Therapy day. Made even more exciting by my current state of pollution, weird dreams about Kees, and a classic Freudian slip. I always want to get my mileage out of a therapy session. I began with crying and railing about feeling polluted, corrupted in some way. My body fluids were exploding out of me, or being mechanically sucked out of me. Not feeling so sexy right now. I feel like something is happening to me, like some sort of forced purge, an effort to expel all the disgusting parts of me. Like a body when it rejects an organ, I feel like mine is trying to expel my soul. I am screaming in here as I am leaking blood and piss and shit and snot and tears and ichor.
“Ichor?” she queries, interrupting me. “Like the blood or gods or demons?”
I blink. “I meant lymph.”
“Well, I suppose that is correct in an archaic sense, but ichor?” She shifts in her seat. “Do you feel there is something inhuman about you? I ask because you usually find identifying as a monster empowering. This seems like a departure.”
I hold up the clear tube that holds the bubbles of fluid being sucked out of my wound by the wound vac. It makes me cry, quietly. “It’s not healing,” I say. Even I can hear the despair in my voice. “I feel like my body is disintegrating.”
And yes, she did say, “How does that make you feel?” She said something more like, “How do you feel about that?” Something to that effect. I said something that surprised even me. “I am corrupt and I must be destroyed.” We both stared at each other for a long while, and the she said simply, “tell me about your corruption.” And I sang a song that I didn’t think that I could, one full of grief, of how those who loved me always eventually try to destroy me. That they cannot abide me any longer at some point. There surely must be some evil in me that this happens over and over. I talk about my mother and her mother. I get quiet.
“What about Kees?” she says.
I look up at her with my tear stained face. “Kees was mad.”
“Kees decided to love you. He wasn’t afraid of you. You can’t make him an exception. Kees was able to love you without demands and you brought him joy,” she said, her hands open in a reassuring gesture.
“This all happened so long ago, and I haven’t felt like this in years. So many years. Can I still have survivor’s guilt inside? Have I still not purged the grief and shame?” I slouched, defeated, with my story in tatters at my feet.
She tells me about trauma and the way the body deals with it. She knows I have spontaneous bruising, that I even now still deal with a neurology shaped by violence. There is a certain compassion in the Mighty B. She does not assume that because I have CPTSD that it means that I’m weak. I have to answer to the memory of Kees. No matter how awful my life has been at any given time, I have always had someone to love me. It is a blessing, and a privilege, because for most people, there really is no one to save them. But for some reason, I have always had love, even if others have sought to destroy me. And love is not enough, but it is better than any other survival tool I know.
Seyewailo 