The Beginning of Everything

leave my bedroom for the first time since being home. I find clothes that are easy to put on, as my arms are still sore, as that spot between my shoulder blades flares with pain and heaviness when I raise them. Emi helps me put on my socks, my winter boots, as I must not bend and cannot reach to do either without bending. It is the end of January, and outside the world is snow and ice, and so we both must bundle up, puffy winter coats, winding scarves, thick hats, warm gloves. Today is her first appointment with a therapist, just a few blocks from our house, and I promised I would take her. My purse is still too heavy for me to carry, so she carries it for me. The sky is gray, but the snow is bright, pocked by patches of ice slicks. Walking for any length of time is still new, being upright is still new—all of this is new, her seeing a therapist, me being in recovery—and so we take our time, going slowly in the searing wind, moving carefully, aware that with each footstep we face the possibility of slipping, of danger. We hold each other as we make our way together across the treacherous city sidewalks, and she reminds me to take my time, to go slow. She holds my hand. She makes sure I’m okay. Together, we make our way across the ice.

Traumatized people are left with an experience of “singularity” that creates a divide between their experience and the consensual reality of others. Part of what makes it traumatic is the lack of communication that is possible about it. “The worlds of traumatized persons are fundamentally incommensurable with those of others,” Robert Stolorow writes. Trauma creates a “deep chasm in which an anguished sense of estrangement and solitude takes form.”

—Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life

29

I am an unreliable narrator.

If my illness was about telling my story to my doctors and myself, trying to explain it to myself, my recovery is about telling it to other people, trying to explain it to everyone else.

How are you? What have you been up to? What happened?

These are normal questions, everyday questions, but attempting to answer them seems impossible. At first because any possible answer seems too big—too sprawling and specific, too filled with details that a part of me understands are unnecessary to the asker, who likely doesn’t really want to know them.

And then because my brain isn’t good yet at sorting through details, understanding perspective, knowing what’s important and what’s not. I still walk into stores and freeze, unable to parse competing amounts of information: the colors, the lights, the sounds, the aisles, the people, the products, the process. Everything dazzles, everything shouts at me at the exact same volume, everything persists with the same emphasis, the same importance, and I feel myself becoming heavy, pulling down the way I used to feel my brain pulling down, aching itself into me, unable to fight gravity any longer. My thoughts, when I have to speak them, are like that, too. My ability to gauge the appropriateness of shareable information is still unrefined, and every conversation I have is a test, both for myself and for the listener as I pause, weigh, evaluate, think. Attempt to speak. Say too little. Say too much.

And then of course because my story is so odd. I coughed one day, and then my brain stopped working? I spent nine months staring at the ceiling? Oh, and also, during that time when my brain didn’t work and I was stuck in bed, I got divorced? How does that even happen?

“What happened?” is the hardest question to answer. It should be the easiest, because there are facts, simple facts, and I can tell people those facts, and those facts are the actual, literal definition of what happened, which is what people are asking me. But it’s hard to know where to start, or how many facts to tell, or which ones, and sometimes when I pause too long, people fill in the blanks for me. They look stricken, assuming I’m about to tell them I have cancer, or that my husband died, or that my parents died, or that my children are sick. I see them brace themselves for the worst, and I rush to reassure them, “No, no, I’m fine, everyone’s fine, I mean, I got divorced, but it’s fine, I’m fine, the kids are okay, we’re fine.”

Sometimes I say, “I was sick, but I’m better now.”

Sometimes I say, “You know that thing that covers your brain and spinal cord?”

Once, while I was still dealing with the leak, I told a friend the truth about what happened. I’d forgotten she had crippling phobias of all things medical, of all things in general, and I told her how I’d coughed and torn my dura and had my cerebrospinal fluid leak out. I saw her visibly pale as my strange sentence of facts went on and on and on, her eyes widening, her body subtly moving itself away from mine, as if I might be contagious. “You got this from coughing?” she asked. I nodded. “Can anyone get this from coughing?” she asked. I nodded. “And you’re getting divorced?” she asked. I nodded. I was the terrifying Ghost of Christmas Future, a living public service announcement, an After-School Special, a horrible warning, a cautionary tale: This could happen to you!

I haven’t learned yet, or maybe never properly understood, how to modulate my grief (Is this grief? Is that what healing is?), how to smooth the edges of my rawness so as not to cut too sharply into the comfort of others. It is as though I can hear everyone singing, but my voice struggles to find the key, to fit the proper register, to blend. A writer friend told me, after the death of her child, that being in the world again she felt like the only person