May 26, 2003

• The Most Reckless Thing

  
  

  Long ago in a galaxy far, far away ... I had a dead end job and a couple of great friends.  Fresh out of college and on my own, trying my wings for the first time in my life out from under the protection, authority, and control of my parents I had no goals, no ambitions, and no thought for tomorrow.

  
  

  You have to know a couple things about me in order to appreciate that time in my life.  You've seen those photos of guys in the muscle magazines.  The ones who have developed particular muscle groups to the point that they no longer resemble the human form.  Now imagine that "sense of responsibility" is a muscle group.  Mine was a bit out of proportion in the same sense that the triceps of Mr. Universe are slightly beyond normal parameters.  I didn't drink, smoke, do drugs, or experiment with sex.  (The wildest thing I did all the way through college was stay up all night playing Dungeons and Dragons while listening to Gordon Lightfoot albums.)

  
  

  At the age of 22, I met other young idealists who agreed that we could change the world if we just had time and access to people we could help.  Hanging around with them, I was introduced to partying as a lifestyle.  We worked hard, but we played harder.  I'm not sure looking back, why they included me in the group.  But, I quickly became den mother to the lot of them.  If I had been working that night, but they were out partying, they would come to my apartment after the bar closed, and I would cook for them.  We'd sit up the rest of the night talking and often I'd have two or three people sleeping on my couch or floor the next afternoon when I left for work again.

  
  

  On my nights off, I partied with them.  I learned to drink, but just said no to drugs (except once when I'd been up all night and got called into work at 6 AM, I knew I couldn't stay awake and Gary offered me a little blue pill - he said "It's kind of like caffeine."  Three days later when I finally came down enough to sleep I felt like I'd been run over by a Peterbilt.  And that ended my one and only experiment with drugs.)  I learned to smoke, and I used the cigarette as a prop, a barrier behind which I was safe.  Don't come too close, I'll blow smoke in your eyes.

  
  

  A whole year's worth of memories are clouded with smoke, exhaustion, adrenaline highs, the taste of herbal tea and the breeze that blows through a weeping willow at 4 AM.  Some of the stuff that happened that year is just silly.  One night, we had the idea that if we took hammers and tapped on radio towers, we could send secret messages to any aliens who might be monitoring earth radio transmissions.  (As I recall, that was the same night I was introduced to slammers.)  So, we all piled into my car - I wasn't sober but I was the most sober one in the bunch.  And we drove up to the hill outside town where all the radio towers gathered and looked down on us with their blinking red eyes.  We climbed the fence.  Then we realized that we didn't know morse code.  (I don't remember why we thought aliens would know morse code.)  So we sat down and made up our own alphabet code.  (I don't remember why we thought the aliens would know the alphabet either.)  And eventually, but before the tequila wore off, we tapped out messages of love, peace and "please pick us to beam up the next time you're in the neighborhood."

  
  

  I'm not sure what would have happened or where that year would have led if I had continued to drift along, playing with my friends and generally living from sensation to sensation.  But, the problem with having a large number of people who know that your door is always open is that sometimes the wrong person knows that your door is always open.  One night I went to bed with a guy sleeping on my sofa.  I woke up when he attacked me.

  
  

  I don't remember all the details of that night.  I remember very vividly the next day when one of my friends came over about noon to find out why I didn't show up at work.  I remember seeing the painting on the wall of doctor's office as he carried me through the waiting room.  I remember being afraid that since I wasn't on birth control that I could have been impregnated.  I remember thinking "I can never tell my parents about this, because this just proves that they are right about me.  I'm not mature enough to handle being out here on my own."  As I look back on it, I'm ashamed that I didn't file a police report or press charges.  Now, I know that a person who will do this to one woman will do it to another and another and another.  Then, I felt like it was my fault because I'd been stupid enough to invite him in.

  
  

  No cautious lifestyle is a guarantee that it won't happen to you.  But for a long time when I looked back on the year I was 22, it hardened my resolve to be strong and safe.  I determined that I would never be vulnerable again.

  
  

  I learned that refusing to be vulnerable to other people was the most reckless (marked by lack of proper caution, careless of consequences) thing I could do.  Refusing vulnerability meant refusing trust, refusing intimacy, and refusing my own nature.  Invulnerability didn't make me safe, it shut me away from all hope of being human.  But, that's getting ahead of my story.

  
  

  Ironically, I was so good at recovery, I made a career out of it.  I became a counsellor to teenaged girls who had been raped or sexually abused.  I was good at my work, a real crusader.  I was repeatedly congratulated on my creative group therapy sessions and ideas.  I probed emotional wounds with surgical skill to discover pockets of infection that could be cured with a few tearful hours of breakthrough on the issues. 

  
  

  I played with the fire.  I juggled the fire.  I danced so close to the fire to prove to myself that my experience hadn't weakened me, it had made me stronger.  I became brittle.  The harder I worked to save other people the more I lost myself.  Finally, I reached the point that I couldn't sleep because when I closed my eyes I lived the abuse I heard described every day. 

  
  

  I had become reckless, determined to follow my course despite the ever more obvious consequences.  Proper caution warns that you should stop when you begin to harm yourself.  But, I was so determined to be safe from all others, that I was blind to the damage I was doing to myself.  Tim and I were newly married, but I couldn't stand for him to touch me.

  
  

  I've been sitting here staring at that last sentence for over half an hour, thinking, "where do you go from that?!"  You don't get out of that place quickly.  To my surprise, it took more than a couple hours of tearful breakthrough to deal with my issues.  In one way or another, I'll be "dealing" with emotional echoes for the rest of my life, it's part of who I am.  But, for the most part, it's such a distant part of the past that it's as though it were long ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

  
  

    

  • 7:46 am
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