Spring 2016.
“Tell me what you can smell, what you can hear.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Normal plane smells – that stuffy, dry smell. Coffee breath. Chemicals.”
“Sounds?”
“The roar of it moving through the air, I guess. Someone rustling a newspaper. Tinny hip-hop through headphones. A baby crying. Conversation. The glug of wine in a plastic cup.”
“Then what happens?”
I become very aware of my heart. “The man stands up and he is shouting.” My voice shakes. “He’s standing behind my boyfriend. He gets out a knife and he slits his throat, there is blood everywhere, it’s all over me. Rusty smell. People are screaming. My boyfriend is looking at me. He is dead.”
“Then what?”
I am crying now. “They have taken over the plane. It starts to nosedive and everyone is screaming. And I know this will be the end.”
“Then what?”
“Then nothing.”
I am not on a plane nosediving into the sea, but my brain is on that plane. It’s firing off terror signals like a wonky catherine wheel. My palpitating heart is also on the plane. I imagine that it is as visible in my chest as the tiny unborn hand I once saw high-fiving the wall of my friend’s womb, protruding. And my shaking body’s on the plane, as I sit there, in the therapist’s office, the sunlight streaming through the windows and the gardeners outside mowing the lawn, and I think: I am about to die. Not for the first time, either. Not even for the first time that day. I feel as though I’m about to die almost every waking moment.
***
There is no box on the GP’s mental-health assessment form for every minute of every day. The boxes are:
Not at all
Several days
More than half the days
Nearly every day
So I ticked the last box, for every question.
I am sitting in the chair next to the box of tissues, because I am mad. This is not the word we are supposed to say, but this is the word that I am. It describes me exactly. I am an insane person. A small part of me, objectively, knows this – it is why I am here – but most of me thinks that my reactions make perfect sense, because the world is conspiring to kill me. And though I stay indoors most days, and when I do venture out, I ensure that I am vigilant at all times, I know that it is merely a matter of time before I am dead.
***
I have been mad once before, in 2011. I should stop saying mad and use the clinical diagnosis: I have post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD for short (snappier). I do this – make cracks to try and appear dry and flippant about my illness. Because it shows I have a sense of humour, because it shows I’m not just a victim. I have alluded to it, but no one knows how bad it was. Except maybe my husband. And maybe my mother.
It was my mother who came and got me from under the duvet after the attack happened to me (note also my use of the passive voice). This was September 2010. I had already been to the police station, where I had given my statement and sobbed along to the radio. I’ll Stand By You by the Pretenders was on, a song she always played when I was growing up. The copper let me have a fag on their flat roof, then he had driven me home, where I had put on a pair of pyjamas that made me look like an overgrown five-year-old and crawled into bed. I can’t remember phoning my mother or what time it was. Did she drive through the night? When I think about it now, I cry not for what happened to me, for the bruises on my neck and on my thighs, but for my mum, having to hear about it. “Your daughter’s been attacked”; or was it “Mum, a man tried to kill me”? I couldn’t remember. Still can’t.
***
The nosediving plane scenario doesn’t happen the first time I get PTSD, following the trauma in 2010. The first time, I am afraid largely of things directly related to the attack I have just suffered (there’s that passive voice again). So: men who look like the men who cornered me; walking home alone at night; the dark, poorly lit patch at the end of my road; men walking behind me as I walk home alone at night; parks. I am constantly on edge, expecting.
In addition to this, I suffer flashbacks. Something flips and I am back there, on the pavement with his hands around my neck, screaming. I have graphic nightmares. I cannot bear to watch depictions of hangings or strangulations on television. Until I developed this aversion, I never realised how frequently they appear.
Strangest of all, though, is this ghost-ship feeling of not being really there. A floating sensation of being outside yourself, like when you are a child and someone tells you about the universe, or you think really hard about how strange humans look, objectively: our noses, our slender, tapering fingers.
I learn this is called depersonalisation or derealisation. My self is in splinters, basically. I’m a simulacrum, a cardboard cut-out trudging woodenly through the city. Somehow still at university, I am reading Being And Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre. And, unlike with Walter Benjamin or Michel Foucault, when I read Being And Nothingness, I do not have to read the same paragraph over and over until I understand it. I get it, this not-being, this dissolving into the background. How pretentious, the person who is me but not-me thinks.
***
In therapy, I learn that the trauma of the attack means that my brain’s usual mechanisms for storing memories have been corrupted. Dr N, the therapist, uses the analogy of cardboard boxes on a conveyor belt, being knocked off one by one, so that they never reach their storage facility. Instead, they have exploded and their innards are all over the shop (this part of the analogy is mine).
Dr N draws me pictures of the brain, showing me the amygdala and the hippocampus. The amygdala is responsible for my fear responses, and you could say that it’s hyperactive. This is why I startle so easily, because it is going into stress mode unnecessarily. The hippocampus is in charge of the storage and retrieval of memories, and helps you differentiate between past and present events. Put simply, mine is damaged, so the past and the present blend together, the attack elbowing its way into my everyday experience without warning or invitation. On a daily basis, I experience the same cascade of chemicals that I did on the night of the attack, when my primitive brain took over during the fight-or-flight terror of thinking I would die.
For some unknown reason – some fluke of genetics, some unknown weakness in me – my primitive brain decided to stick around.
I have never felt like an animal before, not like this, where I flinch and startle at every slight movement, just as the mouse I toy with on the tube platform does when I stand and watch it approach before gently shifting the toe of my trainer so it bolts. I note this atavistic hypervigilance in others, too, when I am out and about. I see a person jump in a certain way and I will think, “Something happened to you.”
Gradually, over many months, Dr N and I relive over and over what happened that night, to the point where talking about it or thinking about it ceases to affect me. It is this “reliving”, along with medication, that, over the course of a year, helps me get better. In that same year, 2011, I meet the man that I will end up marrying. I come off medication. I feel a sense of profound relief that I am sane again.
***
While writing this, I came across a clinical description of PTSD patients that included the following: “Although individuals with PTSD suffer from persistent negative emotions, they are unable to experience positive feelings such as love, pleasure or enjoyment. Such constricted affect makes it extremely difficult to sustain a close marital or otherwise meaningful interpersonal relationship.”
“Looks as though I beat the odds!” I write to my husband. In reality, much of the credit goes to him for putting up with the rages, the vagaries of living with someone convinced that they are to die imminently. He gets off the train at the random station, he tells me again and again that I don’t have cancer, he holds me while I sob so hard I think my vocal cords will rupture, he builds me a garden.
He has never known pre-trauma me. I want to tell him that I used to be more excited about the world than I was frightened of it. I want him to know that I used to be cool, that, before my universe narrowed to a pinprick, I was someone better, someone fun. I want him to know that he’d have loved her even more.
***
It’s the second time that things get really bad. The 2015 Paris attacks are not my story: I didn’t lose a loved one, didn’t see anyone shot dead in front of me. But suffice to say that those hours I spent trapped in a bar near the Bataclan not knowing if they were coming for us, convinced they were coming for us, prodded my condition awake once more.
This is how I become, essentially, agoraphobic: I stop taking public transport. I fly once, and spend the descent lying in the aisle being given oxygen. I rarely go to restaurants and bars (when I do go, I sit away from the window, and am jumpy and distracted). I do not go to shopping malls, cinemas, railway stations, or squares. I do go to work – I take a taxi there and back, and spend the entire time in the newspaper’s office wondering when they are coming to kill us. Sometimes, the fire alarm goes off and I walk out of the building with my whole body shaking and go home, where I sob, and then sleep for hours. I am lucky: my editor is very understanding.
Other things that frighten me: people on mopeds. Cars that are parked with people in them. Suitcases that appear to have no owner, people wearing bulky coats. I look up at planes overhead and am convinced they will drop from the sky. On Christmas Day, a low-flying helicopter reduces me to such paralysing terror that I lock myself in the bathroom. At Christmas lunch in my local pub, I eat two roast potatoes and a small mouthful of turkey, and that is all (I have stopped eating almost altogether), because I don’t want to be distracted when the men burst in to kill us. I hear French sirens in my sleep.
I also develop health anxiety for the first time. I have cancer and a brain tumour and multiple sclerosis and rupturing varices. (How do you even know about those?” my doctor friend asks. She is endlessly patient, as she tells me over and over again that I am not dying.) So do all those I love, who are bombarded with phone calls unless they tell me immediately that they are safe. My parents, everyone I have ever loved, will die. My brother, who is disabled, becomes a particular focus. He will have an epileptic fit in the pool and drown, I am sure of it. My husband will be stabbed on his way home from work. It’s exhausting, thinking about it. I can’t imagine what it is like for them.
The nightmares are worse than any horror film I have ever seen.
***
So I’m back in therapy, talking my therapist (Dr S, this time) through the vivid hijacking fantasy I have concocted in my head, which we will then repeatedly expose me to until it is meaningless, the delusions of a mad person, with no relationship to reality. And eventually, many hours later, this finally becomes the case.
Over many months I go from “Nearly every day” to “More than half the days” to “Several days” to “Not at all”.
It takes more than a year to finish the trauma-focused CBT. In combination with medication, it starts to work. I go outside again. I take a plane. I sit in a square in the sun. I go to bars and out to eat. I get the tube in rush hour. I no longer live with the contradiction of fearing death while at the same time wanting to throw myself in front of oncoming traffic in order to stop that ever-present fear. It feels like a miracle.
I look back on the frightened person I was, who every day saw a thousand impending catastrophes heading straight for her, and I barely recognise her. Who was she? Not me. A mad person. Me but not-me.
***
Until I typed these words, I did not know how to write about the time in which I wasn’t sane. I wrote a novel, pouring my trauma into a fictional character: another not-me. At the same time, I hid how bad it was from the people closest to me. I hope it’s over. It could be under there, lurking, waiting to resurface. Perhaps it never will, and I will cope with the inevitable trials of life with grit, fortitude, and humour.
But I am nervous. Friends who have had traumatic births have, they tell me, seen all kinds of dark pain resurface. Illness and bereavement have had profound effects on the mental health of people I know and love. To an extent I am waiting, but I am also hopeful. I don’t believe in a cure, but I do believe in my determination to do the psychological work, if required.
I am not special, not the only one marked by trauma. I often meet people who are undiagnosed: the male friend who was beaten up and couldn’t relax in pubs, the young woman who was raped, the homeless veteran in Manchester. A dear friend of mine was one of the first on the scene at Grenfell Tower. The unexpected smell of smoke can now make her wet herself. She tells me, “I sometimes look up and see buildings on fire so vividly, then I look again and it is not the case.”
How strange and capricious our minds are, how deluded we must be, to purport to be in control of them, to think we have evolved past fear. How ironic that I spent all that time thinking I would die at someone else’s hand, when what kept me alive was not my hypervigilance but the work of three women, Dr N, Dr G and Dr S. Without them, there is not a doubt in my mind that I would have hurt myself.
In January, my flight passed over the mountains of Afghanistan and I was struck dumb by how beautiful they are, how you’d never know from up there in the blue that below there had been a war, that below me had been a nest of trauma and pain. As I gaped, the plastic window rattled next to my peering face. A baby cried. A newspaper rustled. My husband’s sleeping head shifted on my shoulder. The mountains disappeared under a coverlet of clouds, and the plane flew on.
• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s novel, The Tyranny Of Lost Things, is out now, published by Sandstone press at £8.99. To order a copy for £7.73, go to guardianbookshop.com.
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