Content Warning: This entry contains references to sexual assault. I would like to clarify that while I am referring to sexual assault, what happened to me was not rape. However, I choose to still use the term “sexual assault” because it is the legal definition of what happened. It was important to my healing to learn and accept that what happened to me was serious and by legal definition, sexual assault. I don't want the term I use to seem misleading; however, at the same time, I want the audience to understand that sexual assault has a wide definition and leaves a lasting impact in all of its forms. Thank you.

Stuck

April 26, 2020

I sometimes wonder if I’ve spent the better part of the last decade of my life in survival mode to one degree or another. It was twelve years ago this past February that a tornado destroyed my home, it’s been nine years since my first sexual assault and the following court experience, it’s been five and a half years since my brain surgery, almost five years to the day since my rib removal, and there have been a whole host of diagnoses since then. To be honest, I can’t even tell when I’m in survival mode, and part of me wonders if that’s because I never get the chance to leave it.

I don’t know for sure, but I think part of survival mode is minimizing the gravity of what’s going on around me. I think it’s an aspect of being able to cope. If I deny the impact the blows are having it’s like I don’t feel the punches. For instance, in January I was diagnosed with arthritis in my neck, at age 25. That’s a life-long diagnosis that progressively gets worse. That I was diagnosed with in my mid-twenties. A couple of weeks later I gave my notice so I could leave the job I’d held for three and a half years and take a new job with more responsibilities and challenges. I then moved 686 miles away and started living with my parents and brother, almost four years after leaving home. I then started said job where I was facing age discrimination from the board of directors, harassment from an employee, and a lot of very real issues to resolve without a lot of time, all without a break between jobs. Not two weeks later I had a death in the family, one of my closest friends moved to another country, and a global pandemic was declared. Considered an essential worker, my workload essentially doubled and pushed me out into a more visible position than I’ve ever been used to operating in. On top of all of that, I’ve yet to be paid for the eight weeks of work I’ve put in, often working much more than 40 hours a week and working through the weekends, and I’m experiencing harassment on the basis of a federally protected class and a hostile work environment. Add in that I can’t leave the house to socialize or find a gym or go out to eat and so all I have is work and Netflix.

But if you bring any of that up to me, trying to provide me with the reasons I might be stressed or overwhelmed, I’ll just respond, “yeah, it’s okay, I’m fine.” Even writing it out, I don’t feel anything beyond a detached acknowledgment. Those are the facts of the situation, yes.

After a particularly overloaded week, I was exhausted. I fell asleep for the night at 8:00pm. I remarked that I didn’t understand how I could go to bed so early! To which my mom notes, “Well, you had a really stressful week this week.” And I responded, “Did I?” I honestly wouldn’t have labeled it a stressful week, and even after she said that I had to think about it.

I feel like this isn’t…normal. I like to think I should be able to identify a stressful week. But instead, I have to be told that I’m stressed and then convinced of that fact. That can’t be normal.

I do the same thing when I look at my life. When I’m told I’ve had a lot of trauma, I think, “have I?” I guess when I inventory it all, it’s a long list, but I feel like that’s normal. We all have stressful seasons, traumatic experiences, and I’m not some sort of exception to life, so don’t we all have this? Sure, mine seems kind of concentrated because of my age, but everyone has something, and if it hasn’t happened yet, it will in the future. None of us are unscathed, so why should it matter if I give gravity to what’s happened to me? What purpose does that serve?  Should I be paralyzed by the thought of all I’ve gone through? Should I constantly live cowered in the moment the tornado ripped apart my home? Should I stand in the courtroom from my sexual assault? Should I lie in those moments in pre-op terrified I wouldn’t see post-op? What good does that do? It happened, it was horrific, it’s over.

I’m genuinely asking, why do I need to feel the impact of the hits? They’ll knock me down, take away my breath, and I won’t be able to do the job I’m not being paid to do or function at all. Can’t I just cope forever? What’s after coping? What comes once survival mode ends? if it ever does.

Truthfully I don’t always know when I’m in survival mode. I wouldn’t even think I am now except that I’m staying up much later than normal, bingeing books and movies, and conserving my emotional energy, which are usually my tells. Maybe I’ve been surviving for so long that I don’t even know how to get out of that mode. To be fair, I’ve never been long outside of one event before I’m thrown back into another.

But that’s my point. If I’m going to continue having hit after hit after hit, is there a way to live in that without being in survival mode? I can’t live fifty years like this, can I? Do I have an option? I’ve accomplished a lot while living in survival mode. I’ve built a successful, and I’ll even assert an impressive, career in the midst of this. I have wonderful and fulfilling friendships. I have a close and supportive family. I don’t have a romantic relationship - that’s always the first thing to get crossed off the list when I dip further into survival mode.

And I think that’s the point. I think survival mode, deflecting the hits emotionally, takes up so much of my energy that I turn my life into lists in order to keep moving forward. I have checkboxes next to writing or calling friends, spending time with family, accomplishing things in my work life. I’m just trying to check things off the list so that I know I’m still functioning. I don’t really feel like I’m living. I feel like an outlined sketch of myself that hasn’t been colored in yet. I function, I move forward, and there’s no doubt it’s worked, but I’m not engaged with the world around me. I’m engaged with checkboxes and line item to-do lists. It’s the only clarity in the fog of survival mode.

The question remains, though, does it matter if I’m living while I’m trying to stay alive? The higher impact the blows have the more energy I divert into holding up the shield. Survival mode changes the way I see the world - everything has a cost, and I have to calculate before paying it, but I never get a raise, and I can only barter with myself. I can’t help but wonder if I’ve been budgeting wrong, but the energy cost of changing is too high, so everything remains the same.  

I feel stuck in this and I don’t see a way out. I don’t see a life outside of surviving. And I wonder if that might be okay.

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