I want to scream.
I want to yell.
I want to curse at the people who hurt me.
I want to physically fight back in the way that, mentally, I can’t.
I want to look those who tormented me straight in the eye and say:
How could you do this to me?
I am hurting and in shock.
Frustrated.
Mentally collapsing.
And angry, oh so very angry.
I don’t mean the kind of anger that comes and goes.
I mean the kind of anger that hides under your skin.
The kind hidden beneath the outward professionalism, the polite emails, and the carefully chosen words.
Underneath every please and thank you I typed to those responsible who tried so hard to make me invisible.
Underneath every morning that required every ounce of strength I had just to show up and walk back through those doors.
I walked into work every morning as the victim of a sexual assault that had occurred during my lunch break—during my workday.
And there was the irony of walking into a public health facility, a center charged with protecting woman’s health and offering them support at some of life’s most vulnerable moments.
Think about that contradiction for a minute.
I worked for an agency connected to resources for domestic violence, human trafficking, mental health crises and suicide prevention—the agency responsible for answering the 988 crisis line in the state of Arkansas.
988.
The number you are told to call when you feel like you have nothing left to live for.
And I worked there.
I walked through the employee entrance barely able to remember who I was.
Maybe I simply wasn’t as important because I was an employee.
It felt as though employee health and comfort didn’t matter at least not mine.
All I was expected to do was get the job done and leave.
I still had a computer.
I could still type.
I could still answer emails.
I could still say good morning.
Sometimes I could even make my voice sound normal.
They thought because I showed up I must have been okay.
Or maybe it was because I wouldn’t leave maybe that was the true issue.
But I was NOT okay!!
There were times I could barely remember my own name, let alone remember how to care for myself.
How do you explain that?
How do you explain being a grown woman who had spent decades working, raising children, solving problems, paying bills, fixing houses, caring for every other person and handling whatever life threw at her and then suddenly having to fight to remember things that used to happen automatically?
Eat.
Shower.
Pay the bill.
Find the keys.
Answer the message.
Remember what day it is.
Remember why you walked into the room.
Remember the sentence you were trying to finish.
Remember who you were before all of this happened.
My brain couldn’t manage a life anymore.
It could only manage surviving minutes at a time.
Yet somehow, I still kept showing up.
Maybe that was the part that fooled everyone.
But my medical team help me tried to get help.
Even when complete mental collapse felt all but imminent, all five tried.
I saw my psychiatrist every month.
I went to two different therapists every week.
I saw my chiropractor weekly, and even my chiropractor wanted to help with accommodation paperwork because he could see what was happening to me.
My general practitioner tried.
My endocrinologist tried.
My therapists tried.
My psychiatrist tried.
I had five different medical professionals submit requests for ADA accommodations on my behalf.
They could see something was terribly wrong.
And it wasn’t only medical professionals.
I could tell an ordinary person what had happened without giving them graphic details.
I didn’t have to describe the deer blind.
I didn’t have to describe what happened to my body.
I could simply say:
I was sexually assaulted during my lunch break.
Afterward, I was moved from the work I had send almost half my life conducting, then moved again, and eventually I spent nine months working in a windowless room while trying to get help for what was happening to me.
Their faces would change.
Oh my God.
I am so sorry.
It was almost instinctual—the empathetic side of a stranger.
A human being hears that another human being was hurt.
A human being responds with compassion, empathy and concern.
It isn’t complicated.
They didn’t need medical records to believe me.
They didn’t need lawyers or discovery to prove to them what had happened.
They didn’t need an accommodation committee.
They didn’t need to understand Complex PTSD.
They didn’t need every detail.
They simply needed to listen long enough to hear my pain and suffering and understand:
Something terrible happened to her.
Normal human empathy.
That was the thing that seemed to be withheld from me.
Now mind you, I didn’t stay silent.
I wrote state representatives.
I wrote legislators.
I wrote to the Governor’s office.
I filed Equal Opportunity charges.
I hired lawyers.
My medical providers sent letters and filled out forms.
My therapists asked questions.
My attorney asked questions.
I asked questions.
I asked the Arkansas ACLU.
I reached out to disability organizations.
I begged.
I pleaded.
Everybody seemed to be asking questions.
And yet what reached me almost every time seemed to be the exact same thing:
Silence.
Or what seemed to be the same nonexistent answer.
Don’t talk about that.
Be quiet.
Move on.
Almost every accommodation request seemed to arrive at the same conclusion.
There were discussions about whether I would be put back somewhere.
About whether working from home might continue for a very long time.
About what would happen to me.
There seemed to be endless discussion about me.
But one question felt painfully absent:
What do you think would help you?
What environment would allow you to function?
What would make you feel safe enough to concentrate?
What do you think an accommodation looks like?
I didn’t expect to get everything I wanted.
But I should have had a seat at the table and the option to look through the menu.
I wanted to participate in the conversation about my own survival.
Instead, other people were deciding.
Other people determining where I should be.
Other people determining what should happen next.
Other people deciding what was best for me.
Other people talking about my body, my work, my future and my trauma while I was struggling to hear my own voice.
It was a feeling that was painfully familiar.
Again, after two men had used my body without listening to my voice repeatedly say:
No.
A lifetime of other people telling me what they wanted.
What my body should do for them.
What I should tolerate.
Who I should be.
Where I should go.
What I should accept.
What was best for me.
It became the relative movie role the narrative I had heard all too often throughout my life:
Be obedient.
Don’t stand up.
You are weak.
You don’t matter.
And the message from my employer felt painfully familiar.
Different circumstances. Different people. Different actions.
But once again, other people were determining what would happen to me while my own voice seemed to matter the least.
Except this time the damage became so severe that the numbing darkness grew louder than everything else.
Eventually, my own voice became almost impossible to hear.
The effects began showing themselves in symptoms and medically supported diagnoses.
Then there were days inside that windowless room my employer put me in when my mind became so desperate to understand what prolonged powerlessness was doing to me that I asked myself a question I had almost been afraid to admit:
Is this what a concentration camp was like?
I knew my experience was not equivalent to the imprisonment, torture, starvation, murder and atrocities endured by victims of concentration camps.
That wasn’t the comparison I was trying to make.
I was trying to somehow rationalize what it felt like to be psychologically captive—to feel trapped inside circumstances I could not control, constantly asking for help while feeling as though no one was listening.
My mind was searching desperately for language large enough to understand what prolonged powerlessness was doing to it.
What happens to a human being when she feels powerless for long enough?
What happens when choice begins disappearing?
What happens when dignity and worth are forced?
What happens when your world becomes smaller and smaller until you no longer feel like a person moving through life, but something being contained and managed?
I didn’t have language big enough to express it or fight off the growing darkness.
The word stress wasn’t big enough.
No, anxiety wasn’t big enough.
No, depression wasn’t big enough.
Sometimes even the word trauma didn’t feel big enough.
I felt dehumanized.
I felt managed.
I felt as though something fundamental had been taken from me, and I could not figure out how to get it back.
And the rage underneath my pain was just as enormous.
Because other people got to go home from their days work.
They could rest.
Recoup.
Recharge themselves.
Eat dinner.
Watch television.
Laugh.
Sleep.
Wake up.
Live.
My mind didn’t get an opportunity. My trauma filled me home. It followed me in every corner of every room 24 hours a day. My nervous system didn’t realize it could rest. It couldn’t stop preparing for another fight.
No matter how hard I fought to get myself back, back to a version I thought I once was, I basically had to fight and try to remember how to be a person at all.
How could they do this to me?
How could they watch me deteriorate and still expect me to perform?
How could I tell them I was drowning from the fallout of a violent crime and somehow become the problem because I couldn’t breathe?
How could medical professionals tell them again and again that I needed help, and their response still feel like silence?
I wanted them to look at me.
Really look.
Not as an employee.
Not as a complaint.
Not as an accommodation request.
Not as a problem that needed to be managed.
Me.
LOOK AT ME.
I am one of those people you have policies to save.
I am one of those people you hope will tear a strip of the paper hidden behind the door in the bathroom stall.!
I could barely think.
I could barely sleep.
I could barely take care of myself.
I no longer recognized myself, and you still expected me to act normal?
The worst flashbacks were not always memories of what happened to me in that deer blind or through the employment discrimination.
The worst moments were due to realing what was happening to my children while I was having a complete mental collapse.
Because the damage didn’t stay at work.
It came home.
The numbing darkness began to swallow my entire family.
Each of my children processed my pain differently during my darkest times.
My daughter had just turned twenty when this began.
As I deteriorated, she became more distant.
Colder.
Almost unable to feel what was happening to me, allowing herself to slowly internalize her own pain alone.
And for a long time, that hurt.
Oh God, it hurt.
Because she had always needed me to be strong.
She had needed me to help her with her health issues, to remember the important things, to be the person who held things together.
But I also knew she needed something I couldn’t give her anymore.
She was surviving it too.
The opposite occurred with my son.
He was thirteen when this began.
He is sixteen now.
He had always been a handful.
A child who could challenge me, frustrate me, exhaust me and make me laugh, sometimes within the same five minutes.
But during those years, he became the child who saw the darkest parts of me over and over again.
He saw my darkness in public settings.
He learned how to read my facial expressions.
He noticed when a room became too much for me and instantly checked whether I needed reassurance or protection.
He heard my speech patterns change.
Which is terribly painful to even acknowledge.
My son became fluent in my childlike dialect.
My mind became metaphorically small.
Something inside my brain had fractured in a way that made the adult part of me harder and harder to reach, and somehow my son learned to interpret what it meant.
My nervous system became so incapable of regulation that the smallest thing would and often did become enormous.
This was the downward spiral of a total internal system collapse.
A noise.
A question.
Something misplaced.
One more demand when my brain had absolutely nothing left to give.
Sometimes I would react like an infant having a tantrum because the adult part of me simply could not reach the controls fast enough to turn down the noise.
I couldn’t sleep.
I couldn’t regulate myself.
I couldn’t control any of my emotions that once would have passed through me without taking over the entire room.
And my son lived inside that with me more than anyone.
Sometimes this caused fits of rage in which I would explode toward anyone within the blast zone because my nervous system was at peak fight-or-flight.
The smallest thing would feel enormous, and once my body crossed that threshold, I could not always reach the part of myself that knew how to calm down before it switch was thrown.
There were times my son would curl himself into a ball and cry because his mother could not calm herself enough to make him feel safe while I screamed with uncontrollable anger.
That memory destroys me the most and cuts deep.
My temper tantrum caused my own child to curl into himself, sobbing with his arms around his knees.
He was supposed to be the child.
Instead, there were moments when he became frighteningly close to a parent to me.
He watched me.
He studied me.
He learned my fear.
He experienced moments when the woman who was supposed to regulate the room could no longer regulate herself.
My daughter protected herself by moving away emotionally.
My son protected me by moving closer and becoming the adult.
Neither of them should have needed a survival strategy for their own mother.
But they did.
People at work saw me continue showing up.
My children saw what came home.
While everyone was debating what I was entitled to at work, my children were paying the price at home.
And eventually something changed inside me.
The fear did not disappear.
The anger did not disappear.
I simply became too exhausted to keep feeling all of it.
Day after day, nothing seemed to get anyone’s attention.
Another letter.
Another provider.
Another question.
Another explanation.
Another attempt to make somebody understand.
And every time hope seemed to appear from behind a darkness, giving just enough light to believe that perhaps this person would finally hear me, it seemed to collapse again.
And again.
And again.
Eventually even hope became exhausting.
And I drifted farther and farther into what I can only describe as:
The oblivion of numbness.
It was a darkness many trauma survivors know.
It isn’t sadness.
It isn’t even fear.
It is something beyond both.
It is what happens when your nervous system has screamed for so long that eventually there is nothing left to scream with.
Feeling becomes too expensive.
All feeling equals pain.
So your body begins shutting the lights off.
You stop crying because crying requires feeling.
You stop getting angry because anger requires energy.
You stop imagining tomorrow because tomorrow requires hope.
You breathe.
You go to work.
You answer the email.
You come home.
You stare at the people you love and intellectually know that you love them while wondering why you cannot reach the feeling that once came so naturally.
That was when the darkness almost controlled it all.
I wasn’t simply disappearing.
Little by little, I already had.
And the darkness had all but gained control.
The darkness didn’t only take away my ability to feel.
It convinced me that I deserved everything that had happened to me.
That may have been the most dangerous part.
Because once I could no longer feel my own worth clearly, everything painful that had ever happened became evidence against me.
Maybe I am the reason.
Maybe every bad decision proves it.
Maybe all these people treated me this way because there is something about me that makes people do this.
If it happened again and again, surely the common denominator must be me.
The darkness collected everything.
Every failed relationship.
Every person I trusted who hurt me.
Every time I stayed too long.
Every time I didn’t leave quickly enough.
Every time I didn’t stand up and demand I be valued.
Every bad decision.
Every mistake.
Every moment when I reacted terribly because I was overwhelmed.
And it whispered:
See? It has to be you.
I could fight everybody else to prove that what happened to me mattered while privately wondering whether I deserved to matter at all.
I could fight relentlessly for myself while not believing in myself.
Those things somehow existed at the same time.
I wrote.
I documented.
I asked.
I begged.
I found doctors.
I found therapists.
I contacted representatives.
I filed charges.
I filed lawsuits.
I kept trying to make someone hear me.
But there was one person I could no longer convince that I really deserved to be heard at all.
Me.
The only voice I could no longer hear was my own.
Even now, my body sometimes reminds me how deep that went.
I can be standing safely in my own yard trying to process all of this when my body begins to shake.
My stomach hurts.
My nervous system reacts before my mind knows what happened.
A squirrel drops a nut in front of me.
I startle.
I turn and yell up at it.
Then I hear myself.
That voice.
Small.
Frightened.
Childlike.
For just a moment I hear the six-year-old I once was, the little girl who had already experienced too much before she ever turned seven.
I am standing in my own yard.
I know where I am.
I know I’m an adult.
I know there is no threat.
I know it was a squirrel dropping a nut.
My mind knows.
My body answers first anyway.
The calendar keeps moving.
My body sometimes doesn’t.
And suddenly I understand again what my children heard.
They heard the child inside their mother before I ever knew she was speaking.
They watched me become frightened by things that made no sense to them.
They watched me struggle to explain my involuntary reactions that did not make sense and was unable to stop.
They saw the person who had spent her entire life taking care of everyone else become someone who sometimes could not figure out how to take care of herself.
And that is hardest thing to forgive myself for occuring..
Even knowing everything I know and understand now.
Even understanding what trauma can do and how painfully hard healing is
Even understanding what chronic hyperarousal and sleep deprivation were doing to me.
There is still a mother inside me who looks backward and thinks:
You hurt your children.
And the darkness takes that thought and tries to turn it into something larger.
See?
It was always you.
Maybe you deserved all of it.
Maybe everybody was right.
Maybe the reason you can’t hear your own voice is because your voice never mattered.
And that is where I went.
That far.
I didn’t know how I was going to get out.
I didn’t know whether there was an out.
I wasn’t looking for someone to solve my entire life.
I wasn’t asking anyone to erase what happened.
I wasn’t asking my employer to become my therapist.
I needed accommodation.
I needed help.
I needed enough human kindness for someone to recognize that a human being was deteriorating and ask:
What can we do to stop making this worse?
I needed enough room to breathe long enough to hear my own voice again.
But by then, I wasn’t sure I would recognize it if it came back.
This is how far down I went.
That was the darkness.
And maybe that is why they never heard my desperate, blood-curdling scream.
Because the loudest scream of my life never came out of my mouth.
At first, it screamed inside me over and over:
How could you do this to me?
Then I became too numb even to scream.
And eventually, underneath everybody else’s voices, everyone else’s decisions, everyone else’s expectations and everyone else’s version of what was best for me—
I can no longer hear my own voice.
Only the weeping of the deeply lost little girl inside me.
Becoming Unboxed 