I’m in line for a rollercoaster ride– the tallest, most terrifying ride built since I’ve been alive. My heart pumps faster, leaving drumming in my ears and veins. More quickly my veins expand and shrink. 1, 2, 3, 1-2-3, 123, as my therapist explains what will happen.
“Is it at your eye level?” she asks with all the kindness she can muster. Nervous and sweating, I’m not sure what eye-level should or will be in this cushy chair. I tell her it is.
This is my first EMDR treatment, something my new psychiatrist told me I should try. The therapist wasn’t so sure I was ready for the treatment after our first few sessions together, but after spewing my guts about being sexually abused as a child (which came after all of the complications with my parents’ addictions and mine, my abusive relationships, my abortion, my suicidal tendencies, etc.), she said it seemed like we were in a spot to try.
She’s set everything up right away, barely leaving time for us to do our therapy-patient speak.
“How have things been since last week?”
“Have you spoken with your brother about your parents?”
“How are things at work?”
I can feel the sweat already bleeding through the back of my layers I wore to stop the sweat from going into her chair that her other patients will absolutely be sitting in five minutes after I get up and walk out the door.
The light is in front of me, a boomerang with a red dot in the middle. I ask her what it will be like, how I will know if I’m doing it right. She gently explains to me every person’s process is different with EMDR, so there is no real “normal,” which frightens me even more.
I think I may do it wrong.
Doing it wrong is a feeling that has stuck with me since I was 4 years old, when my mother told me what I was doing to my sister’s body and the neighbor girls' bodies was wrong. I was allowed to explore my sexuality, but I was doing it wrong.
But the childhood abuse isn’t even why I’m doing EMDR; what brought me here was my PTSD from my **** and my abortion and my abusive relationships and my substance use disorder and my self-harm and my anxiety and my oversharing and my self-hatred, not the childhood abuse.
Now
I am writing this to inspire other women and girls who have been in similar situations that I found myself in throughout my life. I would like to say that I am stronger now because of the things that I talk about in this book, but what one wishes to say and what one has to say are different things.
As I write this, I am hitting a vape and drinking a big *** white claw. I am watching videos and reading articles that made it into the news from my past. I am feeling sorry for myself in ways that my younger self would not approve of.
But I’ve seen other women’s stories told in writing. I’ve read them and I’ve cried for them and I’ve felt jealousy from their ease of sharing.
For many years, I’ve wished that I had enough conviction and strength and determination to write my own story to share with others who might be experiencing the same things, and I’m trying to finally do that now.
I’ve gone through different kinds of therapy and have been communicative with my loved ones about my troubles. I’ve spent countless days drinking ***** and attempting to drown my sorrows away. I can’t remember how many hours I’ve spent crying about things that will never be changed. I don’t know how often my mind wanders to the past to find myself when I was weightless.
I do know it’s been too much, and that maybe trying to do what so many of my idols have done, by writing and sorting through feelings by seeing letters and words and sentences on paper, I may find solace, or know that I’ve shared and that I’ve tried. So here is that attempt.
Then
We lived in Detroit when I was little. My mom tells me it was a small house where my brother and sister shared a bedroom. I do remember sliding down the small staircase with pillows and crashing into the bottom. But after we all grew, and the neighborhood grew to a bit of ****, my parents were determined to get us a bigger house in a safer area. We moved to Howell which was pretty much a farming town. Our house was being built all new, I remember the smell of the basement when our parents took us there to look at it.
I don’t remember much around the time when the house was built. I do remember making friends in the neighborhood; younger families with kids our age, specifically girls my age, or around my age.
I was probably in kindergarten when I met the older girls in the neighborhood, I knew they were older than me and I looked up to them for that.