Sad is Happy for Deep People

Fairly recently my brother asked me if I ever read a book that's cheerful.

I think he was a little concerned that reading "depressing" stories might not be the most helpful thing I could be doing when I know I've got PTSD and there might be a chance that something I read could trigger an episode. Well, the nice thing about reading is that you can always put the book down before things get out of control.

Besides, to quote a Doctor Who episode: "Sad is happy for deep people."

What brought the whole thing up was a discussion on what we were reading. He, of course, was reading up on French history for his doctorate degree, while I had been given a book by Liz Murray called Breaking Night which I found inspiring. He asked what it was about. I told him it was the biography of a girl who had once been homeless and how she had taken control of her life and went on to attend Harvard. Furthermore, she began a program to help impoverished, homeless teens to finish their schooling as she did, taking something terrible from her own life and using it as a personal force toward making something good of what she had learned. What most moved me about her story was her ability to express forgiveness and compassion for her imperfect (okay - horrible) parents. I constantly marvel at how two different people can come from virtually the same appalling background, but one turns out emotionally crippled and bitter while the other will be strong and compassionate. What makes that difference?

Yesterday I finished a book called Becoming Anna, by Anna J. Michener. I can't judge Anna for being less forgiving of her parents for the things that they did to her. For one thing, Anna's parents deliberately hurt her and had her wrongly placed in a mental institution, while Liz's parents were addicted to drugs and alcohol. And for another, Anna wrote the book while she was still very close to what had happened, while the emotions were still raw and the injustice still debilitating. I can understand that. I can understand what it is to go through something so difficult, through no fault of your own, and then later have to come to terms with what happened. Writing can help heal that a little. Even better, writing can be a catalyst toward change. This is the reason that Anna wrote the book.

Because Becoming Anna was the most recent book I read, I still have a lot of thoughts running through my mind that I need to express.

The first of these is a question that she asked early on in the book: "Can a person truly sympathize with what they have never known? Or are there simple two kinds of people in the world - those that are deeply scarred and those that are not - who can never understand each other and get along?" I think for the first question, I would point out that there is a difference between sympathy and empathy. People who feel sorry that I can't sleep at night because my body is irrationally frightened of something that happened years ago and isn't even happening anymore will listen and nod at what I have to say (hopefully without judging me), while a person who emphasizes can actually offer hep and advice based upon personal experience. As to her second question, I have two thoughts on that. One: It's really amazing how I will meet a certain person and we will instantly bond because we have the same sense of humor, the same compassion for people, the same difficulty identifying and keeping personal boundaries (immediately that person and I are like family) - And every time, I will later find out that this person I feel such kinship with was also abused or suffered some terrible loss as a child. It's uncanny. And two: It is difficult for people who haven't been through those things to understand, but I don't believe that it's impossible. I see that in my sister's marriage. She's happily married to the nicest man with the most normal childhood anyone could ask for, and yet he is empathetic and patient when she responds with unreasonable force to something that triggers undealt with issues from her childhood. Statistically, perhaps she "lucked out" on that one.

Another quote that stuck with me was "Self-abuse is shockingly common, especially among people who have been conditioned to believe that they are to blame when things go wrong." Well, lucky me, I'm not a cutter and I've never ended up in the mental hospital for trying to kill myself, but the statement still bothered me. I had been in counseling several different times over the years trying to understand how to handle my social anxiety, the panic attacks that came in and out of my life, and a list of vague, nameless issues that didn't come together to be diagnosed as PTSD until years later. In the course of speaking with different professionals, I was always confused at how they all seemed to think that I hated myself. I was told that I starved myself because I hated myself, that I ate too much because I hated myself - in general, that I would take better care of myself if I didn't hate myself so much. I never liked these conversations. I knew I had a low self-esteem, but I was not deliberately hurting myself in any of the ways they suggested. Could I really be so disassociated from my own thoughts and feelings that I was punishing myself and didn't even know it? Well, the answer to my own question here is "yes," but really I'm not asking the right question. The real question is, "What happened to me that I never learned how to care about myself and to take care of myself?" I mean, I am really terrible at it. The latest counselor keeps talking about how I need to learn to soothe myself when I’m experiencing anxiety, or when I can’t sleep. She even went so far as to say that I need to have something soft to rub against my skin when I’m feeling especially disconnected. I looked at her and I believed what she was saying but still felt a cynical sort of skeptism about the idea. After all, I’m a grown woman and there’s something almost humiliating about being told that I can’t do for myself the first most basic thing that doctors and nurses will tell you that a baby needs to learn: how to self-soothe.  How to tell myself that everything is all right and I’m going to be all right and I don’t have to be so afraid that I find myself looking at myself from far away, outside my body, trying mentally  to find someplace that’s safe because I can’t seem to do it emotionally. Do I hurt myself because I secretly hate myself that much? I don’t know. What I do know is that I hold myself to very high standards, and it is devastating when I can’t reach them. I know that I always blame myself when this happens, no matter what extenuating circumstances there are. And I know that this is partly because I feel that I am falling short of what others expect of me, too.

Anna talks a lot about the cycle of violence and abuse. She has two main reasons for telling her story. One is to protest an “enlightened” society wherein children still get abused and other people see and still to this day just turn their heads away. The other is to expose the malpractices of the public mental health system upon children. As a child, Anna was not listened to. Her parents had her convicted to that mental hospital based upon only their word as parents. It was her word against theirs, and as a child she was not given the right to defend herself. I remember a kindly Sunday school teacher who laughed and made a joke of it when he reached across a table to get something and I winced like I thought he was going to hit me. I remember a nice old school teacher who taught typing placing a donut on my keyboard in the middle of a typing test when he saw me struggling not to cry after a sleepless night. I remember, with utter scorn and still a little anger, the doctor who popped the vertebrae of my spine back after I’d been hit, who joked with my mother about “mouthy teenagers these days.”  And I will never forget the one teacher who read a story of mine while the classroom worked, with tears in his eyes, who actually tried to get me out of that house. The sad thing about this last memory is that it illustrates another of Anna’s points about those children: Because so few people do anything about what they know, children are fooled into questioning whether or not it really is abuse. My parents didn’t prevent that teacher from taking me anywhere. At the time, I said that I was fine and that I didn’t want to leave my little sisters alone there. “And I (Anna) thought how fortunate I was merely to be imprisoned by other people instead of by myself.”

Anna talks about suicide. You combine abuse and indifference with self-hatred and fear, and you have a good chance of coming up with suicide as a way out. The thing is, “Most people who think of or attempt suicide don’t really want to die. They just want some help living, because that gets really damn hard at times.”  Studies show that “having PTSD correlates to having a higher chance of committing suicide; over “50 percent of all trauma survivors worldwide will attempt suicide in their lifetimes.” The National Institute of Health estimates that people suffering from PTSD are six times more likely to commit suicide. Among the military population, suicide has reached alarming levels. American veterans now account for one in every five suicides.” (Tanya Somanader and Zaid Jilani) I’ve never ended up in a mental hospital for attempting suicide, but last year before I found out what was happening to me, I hadn’t slept in over a month and was starting to dig through my medicine cabinet for all the discarded medications doctors had prescribed without knowing what was really wrong - with the intention of taking them all. In the light of day, I saw that this was some serious crazy talking here – it is not at all like me to want to die. I was just too miserably exhausted to think straight anymore. But I was fortunate in that I was self-aware enough to seek help when things reached that point. I didn’t want to die. I just needed help figuring out how to live.

I’d lived for a long time blaming myself for things that I had no control over – trying to control them anyway. As a child, I thought that if only I could be good enough, my father would have no reason to be angry with me. So I did the housework and I got good grades and I stayed out of all the trouble common to rebellious teenagers. (Probably the most rebellious thing I ever did – the worst thing I could think of, in fact – was checking myself into counseling when I was seventeen.) After I had gone and married someone just as abusive as my father was, I was still trying to be the good girl, the perfect wife and mother. I can’t begin to express the outrage I felt when we were in divorce court and my ex-husband tried to say that I was crazy and an unfit parent. In her book, Anna says “I knew the feeling well, the horror that comes when you have spent years molding yourself into exactly everything someone else says you should be, and you still don’t get on the ‘sane’ list. Not only is everyone as apathetic as they were before, you have lost yourself as well.” And I did. For a very long time, I literally didn’t recognize myself. The girl I was at school – that wasn’t me. The woman I was at church – that wasn’t me. It reminds me of something Amy Tan wrote: “I didn’t lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on a stone are worn down by water.”

When I started reconstructing myself after the divorce, I had to dig deep for the simplest things: What kind of music do I really like? What movies do I want to watch? How will I spend my time? Where would I like to live? How will I make money? Following these questions were the deeper ones: Who am I separate from my children? Where do they end and I begin? What do I really believe about the nature of God and the practice of religion? What would make me happy? What do I want out of my life? How can I learn to take care of myself without feeling guilty or selfish? Years of being told what to do and what to think and what to like, of being told that I was stupid, lazy and selfish had deteriorated all sense of self. I placed a vote of no confidence in myself, and I sometimes think that this showed in divorce court. My ex-husband said that I was crazy and unfit – and I cried but didn’t stand up enough for myself because at the time I was actually afraid that he might be right. Anna says at the end of one of her chapters: “Whoever says ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me’ never had it written about them that they were insane.” I am aware that, to this day, my ex-husband tells people that I left him because I “went crazy.” Why else would I have given up such a perfect life with such a great husband? Always worried about how he will look to the outside, he is. Insidiously secretive on the inside, in places where people can’t see unless they’re right up close on a daily basis. It was emotional abuse – there are no bruises or police records to vindicate me. Words are damaging. They have as much power to destroy as they do to inspire.  Well, I was pressed but not crushed.

I used to really criticize the girls at school who would read one after another of those teen-angst girly books – the ones obviously geared to preach or educate about teen-angst girly issues such as anorexia, teen pregnancy, or abusive boyfriends. Part of my objection was pure intellectual snobbery – those books were hardly great classics of literature. And part of it was because I personally did not want to think about those things. Most of them I felt I couldn’t relate to. I was too busy trying to be the perfect daughter, student, and person in general. I didn’t have anorexia, I didn’t have sex, and I didn’t date until I was a Junior in high school. I suppose I thought I was too good for those books. I preferred escaping harsh realities by reading fantasy novels or sloughing through a volume of Shakespeare. It never occurred to me at the time that the only reason I couldn’t relate to those girls was because I had so far removed myself from my own suffering that I wasn’t even experiencing the good things about being a teenage girl. One counselor said that I was like a little girl playing up in a tree house, occasionally peering down at the world below. That statement bothered me for years – probably because it was true.

So why don’t I read happier books? Possibly because I’m doing what the girls I once judged were trying to do – gain a deeper understanding of things that have happened to me or to other people that I have known. Better yet, to follow people who have gone before me so that I can find my way out of the forest.  When I read Breaking Night, it inspired me and it encouraged me to do some things that I’d felt too small and broken to accomplish. I’ve never been committed to a mental hospital (as of yet), but reading Anna Mitchener’s book made me think a little more compassionately of girls I have known who acted out their anger instead of holding it all inside. I’ve already explained the things the book got me thinking about myself. Books are mirrors and travel guides and entertainment and pastimes. They show us ourselves and others. They show us where we want to go and where we have been. They make us laugh, think, cry, and even get angry at times. I read a lot of happy books. I love children’s literature and picture books. I enjoy biographies and poetry, autobiographies and novels. I read many things for many different reasons. Ultimately this is because I am many different people and have many different purposes myself. I'm not reading sad books because I like being sad. I do it because making all these connections makes me happy.