical responses. I thought I’d made significant progress. I’ve felt incredibly embarrassed, weak, and broken admitting I was having such a hard time. I’m supposed to be an adult with work and responsibilities and obligations. What a charmed and sheltered life I have, to be able to fall apart at all.
To be fair to myself, I didn’t get here on my own. Part of the panic was a sense of absolute helplessness, that I saw a train wreck about to happen and had tried over and over again to get out of the way and avert catastrophe to no avail whatsoever. It’s cliche to say that love involves risk, that letting others in and developing trust means it can and will at times be broken. So much of the work over the past several years has been learning to recognize the walls I had built around my heart and to feel safe enough to let them down, that in trying to protect myself from hurt I was missing out on all the things that make us truly human, joy, and connection, and meaning, and interdependence. It’s also involved learning to trust myself, that when something feels bad, it’s because it is, and that I should feel safe to say so. That if not, there’s no unkindness, no further justification needed in stepping back from a person or situation. And in a way I never had before, I did speak up, and I did step back, and I sat boundaries with firmness and compassion…still only to end up up flat on my face, shaking on the couch in tears, feeling utterly and irrationally under the threat of an existential terror I could not name or describe. It’s one thing to have trust broken; it’s another to be completely denied by someone with whom I did feel uniquely safe. That a person could have the power to do that, to unilaterally and publicly erase or rewrite so many memories as if they didn’t even happen, made me feel like my life wasn’t my own and perhaps could never be.
It took awhile after my ex-husband left to feel comfortable using the language of trauma and abuse. The relationship had been unhappy, troubled, dysfunctional, toxic even. But abusive? No, not me, not my life. He never hit me or assaulted me, never outright degraded me or commanded me to do or not do a thing. He said he loved me. He also made me feel small, disgusting, and powerless, a source of endless disappointment both as a sexual partner and companion such that no one else could ever possibly want me around or put up with my constant failures. Unsurprisingly, I became very isolated from family and friends, anyone with whom I might have shared such feelings and received support and affirmation of my worth. When it ended and I finally started talking, that’s what everyone kept saying, “I wish I had known what was going on.”*
I wish they had, too, and I make a very conscious effort now to share my life with those I know care about me, even and especially when I have the urge to keep something hidden. It’s not that I don’t value privacy or feel the need to expose every detail of my day, just that the cost of living in secret was too high, and I’m not willing to pay it again. After being gaslit for so long, having people witness my life, even the dark and cobwebbed corners of it, helps me to feel real. In fact, I think I feel the most myself when I know it’s safe to say I messed up, or share half-baked ideas, to ask for help, or sit quietly in the backseat rather than actively participate in conversation without anyone taking offense. It is part of the reason why first improv, and now social dancing, have been so life-changing. The mutual embrace of imperfection and impermanence, to create something with another and then let it go, to be able appreciate both its beauty and its shortcomings, helped me feel comfortable in my skin in a way I never had before. Dancing is one of the only times my brain is (mostly) quiet, and it has taught me how to play instead of perform.
My biggest flaw as a dancer, besides just not having yet developed the technical skills I need, is anticipation. It’s hard for me to be totally in the moment with my partner and not try to figure out what will happen next. As harmful as secrets are, the fantasy that knowing will prevent error or misfortune is also a trap. If my friends and family had known the truth about my relationship, it’s possible I wouldn’t have gotten married. But honestly? I am scarily good at coming up with very compelling justifications if that’s what I’m trying to do (I’m not a law person for nothing). Knowing the truth and living in accordance with it are two very different things, much less trying to convince another person to do so.
Since childhood, that’s been the theme of my only recurring nightmare. I’d fall asleep to find myself on the lake with my family. Floating in the water, I see dark clouds begin to roll in, then hear thunder rumbling in the distance, and flashes of lightning growing ever closer. I try to tell my parents, but they can’t hear me, as if I’m not speaking at all. I scream, and eventually cry, desperately trying to warn them of the coming danger, while they continue on both oblivious to the threat and to me and my impassioned pleading.
Perhaps there’s some sort of comfort to be had that the worst situation my kid brain could imagine was a storm. But even as an adult, still what scares me the most is the thought of being so completely lacking in agency. No longer a dependent child, I do think I know that I can now swim myself to safety when necessary. Leaving those I love to face the storm alone, though, accepting that there is no amount of persuading or cajoling or explaining that can make them take the actions needed to save themselves—that seems to go against everything I’ve ever been taught about what it means to show compassion and care. Addiction, too, has similarly long been one of the worst situations I can imagine having to navigate despite being so common. Surely it is hell on earth, watching someone you love repeatedly harm themselves and others, slowly destroying their lives, knowing there is nothing you can really do to stop them. I am in awe of those I know who do or have had to show that kind of strength, to be able to respect the choices of another even when they are so objectively wrong, to respect their own safety and dignity by maintaining boundaries, to not confuse enabling behavior as accountability.
We live in a world where harm prevention is supposed to be the ultimate good. From free speech to war, the universal exception to the priority of liberal autonomy is defensiveness, either protecting ourselves or others. That basically all of modern politics boils down to disagreements over how exactly to define “harm” and “prevention” might be taken as evidence of the hollowness of these concepts, but more fundamentally (and as most classroom debates over Kant seem to suggest), I think respect for autonomy and avoidance of harm might just be at odds. I don’t mean to advocate for harm, nor is this some sort of Charlie Kirk-style apologism. Just that maybe there is some sort of peace to be found in accepting that we are going to cause pain and we are going to get hurt no matter how hard we try to stop it from happening; that living with this fact about ourselves might actually help us build stronger, kinder relationships rather than working so hard to keep the peace and spare each others’ feelings. It’s fear parading as virtue, pretending we’re looking out for one another when really we’re so very frightened of what will happen if instead we choose to act out of trust — scared of being let down, of failing to live up to our idea of who we are or who someone is to us, of not knowing how to live with the consequences, how or if we can recover from the pain of them.
This summer felt a bit like I was living out my nightmare in waking life, as if I were invisible and incapable of taking any action that could save myself or others from so much turmoil, and it brought up so many feelings from years ago I thought were finally behind me. I don’t really know how to live alongside hurt, to acknowledge it for what it is as well as my own limited ability to change it. For the most part, when it’s “not my problem,” I think I just look away from it or remove myself entirely. I mean, I can barely stand to sit in the discomfort of a quiet classroom when students don’t want to speak or need time to collect their thoughts. Like many, I have to take breaks from reading too much news because I get overwhelmed with the enormity of suffering that’s constantly reported. And yet I think witnessing and affirming the feelings and experiences of others, especially when it’s painful, is one of the most important and human of acts. I didn’t realize how terrifying it would be to stubbornly affirm my own feelings when it meant having to recognize the full impact of someone’s potential for destruction. I want to live an honest life, but I have been so frustrated by how myopic and dull my mind becomes when it is consumed by anxiety and fear, how not running from hurt has made it so much more difficult to also witness and share moments of laughter and happiness and success. As my favorite Mary Oliver poem reads, I don’t want to live a small life, and I don’t want anyone else to, either. I want to be open to both the hope and the risk of life, to have faith in my capacity to hold all of it at once and not break.
I’ve been praying everyday for the courage to keep moving forward even though I know it will mean finding myself in the crosshairs once again, for the courage to remember that those who’ve hurt me are human, too — that they are responsible for everything they’ve done, deserve to be held accountable for it, and have no more power to change reality than I do — and for the courage to choose love and find those who will choose it along with me. Patience and forgiveness take courage, too, not to be afraid to let go and still believe it’ll be ok even when it all feels fucked. Like everything, courage is a choice. I’m still trying to get my nervous system on board, but it’s a choice I want to make and help others feel safe making, too, that I can only even attempt because people have done the same for me. I’ve got too many demons of my own to be at the mercy of anyone else’s, but I’d gladly face them all together, even if, for now, the thought of it still makes me sick to my stomach.
* The Body Keeps the Score has been very helpful, both when I was initially in therapy after my husband left, and again this summer. To even have the words to describe how I felt was a relief, realizing that there was a real thing happening in my body that other people also experience and a scientific explanation for it. It's an accessible, if at times given the subject matter, difficult read. The prevelance of trauma and abuse he documents is also incredibly disheartening. It's absolutely no one's fault that they didn't know what my relationship was really like, but conversations that are uncomfortable or potentially lead to rupture in a moment might genuinely contribute to someone's safety in the longrun.