Slowly, but Surely, I Disappeared

People tend to imagine disappearance as dramatic.

A slammed door.
A final goodbye.
A body walking away.

Mine was quieter than that.

Mine happened one toilet flush at a time. One door slam. One scream from the hallway. One sudden laugh behind a wall. One startled jump of my nervous system after another.

Slowly, but surely, I disappeared.

Not physically.

I still showed up to work. I still answered emails. I still attempted to do the job that had been assigned to me without my choosing, for an employer I had spent nearly half my life serving.

From the outside, I was still there.

That was the problem.

By then, internally, my world had already started to shrink. Eventually, that shrinking became both mental and physical.

It was at that point that I found myself sitting inside a room that I would later label “the box.”

But that room was not the first box I had lived inside.

Long before there were four walls suffocating around me, I had trained myself to contain life’s difficulties inside that same, yet metaphorical, box.

Pain went into one corner.

Fear into another.

Memories I could not understand were buried somewhere deeper, covered in cobwebs and dust.

I knew they were there.

A part of me always had.

But the deeper I buried them, the easier it was to remain numb to what had happened.

So they stayed untouched, almost as if they carried their own warning label:

DO NOT OPEN. DANGER.

That numbness allowed me to keep stacking life on top of them.

Work.

Motherhood.

Responsibility.

Education.

Competence.

Humor.

Sheer determination.

Layer after layer, they became the identity that numbness allowed me to build—the version of myself I could live as without disturbing what remained buried underneath.

Internally, as long as those boxes stayed buried in the darkness, outwardly the world believed I could continue to function.

I could work.

I could build things.

I could raise children.

I could solve problems.

I could walk into chaos and somehow become the calmest person in the room.

Looking back now, I believe I treated the pain inside my mind—the things hidden in those dark, frightening shadows—as my own Pandora’s box.

Something you could acknowledge from the outside.

Something you never forgot was there.

But something you did not open.

You did not touch it.

You did not look too closely at what was inside.

Because somewhere inside me was the belief that if that lid ever came off and everything escaped, destruction would follow in its path.

And there would be no putting it all back.

No returning to the person I had been before.

It just so happened that, for a very, very long time, the containment system worked.

Or at least I thought it had.

Then my mind was subjected to a violent crime.

Pandora’s box cracked open, and the darkness I had kept buried for so long began to ever so slightly escape through the very fine hairline crack.

At first, that crack caused what felt like a numb, dazed confusion.

My body did not yet understand that what was surfacing was the reflection of every painful thing I had hidden inside of me.

But the things that had accumulated for years seemed to recognize that this was their chance to surface.

Pandora’s box had been shaken so violently by the actions of two men that the hairline crack could no longer hold.

It split wide open, unleashing the mental wreckage I had spent a lifetime containing and stripping away the numbness that had allowed me to survive it.

Suddenly, the things I had spent so long keeping separate came crashing together in one overwhelming powerhouse of helplessness, attaching themselves to what had just happened.

Old pain with new pain.

Old fear with new fear.

Past trauma with present trauma.

The lid was now fully open, and every fiber of my nervous system felt exposed to the open air around me.

Sounds became warnings.

Closed spaces became different.

Silence felt different.

My own memories began showing up without being invited.

The past stopped behaving like the past.

Everything that had once passed through my world unnoticed now seemed capable of reaching straight inside me.

And at the most important moment—when I needed safety to begin sorting through what I had physically escaped—the walls that had once contained my own Pandora’s box finally crumbled.

Internally, everything was spilling out.

Externally, the walls around me were beginning to close in.

My world became smaller.

My employer removed me from the work, the office, the community, and the personal connections I had known for nearly two and a half decades and placed me in a remodeled storage closet inside a public health clinic.

The room had no windows.

For nine hours a day, for more than nine months, I had virtually no face-to-face human connection.

The room sat directly across from a break room, between two restrooms, and beside a hallway door that constantly slammed.

Children cried as they were being vaccinated.

People talked and held conversations directly outside my doorway.

I constantly heard other doors opening and closing.

And without warning, I would hear the toilets flush so clearly it sometimes sounded as though I were in the room with the person using them.

My office phone barely rang—maybe two or three times a week at most over the course of those nine months.

But there were times when it did ring that I physically jumped out of my seat, as if someone had suddenly walked up behind me and yelled, “Boo.”

To everyone else, these were ordinary sounds in an ordinary building—a busy public health clinic functioning exactly as it was supposed to.

To my nervous system, they were impact after impact.

Sometimes they hit me like firecrackers.

And it was at that point that I began calling the room the box.

There is something painfully ironic about spending a lifetime putting pain into boxes—containing it, confining it, burying it deeply enough that you could continue to function despite a lifetime of traumatic experiences—only to eventually find yourself physically sitting inside one.

It was around this point that I began to understand just how confining that room had become.

For nearly twenty-four years, I had been a field employee. I had never spent my working life confined to an office, much less a windowless room with almost no human connection.

Yet somehow, this was the place my employer had decided was best suited for me.

Because when a person is still breathing, still reporting to work, still answering emails, and still functioning just enough to appear intact, people assume she must be okay.

They see that she can still work.

And if she can still work, perhaps she can perform a new job—one she did not choose, but one someone else decided would better serve the needs of the agency.

No matter how hard I tried to explain it, they did not see what survival was costing me inside that box.

The room itself held reminders of the violent crime I had been subjected to.

The isolation.

The confinement.

The lack of control.

The sudden, unpredictable sounds that reached my body before my mind had time to understand them.

Every day I continued to function inside that room, might have been mistaken for evidence that I was managing.

It was not.

I was simply surviving it.

It was at this point that I asked again for accommodations for the disability created by the violent crime I had survived.

I submitted documentation.

I filled out paperwork.

I explained my triggers.

I tried to articulate what post-traumatic stress disorder actually felt like inside a body that had once been physically trapped and now felt metaphorically trapped all over again.

I thought my words would matter.

I thought following policies and protocols was the responsible thing to do.

I thought providing evidence would matter.

And somewhere deep down, I believed the people in charge would simply understand what was happening inside me.

I believed that if I explained it clearly enough, they might understand that choices I had not made for myself were having consequences they could not see.

That they might reasonably understand that continuing to place me in a loud, unpredictable, confining environment was not helping me recover.

It was making things much, much worse.

So I kept explaining.

And explaining.

And explaining.

Meanwhile, my body kept reacting to what my mind perceived as constant threats.

It was at this point that I began documenting everything—not for anyone else, but for my own sanity.

The notes I took did not look like journal entries.

They looked like surveillance logs.

8:14 — talking in the hallway.

8:15 — door slam.

8:26 — cough.

8:35 — door closes; heart jumps.

8:41 — toilet flush.

8:48 — child cries.

To anyone else, those notes probably looked absurd.

Meaningless.

But to me, they were proof.

Proof that I was not imagining the sounds.

Proof that my body was reacting exactly as I said it was.

Proof that something was happening to me even when no one else could see it.

I wasn’t journaling.

I was recording my nervous system in data form.

Looking back now, I realize that every sound had an internal consequence.

Toilet flush — heart jumps.

Child screams — flash of terror.

Footsteps — body braces.

My muscles would begin tightening before I could tell them not to.

My mind would wander back to the confinement I had experienced at the hands of those two men.

And the longer I remained confined inside that box, the more intense the electrical shocks, panic, and aftereffects became as they moved through my body.

Eventually, everything became reaction first.

Understanding came later.

It was as if my nervous system had become so short-circuited that my brain itself became almost infantile.

I could still speak.

I could still show up.

At times, I could still perform enough of a job to appear functional from the outside.

But there were also moments when I could not complete the simplest things.

I could not put a box together even with instructions in front of me and someone assisting me.

That was how far away I had become from the woman who had spent her life building things, solving problems, and figuring things out on her own.

It was not that the knowledge had disappeared.

I simply could not reach it.

My body reacted first, and my thinking brain seemed to arrive sometime later.

The worst part was that eventually it was not even the noise itself.

It was anticipating the noise.

Anticipation became its own trauma.

I would sit there knowing another door would eventually slam.

Another toilet would flush.

Another child would scream.

Someone would hold yet another conversation directly outside my doorway.

I knew it was coming.

I just never knew when.

So even in the quiet, my body was waiting for the next impact.

Hypervigilance is a brutal way of teaching your body to live—in constant, never-ending prediction.

How to scan for danger.

How to brace for the unknown.

How to prepare for the next thing because danger begins to feel as though it is always waiting right behind the last one.

Hypervigilance sounds clinical.

Living inside it is not.

It is exhausting.

It drains the life right out of you and slowly teaches your body that everything might be the next threat.

Your body becomes its own alarm system, except eventually it no longer knows when it is allowed to turn itself off.

Unfortunately for me, the longer I stayed activated, the less of myself there seemed to be left for me to reach.

First it was my concentration.

Then my motivation.

Then whatever confidence I still had left in my own abilities.

Things that had once been automatic became difficult.

Remembering which direction I needed to go.

What day of the week it was.

Which way was left and which way was right.

There were probably days when I barely knew which leg to put into my pants first.

Every decision became harder.

My ability to communicate changed.

My ability to reason changed.

My ability to simply hold a logical conversation changed.

I had a master’s degree in negotiation, conflict resolution, and peacebuilding, yet there were moments when I could barely figure out which way was left and which way was right.

My ability to organize information completely changed.

I knew the knowledge was still there.

I knew I still had a lifetime of experience.

But somehow it felt as though there were layers between me and the part of my brain where all of it lived.

Looking back now, I realize I was not losing my intelligence.

I had lost access to myself.

And somewhere in all of that, my body was still trying to do the one thing it had learned to do so well—stay numb enough to survive the constant hypervigilance and perceived threats around me.

That is a difficult distinction to explain unless you are the one living inside it.

Eventually, even the version of myself I had trusted for decades—the competent one, the strong one, the woman who could walk into chaos and figure out what needed to be done—all but disappeared.

I had gone from being the person other people looked to for answers to sometimes needing someone to hold my hand and tell me what I needed to do that day.

In my place was someone who tracked toilet flushes to prove she wasn’t losing her mind.

I wrote words in notebooks that still break my heart.

I don’t feel normal.

I don’t know who I am anymore.

Trauma does not only hurt.

It has the ability to alter your identity.

It was at this point that I realized I was no longer only grieving what had happened to me.

I was grieving who I used to be.

And the cruelest part was that I was disappearing in plain sight.

People passed my doorway.

They laughed.

They talked.

They went about their ordinary lives.

Meanwhile, inside that room, my nervous system was fighting a silent war no one could hear—and one that some of the people making decisions about my work seemed unable to understand.

Because you can answer emails while falling apart.

You can sound professional while your heart is pounding.

You can continue working while struggling to remember who you were before survival consumed so much of your brain.

You can appear functional while losing pieces of yourself every single day.

That is the part I don’t think people understand about the darkness.

Darkness does not always arrive all at once.

In my case, it accumulated.

One experience attached itself to the next.

One memory awakened another.

One frightened response taught my body to expect that the next one was just around the corner.

My world became smaller.

My mind became louder.

And the confidence I once carried began to all but silence itself.

Then one day you look around and realize you are living inside that box—somewhere you were never meant to go.

I had spent a lifetime learning how to contain pain.

But when the lid finally came off, instead of being given enough safety to begin sorting through everything that had escaped, I was placed inside another box and expected to keep functioning.

Expected to keep working.

Expected to move forward with a career as though nothing inside me had fundamentally changed.

The box did not contain the darkness.

It gave the darkness somewhere to grow.

And that is where things became so very much worse.

Not because everything dark in my life happened inside that one room.

It didn’t.

And not because every piece of darkness came from the actions of those two men.

It didn’t.

There is more darkness in this story.

Much more.

But that room helps explain how I got there.

How a nervous system already overwhelmed by trauma learned to expect impact everywhere.

How a woman who had survived by containing everything finally reached the point where Pandora’s box could no longer hold what was inside.

Slowly, but surely, I disappeared.

Or at least, looking back now, that is what it felt like.

Because even then, somewhere underneath everything that had escaped, something remained.

I could not stop writing.

At first, I wrote as a way to document the discrimination I was being subjected too.

Dates.

Times.

Sounds.

Proof.

But writing became  something greater than evidence collecting.

It became the journal of my mind.

When I could not explain what was happening inside me, I could put it on paper.

The fear.

The anger.

The confusion.

The memories.

The pain my body seemed determined to keep carrying.

And I slowly began to realize that putting those things into words gave them somewhere else to exist.

They no longer had to live only inside me.

Maybe there were other people carrying their own darkness who had no idea how to put it into words either.

Maybe words could give some of that darkness a way out.

Writing did not erase the pain.

It did not heal me.

It did not close Pandora’s box or put everything neatly back where it had once been.

But every time I moved something from inside my body onto the page, it felt as though I had released a little of what I had been carrying.

And when even the smallest amount of darkness escaped, it left room for something else to enter.

Just a touch of light.

I did not know it then, but maybe that was the beginning.

Not of being healed.

Not of being finished.

Just the first crack in the darkness where light could find its way back in.

The beginning of becoming unboxed.