فصل 15

CHAPTER 15

The Lie

I WILL NEVER GET PAST THIS

Since I’m talking about the hard things I’ve battled and conquered in the stretch of my life, I would be remiss to leave out the one thing I didn’t think I could overcome. Anyone who’s ever been through something truly traumatic, regardless of how the repercussions have manifested, deserves to hear that they’re not alone.

There are many types of trauma—big, small, childhood, adult—but we all belong to a club we never asked to join. We find solidarity in numbers, in hearing other stories . . . and this is mine.

My big brother, Ryan, was funny and unfailingly kind. He had an almost prodigious ability to pick up any instrument and teach himself to play it by ear within the span of a single day. He was handsome. I didn’t know it then because I was younger and not inclined to think about it, but when I look back at photos now and see his cocky grin and his startling blue eyes, I realize how good-looking he was. When I was a young girl, he was my best friend and constant playmate. I can still see the two of us vividly in my memory, staying up late in our room playing the alphabet game “My name is Carla. I’m going to California to sell Crabapples. My name is David. I’m going to Delaware to sell Dogs . . .”

As an adolescent, he was my protector. He taught me how to handle a bully, how to throw a punch, and how to thread a ramen noodle through my nose and out my mouth. He wasn’t necessarily better or worse than anyone else’s big brother, but he was mine and I loved him. He was my big brother until I was about twelve years old, when his mental illness took over.

He took his own life before I turned fifteen.

I know the reality of that sentence is heavy. But here I am admitting the worst of the worst—the ugly truth of my brother’s disease and the destruction of the family it left behind.

I don’t know any way to the other side of this conversation without trudging through it. I don’t know any other way to offer solidarity to others who’ve gone through their own trauma without describing my own. Not many people want to share that a member of their family was borderline schizophrenic. Not many people want to tell you that their sibling was severely depressed and obsessive compulsive, going through multiple doctors and countless mood-stabilizing medications before he was even old enough to get a learner’s permit.

Very few people would tell you that in his worst moment, my big brother got access to a handgun and left the discovery of his body to me.

I don’t want to talk about the nightmares that came afterward, or the crippling fear that I experienced. For years afterward, I assumed every sleeping person, sitting person, unmoving person I encountered must be dead too. I don’t want to talk about how when some well-meaning family members came to clean up his room, they covered the bloody wall with the only paint we had on hand that day. I don’t want to tell you that because of that, seeing silver spray paint still makes me sick to my stomach. I don’t want to tell you about the horrific images that are seared into my brain, or the guilt I carry to this day because I was too afraid to sit with his body until the paramedics arrived. I don’t want to talk about all of the therapy I had to sit through as a scared fourteen-year-old, or as an angry seventeen-year-old, or as an adult grappling with the idea that I needed to make up the difference for his loss. I don’t want to tell you about how many times I have obsessively planned out the funeral of my husband or my children as a sick coping mechanism for my fear that something could happen to them too.

I don’t want to tell you about any of these hidden, ugly, dark truths . . . but I will. I will tell you about my trauma in some of its gruesome detail because I want you to know that there was a time when I didn’t think I could wade through it. There was a time when even with my future stretched out in front of me, all I could see was blood and fear and loss.

But I am still here.

And so are you.

I am still here because I refuse to let anything or anyone decide what I get to have. I am still here because I refuse to let my trauma have the last word. I am still here because I will not let a nightmare have more power than my dreams. I am still here because I didn’t allow the hard time to make me weak; I willed it to make me strong.

Recently I was watching Tony Robbins’s documentary I’m Not Your Guru, and he said, “If you’re going to blame your hard times for all the things that are wrong in your life, you better also blame them for the good stuff too!” I was stunned to have something tangible to explain the way I have felt about my brother’s death. You’re not supposed to acknowledge the good things that come out of trauma . . . there’s something perverse and unhealthy about it. It seems wrong to look for any silver lining, because that means appreciating something terrible that happened to you. But I recognize now that if you don’t look for the good that came out of what you’ve lived through, it’s all wasted.

I would give nearly anything to have my brother here with us—to know him whole and healthy. To lose him was so devastating I could easily have allowed it to destroy me. What happened to my nerves, my sleep, my sense of safety, and worse, my sense of trust because of having seen him that way, might have totally crippled me. Instead, I flipped the narrative inside my mind. Even as a teenager I used to think, You can do this, Rachel. You can do anything. Think of what you’ve lived through already!

When I moved to Los Angeles at seventeen, where I didn’t know anyone or anything and could barely afford to survive, I refused to give in to fear. Sleeping in a crappy apartment, living off food from the ninety-nine-cent store, and barely making rent weren’t ever truly scary. I’d lived through real terror, and I knew the difference.

When I was in my fifty-first hour of labor with my first baby and I was weak with exhaustion, my internal monologue reminded me how strong I was. You were forged in a fire worse than this . . . You’ve stood with death, and you are certainly strong enough to help bring this life into being! I’ve run marathons. I’ve built companies. I’ve pushed myself and my career to places further than other people might have believed possible. And the entire time I knew I was capable of it because I knew I’d already lived through worse. Maybe if you haven’t lived through anything hard, you find the idea obtuse or even Machiavellian.

But what is the alternative? We live through something crappy, and that’s it? We’re done for? We allow all the hard, ugliest parts of our lives to color everything else?

You cannot ignore your pain. You cannot ever leave it behind completely. The only thing you can do is find a way to embrace the good that came out of it—even if it takes you years to discover what that is.

Losing my brother was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me in my life . . . but it does not define my life. You can live through something that rocks your world off its axis. You can survive losing a piece of your heart without losing the core of who you are. More than merely surviving the loss, you can thrive. You can do it because it’s what you deserve. More importantly, you can survive the loss because living is the greatest honor you can give to the person you lost . . . even if the person who’s gone was your younger, more innocent self.

The path through hardship or extreme trauma is one of the most difficult things a being can encounter. But make no mistake the only way is to fight through it. Pain and trauma are a violent whirlpool, and they will drag you under if you don’t battle to stay afloat. There will be times, especially in the beginning, when it will take everything within you to keep your head above those waves.

But you must keep your head above the waves. It’s so difficult, but you are tough. Even if you don’t feel it at the time, the very fact that you’re still breathing in and out means you’re fighting back against the tide that wants to sweep you away. Don’t let it. After a while I promise it will become easier to tread water, and finally you’ll learn to swim against the current. The friction you’ll face will build your muscles, bones, and sinew—the very fabric of your being will be shaped by this journey. The toughest one you’ve ever taken, surely . . . but you will become something greater because of it. You have to. Otherwise, what was the point?

I used to naïvely say that “everything happens for a reason.” But that was only because I hadn’t yet lived through something horrific enough to bring that statement into question. I don’t believe everything happens for a specific reason, but I do believe it’s possible to find purpose—even in the absence of explanation.

THINGS THAT HELPED ME . . .

1. Going to therapy. I know I’ve already mentioned this, but in this instance, it’s worth repeating. I cannot fathom how I would have survived all that I have without the help of a trusted therapist. The process wasn’t fun or easy, and I often hated sitting on a couch week after week reliving the trauma; but if I hadn’t done that work, it would still be haunting me.

2. Talking about it. Not just with a therapist but with at least one other person you trust. When we were first married I sat down one night and told Dave everything about the day Ryan died. Details that had been locked inside my head for six years all fell into the sacred space between us. He didn’t try to fix it or organize it or adjust it in any way. He listened, and in doing so, willingly took my pain inside himself and made the load lighter to bear.

3. Making myself think about it. Right after Ryan died, I really struggled with nightmares and obsessing over the images in my head. An extremely wise therapist suggested I set a timer every day for five minutes, then force myself to remember it in detail until the timer went off. I thought he was insane. Turns out, there was something about knowing I would think of it later at an appointed time that allowed my brain the peace of not playing it on a loop. It also meant that I felt in control of my thoughts again. I am so grateful for this wisdom, and I’ve given it to fellow trauma survivors over and over. I even wrote it into my fictional book Sweet Girl as the advice Max gets from her best friend. You really do just write what you know.