I wrote yesterday about exactly what psychosis looks like in my life.
Cue November of 1998. That is exactly the state of mind someone I know walked into my dorm room around 9 PM in the evening in November of 1998 ….. that warped center of the universe is the precise state of mind I was in at that time. My fourth manic/ psychotic episode at the time.
I can’t recall the storyline in question of that episode. Except that I was pretty sure I was the literal center of the universe…..that is a recurring theme in these episodes.
My room was a mess. I don’t know exactly why I had torn it apart. I’d stopped sleeping days before out of distress that a childhood friend had died in a car accident, probably stress about schoolwork, too. It was close to the end of the semester. I was in the process of supporting another friend through an abortion.
It took until February of 2010 to be able to admit to myself— to see clearly, even as my mind was ill— that he had raped me in my first actual sexual encounter with him in November of 1998.
I remember the day clearly that Jared first suggested that my first encounter with him had actually been sexual assault. I was standing in the hallway, he had come up in conversation, and Jared was standing at the kitchen sink of our Essex Drive house. I can picture the scene clearly, even over probably 17 years later.
I remember telling Jared, “No, it wasn’t like that.” I mean, there hadn’t been violence. He hadn’t had to hold me down. It certainly didn’t look like movie rape scenes. I mean, the sex had been my idea, probably. He was just agreeable.
I didn’t realize that the very fact that I had been manic to the point of psychosis at the time meant I was actually legally incapable of consent to sexual activity.
He had been in my room at the behest of the campus because they had contemplated forcing me to go to Grady’s psych ward against my will. It was his whole job that night in my room to determine whether they needed to come back and take me to the hospital.
And it was in that environment, that this person, who knew at the time I had never had sex with anyone, decided that having sex with me on that visit was a good idea.
I told him years later that I had always wanted to marry the first person I was with sexually. He said he hated when women said that. I shuddered in that moment, realizing he’d heard it before.
I remember sitting in the local friendly mental ward by myself late one night writing that February of 2010 (they allowed us markers and paper)….and writing about this person, and all of a sudden I wrote “RAPE,” in connection with wondering how that person was doing because I hadn’t talked to him in a while.
I think I must have screamed. I remember the doctor on call at the time ushering me into the refreshment room shortly after I wrote the word— otherwise I have no idea why in the world she would have been at my side—and she offered me some water, and having me describe what I had been writing about. I told her the whole story.
I don’t know for sure, but whatever she documented that night….I’m pretty sure at least a portion of my PTSD diagnosis is based on that hospital stay. I’ve never seen my own records.
Writing the word happened before I was conscious of what writing the word meant. I can’t describe the feeling of having an entire worldview— my entire known history with a person— flip like a switch precisely like that.
That probably happened on a Thursday. I know that because Saturday or Sunday would have been a visitation day, and I wasn’t allowed visitors the next visitation day. I wasn’t allowed visitors because I’d been injected with haldol and was pretty darn close to a drooling pool of mess. I remember collapsing under the medication counter, in grief, I remember the injection, and I remember that my eyes wouldn’t focus for a good long while after that.
I’d seen the group therapy leaders talking to people in session, telling them that they may not be able to focus or understand what was going on, and I remember being that person the session leader was glancing at as she said that, in the day or so that followed.
That is the shocked stupor that my system went into, realizing that maybe my sexual history was maybe, to all appearances, not as it had seemed in years prior.
See, that’s the thing about mental illness and psychosis. It’s not all delusions and disorganized thinking. Sometimes, in the midst of it all, there are piercing glimpses of actual, true reality in ways that my brain compensates to be blind against, for survival’s sake, in my regular daily life.
I got a withdrawal with hardship from four of my five classes that semester, in the Fall of 1998, thanks to documentation from my psychiatrist. My English teacher refused the W in favor of a WF because she had already distributed the final.
I’d still considered him a friend after I married Jared. The two of them never met, but they’d spoken on the phone because I wanted to talk to him while I was in a mental hospital after my Lamictal allergy in 2008.
He was always pretty forceful and leading in our rougly 4 years of active sexual activity, between 1998 and 2002 or so.
Jared takes it further, to define most if not all of those encounters as repeated assaults.
I used to complain that Jared was not forceful enough in his approach in the bedroom— I wanted to be “taken,” as I would tell him, sometimes close to tears in my disappointment.
I know now how those pleas must have pained Jared, as he understood exactly what my sexual past entailed, as he learned my needs and rhythms and how I understood sex was supposed to be, in realtime.
I told him last Fall that it was my literal cross to bear that my beloved alma mater continues to honor someone who probably never should have graduated had I had the wherewithal to report what had happened back in 1998.
And so, I sit here, on random Friday nights in Gallery Row, safe with Jared, and I try to write about other things.
And yet, my brain always goes back to the drama. The finding peace amidst the constant mental dissection seems to be my life’s work.
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