I taught a podcasting class via Zoom that summer, and one of my students spoke to a woman with severe germaphobia and OCD. For a long time, the woman was bound to her home, washing her hands with bleach until they bled. Her friends and family used to think she was crazy, but after the pandemic began, she got a couple of calls from people apologizing for judging her. “We get it now,” they said. Her reaction to this was that she wanted to leave the house. Seeing everyone obsess about germs as much as she did made her want to run her fingers over things. It made her want to kiss people.
One woman I know has a strained relationship with her parents, who’ve struggled for years to understand her C-PTSD. But while being quarantined, they expressed feeling helpless, depressed, and panicked. “Yeah,” Susan told them. “That’s what it’s like to be me all the time.” And something clicked for them.
“Even though they don’t understand it entirely, they’ve come closer to understanding it. And that’s an experience I’ve struggled for decades to convey to them,” my friend said to me. “It’s not something I would’ve wished on anybody, but being able to articulate my past experience in ways where I feel understood reduces a lot of shame.”
Which brings me to the final reason why I felt I was thriving in the apocalypse. It reminded me of Dr. Ham’s definition of pain versus suffering—of feeling legitimate pain versus the suffering of shame associated with that pain. When I saw nurses breaking down and crying on the news, and I cried with them, I was feeling legitimate pain. What I wasn’t feeling anymore was the suffering.
That felt like freedom. That felt like healing.
* * *
—
At the grocery store those first days of the pandemic, I hid behind dark sunglasses and scarves wrapped around my face. I was scared that there were no eggs or pasta on the shelves. But I felt something else. A kind of familiarity. Like maybe I had been here before. And honestly, I had.
When my grandmother carried the egg containing my father’s genetic code in it, that egg also contained the genetic code for his future seed. In some microscopic way, I had been there when my grandmother went to the store during the Japanese occupation and could not find rice. I had been there when she sewed those Japanese flags.
I had never felt that I could compare my own experience to the great historical tragedies my ancestors survived: poverty and sexism and racism, not to mention the great wars, dotted with sepia-toned images of bombs and blight. I could never live up to the stories that Auntie had told me of their impossible endurance. I was the entitled and delicate youngest daughter in this line, the one with soft hands and a shaky temperament. But now I have survived history, too, have I not? I’ve done so with my own strength and grace. And I’ve done more than survived.
I’ve fought.
* * *
—
There is a Chinese saying that “a third of the world is under the control of heaven, a third is under the control of the environment, and a third is in your hands.” I got here through forces of war, luck, dowries, parents, bad bosses, and good boyfriends. But I took what was given to me, and I used my third of the equation to make choices to heal some of the wounds that had coursed through our family for generations.
I picked out the rocks and the weeds. I am doing everything I can to provide a better plot of soil for those who will come after me.
In Eugenia Leigh’s poem “Gold,” she writes, “Tell me // I am not the thing my children will have to survive. Tell me // the mob I inherited will not touch my son. Yes, the cavalcade of all that’s tried to kill me // may forever raid my brain, but know this: in my mother’s first language, the word for fracture, for crack, / is the same as the word for gold.”[1]
One day in the future, I will show my child her great-grandmother’s jade, the little gold rabbit with the ruby eyes. I will tell her that this will be hers. I will tell her all the stories about how our family survived, about the wars, and the gambling dens, and, yes, eventually even the golf club. I will tell her that when the sky falls, she should use it as a blanket.
And then I will give her the shining thing, the thing that none of us got, the thing that only I, in all of my resilient power, can give. The thing that all this pain has given me. I will hold her tight and tell her that I love her more than anything in the world. That she can always come to me for anything at all, and I will fix it if it needs fixing or just listen if she needs to be listened to. And as long as I live, I will never leave.
* * *
—
As of February 2022, it has been four years since my diagnosis. And I wouldn’t describe myself as healed from complex PTSD. I wouldn’t even say I am in remission.
I’ve learned that the beast of C-PTSD is a wily shape-shifter. Just when I believe I can see the ghoul for exactly what it is, it dissipates like a puff of smoke, then slithers into another crevice in the back of my mind. I know now it will emerge again in another form in a month or a week or two hours from now. Because loss is the one guaranteed constant in life, and since my trauma reliably resurfaces with grief, C-PTSD will be a constant, too. Rage will always coat the tip of my tongue. I will always walk with a steel plate around my heart. My smile will always waver among strangers and my feet will always be ready to run. In the past few years, my joints have continued to rust and swell. I cannot transfuse the violence out of my blood.
Every time the beast returns, I have to fight it slightly differently. The wars are shorter now, and often, the old tools work well. Counting colors and curiosity and conversations with my child-self muzzle the beast and shove it back into its hovel. Sometimes the beast requires new weapons—new forms of IFS or CBT, new mantras, new boundaries. Sometimes the beast bites a chunk out of me and gives a relationship a decent thrashing before I can get it in check again. Sometimes I fall into familiar pits of catastrophizing or dissociation, sometimes I find new, unpleasant swamps to wade through. Each episode is its own odyssey through past, present, and future, requiring new bursts of courage and new therapy sessions.
But there are two main differences now: I have hope, and I have agency. I know my feelings, no matter how disconsolate they are, are temporary. I know that regardless of how unruly it is, I am the beast’s master, and at the end of each battle I stand strong and plant my flag: I am alive, I am proud, I am joyful, still.
So this is healing, then, the opposite of the ambiguous dread: fullness. I am full of anger, pain, peace, love, of horrible shards and exquisite beauty, and the lifelong challenge will be to balance all of those things, while keeping them in the circle. Healing is never final. It is never perfection. But along with the losses are the triumphs.
I accept the lifelong battle and its limitations now. Even though I must always carry the weight of grief on my back, I have become strong. My legs and shoulders are long, hard bundles of muscle. The burden is lighter than it was. I no longer cower and crawl my way through this world. Now, I hitch my pack up. And as I wait for the beast to come, I dance.
For Joey, Kathy, Dustin, and Margaret
for being my family
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS