Author: Sophi Nielsen

You made me promise to talk to you. I don’t like to make promises because I don’t like to break promises. But for you, I broke the rules.

But lately talking to you’s been like screaming at a brick wall to move. Fucking useless.

The feeling of you used to be warm water and safety.

Now it feels like falling on concrete.

I’m writing down all these things so I can tell you later.

I promised I’d talk to you, even if I was scared, but sometimes it’s so much easier to write than to talk.

Do you remember when I came to pick you up the other night? I called you on the phone because I missed the turn. I was so overwhelmed I could barely get a word out.

You could tell.

That’s the small stuff you said. I’d be great in a natural disaster. I said. But this stuff stresses me out. This stuff is my hell.

I’ve been thinking about that.

You see, I wasn’t with you then. I wasn’t in the car on the phone with you. I wasn’t on my way to Heritage days in Syracuse to pick you up. I wasn’t on Antelope Drive and 2000 W. I was ensnared deep in the webbing of the past.

Maybe you could tell.

My mother used to yell at me. In the car. My childhood is dotted with memories of people yelling in cars, pricked like a pincushion or a voodoo doll. And me unable to escape.

But the worst was learning to drive.

It wasn’t so bad with my dad. I learned with him first because he could more easily keep a level head when I messed up. When it looked like I was heading to disaster.

But I wasn’t protected forever from driving with my mother in the front seat.

I have a memory. I’m pulled over in the parking lot of the 600 S and 700 E strip mall. The one with Noodles and Co. and Tonyburger. I’m parked next to the Starbucks. The one that moved out and is a boba place now. Everything is pink and they give you a punch card, one free boba for every ten you buy.

I’m pulled over. I’m parked outside the Starbucks. I’m gripping the steering wheel. I’m crying. I’m overwhelmed. My mother is in the front seat.

And I do not remember what came before.

I do not remember what small error escalated to verbal blows, what tiny infraction what small disaster led to me being incoherent and unable to drive.

Social harmony has never leveraged itself for my gain. Maybe it’s because, like hand grenades or land mines, my emotions have always exploded out of me discordant notes, intrinsically destructive.

When I was younger, I tried to find many voices for these destructive emotions.

I balled my fists up, scrunched up my nose, and swayed my ready punches back and forth, I’m gonna get you, pantomiming. My parents laughed. How cute.

I grunted, screamed in animalistic rage, stamping on my purple poly-pocket slide. My sister laughed at my misstep, targeting my own plastic play property instead of hers in my indiscriminate anger. How silly.

My anger would try to scream many times more but to these six ears it would always fall silent, so it curled up, folded into itself, and dried up. Latent for years.

“How do you feel right now?” the therapist asks. Kamala, let’s call her Kamala instead because unlike the others before her she is kind, human, and in her gaze, I see myself more clearly.

But, Kamala, I do not know how I feel now, or most of the time. because I never learned words for this task. I learned only silence or rebellion. I learned only to keep my mouth shut or to scream so loud that none would dare ignore.

So all I can do is point to my solar plexus where something feels “lit up” and my throat where something feels tight. maybe these emotions have names but I must build them up from pieces, from sensations, these their constitutive parts.

My anger found its voice again in the summer of 2016. The subway turnstiles in an empty station were guarded by a patron drunk. And as I fumbled for my entry pass, his breath kissed my ear, muttering some inflammatory jibe, I breathed in a sickly cocktail of fear and anger and spit out the words “fuck off.”

Some friends would tell me I “shouldn’t have done that.” Some would regale me for retellings, ribbing me for the outrageousness. And one would tell me simply, that he wasn’t surprised. A single sweet note striking home to my soul that it had been seen.

But how did you feel?

I felt empty. I felt scared. I felt vulnerable as shit. A paper-thin membrane between the scary shit that could be and my own reality had been shredded open that night, leaving me feeling like a nerve exposed to the entire world. All covered up by, ignored for, bravado and disapprovals fighting for airtime.

So how did you feel?

Yes, I was angry, but I was also scared.

I wonder how many of us have wanted to get hit by a bus. These passive-self harm thoughts. How many of us have them?

I never longed for the pain, only the reprieve, the full stop, the actual legitimate fucking break you’d get if you were in the hospital. “Sorry, I actually can’t do anything for you right now, why? because I’m unconscious.”

Because among words I never learned “I need a fucking break” were chief. I have tried to speak them before, in many forms: meltdowns in high school hallways, the words themselves, even, but to six ears, again, these words fell silent.

So I dreamed of getting hit by a bus cause maybe then, I’d catch a fucking break.

How do you feel now?

Like a weight is falling down on my shoulders, crashing. and I want to put it down.

I never longed for pain, but I got it. Alan Gordon describes neuroplastic pain as a “false alarm” pain. continuing pain long after a structural cause has gone. He identifies those more likely to develop neuroplastic pain as individuals whose brains are in “high-alert” mode who perceive a world slanted towards danger, people who: worry a lot, check, put a lot of pressure on themselves, check, people who don’t know how to take a fucking break. Check.

How do you feel?

Ow.

Psychological and physiological causes are difficult to untangle completely, but over the past 8 years, I have probably been in pain more than I have been out of it.

Ow.

I don’t know how to understand that.

That same cognitive dissonance that’s happening in your head as you read those words, it’s happening in mine too.

Dissonance, there’s a reason I don’t talk about my pain much, it rings discordant against people’s minds

Pain is meant to be avoided in the healthy mind. We avoid all thoughts of it. so when I tell you about it, you instinctually run away, change the subject. Quickly. My words silent to your ears. To say them louder more often would be discordant. Would break the harmony.

You see, social harmony tells me to be silent when I want to be loud. When I stumble to find substitutions for these words I never learned, foreign on my tongue, social harmony tells me the words are wrong, out of tune, like there’s a better way to get in tune than the sing out loud. Like we don’t all stumble against these invisible walls when we’re learning our way through this maze of meaning. social harmony wants beautiful chords without rehearsals, beautiful blending without listening to the voices around us. A perfect result with no reasonable path to that result.

I’m finding small paths around these hard walls I’ve built around myself.

I feel frustrated.

…leads me out of tall intimidating thoughts of who is dangerous who is safe who is to be trusted and who is to be cut out leads me away from thoughts of scorching the earth and screaming into silent ears.

I feel.

I am allowed to feel.

I see the messages on my phone, and my gut clenches, poised to disappoint.

But I look up at the mirror and I look different to myself, more human, more a person, no longer an image designed to please.

How do you feel now?

I feel free.