This, of course, was not inspiring. This was barely survival. There was no thriving here.
I shrunk in my dim, orange office lighting. How had these symptoms already manifested in my own life? I waded waist-deep through images and hauled them up one by one to reexamine in the context of my brokenness: Blowing up at my boss. Blabbering about my problems during parties. Constantly knocking on co-workers’ doors. Chasing a man around a baseball diamond with a bat in my hand. The wreckage I had wrought, all around me. Different. This is what made me different. I thought of that famous line about trauma: Hurt people hurt people. I didn’t want to hurt people anymore.
* * *
—
I left the office early that day, and the next day, too. Every moment I was there, I felt like a vampire who’d snuck into a morning church service and was about to burst into flames at any moment. Part of me felt guilty for bringing my petty trauma into such an intellectual, fancy space. And another part of me felt betrayed by that space. I’d dedicated so much to my career, gave it so much of my identity, missed dinners with friends, and let relationships die because I had chosen to spend my late nights at work. I had done it all because I thought it would make me respectable. But here I was, still the same nutcase I had been when I was a teenager, just in J.Crew pants.
In March, I read parts of the book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by author and psychotherapist Pete Walker. He frequently writes about what he calls the obsessive/compulsive flight type: “When [she] is not doing, she is worrying and planning about doing…. These types are also as susceptible to stimulating substance addictions, as they are to their favorite process addictions: workaholism and busyholism. Severely traumatized flight types may devolve into severe anxiety and panic disorders.”[1]
Maybe work was not salvation. Maybe it was a symptom.
* * *
—
I could not tolerate this constant state of humiliation, of rehashing the past and being terrified of the future. I had to find one other person who knew how this felt, to prove to me there was another way to live this life. So I tried another trusty story-finding internet technique.
I posted on social media, “Do I know anyone who has been diagnosed with C-PTSD?” Nobody hit “like.” I only got one comment on Twitter: “I had to google that but no..... doesn’t look nice from what I’ve read .”[2] I was on the brink of despair when I finally received a response. One acquaintance—a wonderful journalist I’d worked with briefly years earlier whom I’ll call Lacey—sent me a private message. “C-PTSD for the win! Super complicated to diagnose, but once we figured it out, it completely changed my life. I really started to heal!”
I was shocked. Lacey? Lacey had a book deal. She’s on television sometimes. She has great hair and is from a nice neighborhood in a nice part of the country. People at my office respected Lacey. “You have no idea how relieved I am that you have it,” I frantically typed back. “I thought everyone who had it was a trainwreck. I’ve been spiraling. But you seem totally together.”
“I’m not totally together! Nobody is. But I’m here to tell you I’ve done a whole lot of healing. I’ve accepted that I’ll always have more to do, but I’ve made leaps and bounds and it feels manageable in ways I could not have imagined years ago.” She sent me her number.
Lacey and I texted for a few minutes. I didn’t know her intimately enough to share my deepest fears with her, and I didn’t want to burden her, either. But her cheerful, exclamation-marked texts showed me, at the very least, that survival wasn’t impossible. Somehow, there would be another side of this thing. A way out, if only I could find it.
Lacey said the road would be long and difficult. That sounded about right, considering I was endeavoring to relearn how to be a person. I wanted to learn to be happy and strong and independent so I could support others instead of letting my own depression always take center stage. I wanted to learn how to be a better friend, partner, family member, to invest in permanent relationships. I wanted to be the kind of woman people didn’t leave. I had to find out what was salvageable, if I had good qualities underneath all of those layers of trauma and hurt and workaholism.
In order to do that, Lacey said, she’d needed time and space. Long walks in the middle of the day to practice holding awkward, painful new revelations. The ability to step away from her writing when she felt overwhelmed and sad. “The important thing was learning how to take good care of myself. To treat myself kindly,” she told me. And so I knew with certainty what I had to do.
The very next day, on April 1, I officially gave my one month’s notice to leave the job I’d wanted my whole life. I told my boss, “Healing needs to be my job now.”
PART II
CHAPTER 12
I’d always fantasized about indulging in a nervous breakdown. I watched Girl, Interrupted with a twisted, jealous fervor, felt envy when I saw celebrities enter rehab. What entitlement. What privilege, to just let life fall to the wayside, to stop working and pretending and just fall apart. To let my grief-swollen brain split at the seams and spend my days crying and sitting in therapy and drinking lemonade in meditative silence on a manicured lawn. And what impossibility. Because rent.
I didn’t have the money to enter some elite facility with groomed grounds and full-time therapists. But after ten years of constant work, buying the least expensive entrées, and thrift-store shopping, I had finally saved enough money to not work for several months. At last, a burnout of my very own.
I knew this was an enormous privilege that most people don’t have. I also knew that one of my PTSD books said in its beginning pages that you should absolutely not quit your job after diagnosis—survivors need structure and purpose in order to heal.
Still, the books also said that healing from PTSD isn’t truly possible while you are still in danger. You can’t convince yourself that you’re safe if you’re actually unsafe, and my work environment felt threatening on a daily basis, so I had to leave. Besides, I was focused, I told myself. I would be structured and purposeful. Maybe if I made healing my full-time job, I would be as productive as ever. With any luck, I’d be fully healed and ready to become the CEO of a new trauma-friendly podcast corporation by the end of 2018. And so the first thing I did was what any good journalist would do. I began my research.
* * *