Lunar Roses

We have online and off-line friendships with several women who were abused as children. Being abused fucks you up in much the same way being in a large skyscraper that is unbelievably burning, melting, and collapsing does. And five years or ten years later, when you can’t abide elevators or even think of going above the sixth floor of a skyscraper, it’s angering.

Because that’s over. That building collapsed, you survived, ten years ago. It’s the past. It should lie down and be covered over.

The reason the past doesn’t die is that the terror and pain don’t end. It doesn’t stop with the visible problem, the immediate trauma. You don’t wake up a month later, when all your scrapes and cuts have scarred over and make your way whistling to your re-located job.

Humans are poorly made. As an evolutionary experiment, we suck. Back to the drawing board, God. This design is flawed.

Our skin, burned and punctured and sliced and scraped hundreds of times by now, with or without our notice and certainly with no special effort on our part has knit back together every time. And quickly, too. There are visible scars, and they aren’t as flexible as the unmarred skin is, but they keep the rain out.

It’s the big brain that’s the problem. If we had smaller brains, like lizards, we’d run until cornered and then fight until dead. None of this dissociation, repression, bargaining with the people hurting us or with God, endurance of agonies because we possess hope or love or shame or magical thinking.

The past doesn’t die because it’s not the past. When you dream of the dark stairwell in that collapsing skyscraper five nights a week, your mind experiences it as just as real as the first time it happened. When the elevator doors close and you feel that panic [I'vegottogetOUTIneedOUTletmeOUT], it’s not cousin to the panic you felt that day. It’s the same panic. It’s not ten years ago, at a safe distance like a mountain viewed from thirty miles away. It’s NOW. Right Now.

Dissociation is a fascinating and impressive defense against truly horrible shit that should never happen to any living being, let alone a small child. And as a side-effect, sharing a body and a life with several other people is not wall-to-wall horrible. I can think of worse things. Doing the rounds of psychiatric hospitals, I’ve seen worse things.

The complexities of it, though, the unforeseen consequences of a toddler cleaving in twain so as to avoid the full-on assault of the previously mentioned horrible shit, make the whole thing problematical. And on the subject of this particular entry, past and present are the same thing, the same time: Now. We have children here who need the things children need, maybe especially abused children: soothing, encouragement, safety, love. They’re here 24/7, Needing. We’re supposed to be an adult, and singular, so there’s no one to provide these things (and there never was) - no one but us, the other inmates of our special little jail.

And then there is the nature and particular problems of some here who are older, but no less damaged.

Because dissociation allows us to present a unified “front” that displays illusions of competence, okayness, and the appropriate level of maturity, we can move in the world without broadcasting our vulnerabilities. They exist nonetheless. And the Now of every incident of torture or terror is always Now. Not metaphorically. Not “in a sense.” In a system of Multiplicity unaided and unhealed, the past lives. It’s Now.

Once upon a time… there was a girl named Georgina. She had two sisters, one a year older than she, and one a year younger. She had a mother who drank like a fish. She had a father who believed his three daughters belonged to him in every possible way. And so Georgina had a very unhappy life.

One day Georgina’s older sister told her favorite teacher about what went on, with her father and mother and her two little sisters. A social worker and policeman came to Georgina’s elementary school later that day, and took Georgina and her younger sister to a foster home. She was told that the foster parents would take good care of them, which quickly proved to be a lie.

A few days later, Georgina and her younger sister were taken, by the same social worker, to the biggest building in their town. Georgina was separated from her sister and kept under guard in a small room with a few worn toys in it, and after a while she was taken into a courtroom. Her mother was there, sober, crying. Her father was there, glowering. They both were dressed in jailhouse gray.

Georgina threw herself to the ground, wailing and screaming incoherently and pounding on the floor. A guard grabbed her, the judge yelled, the social worker came to her and told her impatiently to act like a big girl. Georgina, though, had stamina, and was terrified besides, and eventually they put her on a gurney and wheeled her out, put her in an ambulance, and sent her to the hospital.

The people at the hospital didn’t yell at her or tell her she was being a baby. They asked her questions about how she felt, and even listened to her answers. They took her blood pressure and her temperature, and let her toy with some of the minor medical equipment. They brought her little cups of ice cream. They explained to her that she would spend the night in the hospital, just so they could be sure she was okay. That everyone wanted her to be okay. And they put her in a wheelchair, and took her upstairs to the psychiatric ward.

Georgina was ten years old (going on eleven).

The trial continued, though no one would tell Georgina what was happening. No one came to visit her, but she was a pet for the psych ward staff, and enjoyed the company of the other patients, all adults, all of whom treated her with more kindness and respect than her own parents or anyone in the system ever had. Georgina occasionally told the doctors and nurses nonsensical things, or snippets of the truth about her father and mother, or threw a screaming fit for no apparent reason. And so she remained where she was.

Georgina’s father was convicted of something, and sent to prison. Her mother was acquitted of something, and Georgina’s sisters were returned to live with her. They came to see her at the hospital that very evening. Everyone seemed unhappy. Georgina’s mother was clearly angry with the girls. Georgina’s sisters were afraid of the psych ward, and of Georgina. Her mother told her she could come home soon.

Two or a few days later, two nurses and the doctor all sat with Georgina, and told her that her mother and her sisters were gone. Not dead, they hastened to tell her. Just gone. They’d left town, and though the authorities had searched for them (or so Georgina was told), they had disappeared. Georgina would be returned to the foster home where she had stayed with her younger sister, only until her mother could be found, or…

Georgina threw herself, screaming and wailing, to the floor.

Georgina stayed on the local psych ward for quite some time. Draw whatever conclusions you will from that. It was the eighties. She was eleven. There was a minor court proceeding. Her mother and sisters did not return. And finally, still a pre-teen, Georgina was sent to the state psychiatric hospital. She had, by this time, added self-harm to her suite of problem behaviors, so as soon as she turned thirteen she was placed on a special unit for women and girls who harmed themselves.

Times changed, theories changed, people’s ideas about the best use of their tax money changed. The state hospital fell into greater and greater disrepair. Circumstances came together, and unit after unit of the hospital was closed. At the age of eighteen, Georgina was released from the hospital. Everyone was released from the hospital. There was an initial surge of money to try to get everyone into some kind of housing, and Georgina found herself, an adult, on her own in a tiny apartment in a city she knew nothing of.

After a few days, a couple of weeks, Georgina walked to the nearest bridge and had to be talked down from jumping from it. She was placed on an acute psych ward in one of the city hospitals. These wards were, at that time, dealing with the enormous new demand on their resources, resulting from everyone being released from the state hospital, and from there no longer being a state hospital to which to send any of their longer-term patients. Georgina wasn’t there long before she was returned to her apartment.

Over the course of the next year, Georgina swallowed drain cleaner, razor blades, and saved-up quantities of her psychotropics, resulting each time in a short hospitalization and a return to her apartment. She slit her wrists (both directions). She had a couple more brushes with high places. She had medical benefits, a disability pension, and an appointment with her psychiatric prescriber every six weeks. She did NOT have a case manager, a therapist, a day program to go to (there were day programs, but as a “self-harmer” she was not welcome), job training or assistance in obtaining schooling or employment, friends, or family. After twenty or so short stays on the psych wards in the big city, the powers in that city decided that the “releasees” should be returned to their counties and towns of origin (and be a burden on THEM, if they couldn’t magically integrate themselves into society after years in an institution). So Georgina was returned to her home town, despite the fact that she’d have no more resources there than she did in the big city.

Georgina was thoroughly institutionalized. She had no idea how to live, and no skills for living, outside a hospital.

In the years we were fighting with our siblings, playing at recitals, perfecting our serve in volleyball, Georgina was on a locked ward with twenty-three other people whose common denominator was that they sliced themselves up, burned themselves, tried to bash their brains out in the shower or hang themselves from the pipes in the laundry room if it was accidentally left unlocked. While we were flirting with, hating, dating, and fucking boys, the only males Georgina ever saw were the doctors and nurses who worked on her ward. She heard from afar that her older sister had died, that her mother had returned at last to her old home town, that her younger sister was living with their grandmother in Colorado. No one wrote. No one visited.

No one cared. The only people to care about Georgina, from her pre-teen years to her adulthood, were people who were payed to be caretakers, and the few friends she made of girls and women she lived with on her locked ward, girls and women who spent much of their time trying to die and hurting themselves.

The last time we saw Georgina - heard her, actually - was very early one morning on the psychiatric ward. She was in the Quiet Room; she’d come in, in the night, so wound up and destructive that they’d restrained her, physically and chemically. We were so zombified we’d missed the whole thing.

There was a county worker in her doorway, and it was the end of their conversation. It was their conversation that woke us; there’s no regard for any patient’s privacy on any psych ward we’ve ever seen. [Nor for any patient's desire to sleep.] They were having this delicate, important conversation, with the county wonk (who had… issues) leaning in Georgina’s open doorway, so anyone nearby couldn’t help but hear every word.

Georgina was crying, which was an infrequent state of affairs. The worker had stopped talking, and it seems was just standing there, watching Georgina, bound to her bed, cry. Finally Georgina said that it would be okay, she’d be okay, if only they’d give her what she needed. The worker asked flatly, uninterested, what it was Georgina thought she needed. [Hear the insult? You don't know what you need, but fine, tell me what your diseased and foolish little brain has come up with.] Georgina hesitated. She knew the woman and all her kind are not to be trusted. And then she said, very quietly, “Long-term care.”

There was a pause. Georgina sniffled. The woman said, “No.” And left. Georgina wept some more, the drawn-out, endless, hopeless weeping of the hurt and despairing.

We never saw her again. We left that place. The last I heard, she was still alive, still visibly and dramatically drowning while the onlookers continued to look on.

And now I’ve told this whole, long, sad tale, I ask you this: why in the world would any identified “mental health consumer” ever place her trust in The System, or in the current vogue of psychiatry, whatever it may be? It is changeable as the wind, unreliable, arbitrary. Today they say, I’ll always be the one you can count on, I’ll always be here. Tomorrow they are gone. Today they tell us we have a brain disease, or that our brain was harmed in its growth and is not right or normal, and so we must take this drug, and that one, every day of our lives, forever. They tell us we cannot be well, that the best thing we can do is surrender ourselves to this fact.

They say, these are the rules, and if you follow the rules, you will be rewarded. You will be well, or if not that, you will be functional enough. Or if not that, we will be pleased with your obedience and take care of you, and you will not fall through these gaping holes we call ‘cracks’ and find yourself homeless, or without healthcare or assistance.

Put your lives in our hands. We know what’s wrong with you. We know what’s good for you. We have your best interests at heart. We won’t be distracted by some shiny new mylar idea and leave you stuck and helpless, again. That won’t happen again.

So we resist. As much as it’s possible to resist when your other options are not especially attractive, either. And they wonder why. So frustrating, all these mad people and their mistrust. Can’t understand it…