Searching for Serenity

Posted on June 7, 2014 by Lisette d. Johnson

There is an exhilaration in survival, in the sheer victory of beating seeming insurmountable odds. Combined with a wonderment of seeing and experiencing it all with fresh eyes and renewed mind, one experiences a sort of a cockiness; a middle finger to the world, the high of staking your claim on life like planting a flag atop K2. With it comes an appreciation of what is truly important; at first a short glimpse which leads to an extraordinary understanding of how finite life really is.

It is a long fall from that height to the realization you are separate. Different. You no longer fit where it once seemed a given. Before. On the outside, you look the same, but what you know can’t be unknown. The continuity of your life interrupted, a timeline with empty space as it stopped and restarted. Conceptually grasped by others, they cannot appreciate your experience on a visceral level.

I am a big fan of the author Laurence Gonzales. The night before the shooting I had been re-reading his book Deep Survival; Who Lives, Who Dies and Why. There are many stories of death and unlikely survival but one in particular resonated with me. Debbie Kiley survived a sailboat accident in a small zodiac while her crew, one by one, died. Some went insane from drinking salt water before walking off the dinghy into shark infested waters. After the shooting I had a quiet obsession to meet her, believing her to be a rare someone I could connect with, who would get what I was going through post survival.

I fanned through others. Cancer survivors, accident survivors, medical survivors, even other gun violence survivors but I regularly discount (though not minimize) them as having experiences that are too dissimilar from my own to be able to relate to my internal struggle.

Recently a comment I made on a Facebook post elicited a private message from a woman who had been shot multiple times through a door while trying to barricade herself, her four-year- old son and her father from her estranged husband. Someone else who, seriously wounded, also defied the odds and lived to tell her story.

We scheduled a call and I was thrilled at the prospect of chatting with her. She, too, was equally excited and after telling her story immediately shared her sense of not fitting in. She’d recently returned from a domestic violence survivor retreat and echoed her sense of feeling different as none had been part of an overt attempted murder. She’s also outspoken about gun violence and has interacted with gun violence survivors, but again, none of whom the violence was perpetrated by an intimate partner. She didn’t fit in there either.

That ‘me, too’ need to identify is very curious to me. There isn’t a mental file for the feeling of being shot by your beloved partner and few survive it to offer validation of it.

In the sea of well-meaning advice givers who suggest doing my work in therapy and then leaving it behind, as if that were even possible, who implore me to stop associating with those in whose shoes I have walked, I am regularly reminded what Gonzales asserts…there is no going home again. They don’t get I can’t go back to that place of blissful ignorance because that place no longer exists. Truly I seem to feel whole only with others who share my experiences in intimate violence.

I straddle two worlds, two lives. I am changed by the shooting and my life has undeniably diverged from the path I envisioned when I decided to exit my marriage. I am the same happy, resilient, substantive person at my core. Yet I will always feel some level of that odd sense of separation and in it a low-level churning of internal conflict. I am in neither place fully.

This uncomfortable place is mine. I long for routine and familiarity to stay grounded, to indulge myself in a laziness of not having to work so hard to stay present. Yet I fear falling into a mindlessness, an abyss of minutiae, the mundane, and shuffling through; a loss of appreciation and gratitude for this amazing gift, this bonus round to truly experience life, to make it all count, to do things differently, to make a difference, to really live instead of just be alive.

In his book, Surviving Survival Gonzales notes “our ongoing survival requires relentless attention”. It is not in the chaos, the fight, while bathed in adrenaline; it is after the euphoria of victory, in the quietness, in the resumption of everyday life, in the loneliness, that surviving survival threatens.

I discovered today Debbie Kiley lost her fight with surviving survival. In my searching for her over the last few years, I held it was uniquely her who could offer me some perspective, who held the magic golden nugget on how to do this. I knew she had struggled after the accident and yet she went on. I never met her but maintained she held the key, fueling my desire to connect with her.

On learning she shot herself, I have paused to reconsider that it was possibly me who could have been her lifeline. I can’t say my own options haven’t been considered at various times since the shooting but I am fortunate to have discovered a purpose, to believe in a power greater than my trauma and a plan greater than my own. The choice is no longer mine to make. Maybe I had little more to share with Debbie than my optimism and hope. Still, it was probably all she needed. Perhaps it is all any of us need.

So it is, in connection with a new survivor, that the lines of our individual stories blurred and we exchanged something that will continue to provide strength to each of us.

*Surviving Survival, The Art and Science of Resilience by Laurence Gonzales
(C) 2012 W.W. Norton & Company

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Singleness

Posted on May 28, 2014 by Lisette d. Johnson

As I sort through my overfull closet for something cool and summery to greet the sudden heat, I laugh at the metaphor that I have no room for a man in my life since I have no room in my closet for his clothes. I reflect on days divided between parenting teens, my many entrepreneurial adventures, volunteering, and maintaining a circle of wonderfully supportive friends. No room, no time either. There. That is that.

Giving up the dream of marriage to find something that isn’t a fantasy has thus far been an interesting journey. It was hard to let go of the rope when I didn’t know how far I’d fall. It was exactly in that letting go that I found I had actually already reached the bottom. This side of it, with all the work I’ve invested, the vista from the peak is worth the arduous climb to get here.

It has so many times felt like I am not making progress. I feel rather stuck and plateaued. Sometimes I’m afraid I don’t know how to be a partner. I was made to feel I was so inadequate for so long that now I go into an uncertainty I can be enough for anyone other than just me. It’s a dark place and I try to stay out of it. In my heart I feel like I am more than enough. Sometimes, though, I have to sort out his voice from my own and it gets rather noisy in my head.

We weren’t designed to be singular. Even Tom Hanks had Wilson. Maybe the momentum was and is still here and the dream, a different one, is still doable. It’s a matter of trusting the process that is taking me to it. I still hope. Hope when it is the right person time will be reallocated and room will be made; in my closet, in my heart.

“The hard part is letting God determine who is good. That means no rebounds. No one night stands. No more hiding.” unknown

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The Children

Posted on April 12, 2014 by Lisette d. Johnson

Another blank screen stares defiantly back at me, and my heart sinks at writing the words clambering to exit, as though maybe to keep them will somehow maintain some sense of order in our lives. To write them leaves me empty, reading them solidifies my doubts and fears.

In my angst I feel like I must do something, so I go rooting through neglected drawers, purging, throwing away what isn’t necessary, reorganizing. I recognize the times I am motivated to undertake these projects it is likely simply to regain some control over something when everything else seems to be spiraling.

In a drawer, I find a stack of pictures taken the final summer. It was after I had said I was leaving, delayed by marriage counseling he requested, that we visited my step son and his family at their cabin in North Carolina and my aunt and uncle in South Carolina. Among the pictures is one just of my children.

My first thought is this is before; when they were blissful and happy, unaware of the pending separation. Before their innocence was stolen, before their world completely imploded. Eight weeks before the shooting.

The human spirit manages to go on, adapting however it can, no matter how catastrophic or traumatic the event. But it is never the same; never as pure, never as free. My daughter surely has imprinted images and feelings surrounding that day, though it appears she has no access to it, no recollection of it, only pleasant memories of our life before. She still mourns her father, as though he simply passed away one day. The rest doesn’t exist for her.

It leeches out sideways, oozing into every aspect of our lives. These four plus years later I still fight tirelessly for her, but fear the battle lost as the adaptation that protected her and allowed her to go on seems to have taken over and I only see fleeting glimpses of the daughter I knew. Even her my son comments he doesn’t recognize her most of the time.

My son was catapulted from childhood into the lone man for a mother and sister at age nine. Flung into an assumed responsibility with no resources to pull from, no support to help him sort it out. He is depressed. He is angry.

I am angry. Furious. Raging. Abjectly sorrowful; unable to even conjure the words to describe the depth of this despair. I look at these two beautiful souls smiling in the picture, these two wholesome and perfect parts of God and I cannot fathom what kind of person could do what he did. Who could be so hateful, so intent to destroy me that they would destroy their own children in the process?

In the darkest hours I go in to each of them, wiping away my tears so as not to wake and startle. I touch them, smooth their hair, kiss their heads, pray, finally returning to my bed to wait out the night.

Sometimes, still, I carry the guilt for staying, for persisting in my fantasy of marriage and family, knowing it is entirely his for treating us the way he did. Yet it is the three of us who are left with, who live with the consequences and I long to make some sense of it, to have everything where it needs to be so we can move forward. If only it were as easy as uncluttering drawers and closets.

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Damage

Posted on March 29, 2014 by Lisette d. Johnson

We must be mindful not to carry the labels assigned to us, including those we assign to ourselves. To consider ourselves damaged goods sets us up to accept being treated less than we deserve, and further abuse. The label may be given, but we perpetuate it and in that we relinquish our power. Constant striving for the impossibility of perfection threatens our dreams, goals, stability and emotional health, which keeps self-acceptance further at bay. Our beliefs limit our ability to choose people we want in our lives and leave us to be chosen instead. We stay far longer in unhealthy relationships when we believe we aren’t worthy.

There was a weekend about a month before the shooting where he and I were supposed to go away together. His idea was we would use the time together to rekindle our relationship. He’d made all the arrangements. The children and pets were to be taken care of. At the last minute I got cold feet. Knowing now what I could not know then, it’s sobering to grasp the real possibility it was that weekend he initially intended to kill me. I often wonder my fate had I gone.

I had spoken with my sister about the planned weekend and my notable degree of discomfort about going. Something about his change of tactics alerted her and she shared how it all seemed very odd. He’d called her only a few weeks earlier saying I was bipolar, had a spending problem, that I was not mentally fit. She’d responded at the time ‘you all need to work it out’ and meant she did not want to be in the middle. Those who refuse to take sides unknowingly take the side of the abuser. He took her to mean I was supposed to work with him to save our marriage.

On the call with me she pointed out he and I were in ‘the honeymoon phase’. Not familiar with the term, she emailed me a link to the cycle of abuse. I sat in Panera Bread reading the email and dumbfounded, tears streaming, I saw with absolute clarity my entire married life abbreviated in a small graphic on the cycle of abuse. With a true understanding for the first time, I was relieved, yet the finality that nothing would change if I went away with him set in.

I knew I had to tell him the weekend was off and was afraid; afraid of his reaction, afraid I would relent and give in to the pressure I knew he would exert. I felt if I went with him he would lure me back in and I’d never be able to get free. I could feel the hopelessness I had managed to get ahead of close around me at the thought of the trip. I thought if I went all the strength I’d garnered to stay the course to leave the marriage would be lost.

On the drive home I called my therapist to walk me through it. I was hysterical as even then, with all the pain I had experienced and irrefutable evidence that was presented, a piece of me still wasn’t willing to give up on my marriage. My therapist told me I had to decide if I wanted to be married or not. In the years following I suggested to him the question was did I want to be married knowing my husband nor our relationship would ever change with only me working towards it.

I went home that day and told him I wasn’t going. He begged it was what we needed to get back on track. I flashed back to my begging throughout the years. He pleaded. I remembered pleading with him to stop berating me. He cried, the first time I’d ever seen him cry. I tried to remember when I had become so empty I had stopped crying.

I wanted to believe it was all we needed to get back on tract too, but I knew it was a pivotal moment and there was no going back. He admonished my refusal to comfort to him in his emotional display; I recalled dreams of being comforted throughout our marriage; the simplest and kindest of gestures denied me when my best friend died, when my parents died, when I miscarried.

Over the years I’d developed a safe place to go to in my mind. That day it was an ad from the 80’s; I’m L’oreal and I’m worth it. The silent repetition of I’m worth it, I’m worth it, I’m worth it, I’m worth it; my hardfought victory to appreciate my own worth and value, gave me strength to refuse to cave despite his emotional upheaval. In that I was further validated I am worth it.

I cannot, will not hand that over again.

“Accepted and worthy, this is our new name” Jason Gray

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Safe Places

Posted on March 13, 2014 by Lisette d. Johnson

I am speaking publicly about the events around the shooting and the abuse leading up to it more frequently . I continue to believe that if one person hears my story and does something differently, I am doing what I was left to do.

I speak to medical residents on the importance of screening their patients, have entered the college and university arena sharing the signs that ushered me through my young adulthood to the end of the road of my marriage and recently spoke to an audience supporting a local domestic violence/sexual assault organization. It is the second time I was asked to speak at one of their events. The first was a memorial for families of those whose lives were lost at the hands of their abusers. This event was a business community awareness breakfast.

I have noticed there is a point during each when the room goes absolutely silent. I am not sure if it is me or the audience lost in what I am saying. I feel like the room has emptied, although I still see everyone in it. Am I transfixed in the moment, or are they?

For a second it is much the same as awakening after the surgery into absolute darkness. I could not hear or see anything and was quite certain I was dead. I remembered my children and came into awareness that I was indeed alive.

Again, in Europe, where I’d taken the children a year later to escape the memories of the anniversary, and to celebrate my son’s birthday which sadly falls on the heels of the shooting, I awakened into blackness, disoriented from the time zone and unfamiliar surroundings; deafened by the silence, pulled into that feeling I experienced after surgery. I push through being stuck there, in the darkness, in the silence; push through to the other side and rejoin.

There are some residual fears left from the trauma of life with him, and the ending. I’ve reached a point where I have to make a decision to not stay here. I’ve gotten comfortable where I am. It seems much easier to bail when things move towards being emotionally vulnerable with a prospective partner. It has become clear to truly be able to engage in an emotionally healthy and balanced relationship I need to once again push through to the other side, to push towards the life that is waiting for me there.

I am uncertain to what extent I will be able to move from this plateau, but ever hopeful I leave the safety and begin again to work towards a better life; turning the outcome over to God and the universe.

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