Coming Down

In the spring of 2021, I started taking long walks every day.   I would walk through the streets of my neighborhood, down the hill through a series of rose gardens, all set up in a diamond shape.   The four individual plots - named the Maple, Orange, Mulberry and Cypress gardens - are positioned at the four cardinal directions. They radiate out from a central circle like a stained-glass visual effect.  During these walks I’d listen to music and take photos of the flowers and other things that captured my fancy.   Sometimes I’d lay on my back on the cool ground, looking up at the rose bushes with the music blazing through my body.   I was slowly waking up.  

By this time, I’d been living in extreme isolation for years.   I’d always been deeply introverted and a loner, but after my move from NYC to Portland almost ten years prior my reclusive lifestyle ticked up several notches.  Much of this was due to something happening gradually in my home, which was that my then-husband had been working for years to isolate me.   He’d been getting in my head since the day he met me to convince me that all of my friends not-so-secretly hated me and that my family was bad for me.   The trouble was, he was actually right about those things and so it took me a long, long time to see that he wasn’t actually motivated by trying to improve my wellbeing.  He was just smart enough to know how to use reality to his benefit.   

By that spring, I almost never left my house.   I worked all day, I took care of everything in the home and I left once per week or so to do the grocery shopping.   Apart from occasional errands I almost never saw or spoke to another human in real life other than him and my son.  I had no friends.  I no longer associated with my family.   He monitored everything I did and always had.  He got into my email, he put trackers on my car, he would use an app on my phone to monitor my movements.  Once I had to go to a more distant Target that had an item I wanted in stock and uncharacteristically stopped on the way home to get a beer and some lunch.   He had a complete meltdown and met me on the curb as I pulled up, ranting and raving that I’d been with another man.  He’d monitored my location and saw I’d stopped at a local brewery.  

Technically, we were already separated at this time but lived in the same house.  We’d separated in the early winter of 2020, when he’d gotten suspicious of a work trip I was taking and had emptied out my suitcase to riffle through it while I was in the shower, looking for evidence of my misdeeds.  After that, I moved upstairs but living separately was impractical due to the pandemic.  My idea of us being separated was not the same as his.  After the incident when I went to Target, I came to understand that he didn’t actually expect me to leave.   He thought of me as his.  He was determined to keep all of my time and energy focused on him.  But at the same time that I was living a hermetic life apart from the world, I was also engaged in a vivid and raucous online life.   And I had many online-only romantic dalliances, something that the age of COVID had made seem normal for many people seeking connection.   So, you see, he was technically correct that I was involved with other men.   All the time that I was hidden away in my attic office or the spare bedroom I’d moved into, I was having intense pseudo relationships with men all over the world.   These men got to know me in a way that no one in my real life ever had.  It was to them that I told my secrets.  Who I shared my dreams with.  We were wrapped up in intense situationships that never went anywhere.  We were intoxicated by a limerent fever dream.   It wasn’t real and yet it was the realest thing I’d ever felt.  

So when I began taking the walks, it was a big problem.  I’d be gone for at least two hours and every day I’d carefully dress myself and put on makeup, because while I was taking pictures of the scenery I was also teaching myself how to take selfies.   It had been years and years since I’d allowed any photos of myself to be taken and even longer since I’d taken a photo where I didn’t make a dramatic funny pose or pull a face.  I was never myself in pictures.  I didn’t know how to be.  I didn’t know how to be natural.  It seems ridiculous to say that I had to teach myself how to hold my face ‘naturally’ for a photo, but I did.  It took a year or more to teach myself to smile, a process that ultimately involved me getting Botox injections around my mouth to release the muscles stuck firm by a lifetime of pursing my lips and holding serious, stressed out faces.  I recognize the irony of this; I needed a cosmetic procedure to become myself. 

Because of the preparation and the time I’d be gone, he was absolutely convinced that I was meeting men.  And the truth was, if I could have been I would have.  This was the thing about my relationship with my ex husband: he knew me well.   Deep down, I was never true to him and I never had been.  This is why I could never fully fault him for his controlling, unhinged and possessive behavior.  I knew he’d never actually possessed me.  I’d had one foot in and one foot out of that relationship since day one.   I’d had multiple emotional affairs running concurrently with that relationship and ironically probably keeping me in it.  Nothing was real.   My real life was not real.  My fantasy life was not real.  I did not know how to be real.  I didn’t even know what real looked like.  I had a constant loop in my head about ending it and could not remember when I hadn’t.  I sometimes think the only reason why I didn’t kill myself is because I was already dead.  

I was fixated on the walks, mostly because I think the only thing that made me feel like continuing to breathe just then was the crisp air and the scenery, my obligation to my son and the feeling of music in my body.   And so unlike every other thing that my husband had tried to bully and take from me, I resisted him with the walks.   I’d go every day, no matter how difficult he made it.  We’d fight and fight while he told me I was a selfish and absent mother.  That I was useless.  That I owed him.  That was a big one.  In his mind, there was a great debt owed to him that I could never repay.  Everything in our relationship was framed up against how much I owed him because against all odds he’d elected to deal with me.  This is how it was from the beginning.  I was difficult, I had a bad personality, I didn’t have a good body, I wasn’t that pretty, I wasn’t that smart, I wasn’t talented, I was a burden.   You see, he took one look at me when we met at the age of 24 and he read me like a book.  He knew all of my deepest insecurities and he exploited each and every one.  Like I said, he knew me.  He knew exactly what I thought of myself and he knew that there was enough evidence in my real life to back things up and he knew how to exploit everything so that I’d consider myself lucky that he stayed around.   Which is how he gradually manipulated me to be the breadwinner, working jobs I hated - sometimes two or three at a time - just to support us.  And how he convinced me that he needed a thriving social life and multiple creative hobbies, which I paid for, so that he never had to be around to handle domestic duties.   I was essentially living like an indentured servant, one whose debt would never be paid.  

So I would go out for walks.  I’d take weird photos of myself in front of bushes and trees, like I was just part of the scenery.  My face in its natural state, still and placid, smileless and dissociated.  I would place myself in these scenes and photograph them as proof of life.  I was there.  But the images had an eerie quality, like I was photographing a ghost who haunts the places she knew when she was alive. And the music was making me feel.   Music had always had a special place in my life, but I had never considered myself particularly knowledgeable about music.  I’d always run with a scene of very creative people and my boyfriends were always musicians or superfans and record collectors and me, well, I didn’t think I measured up to them.  I thought I was lucky to be there.  But over the years, as I’d developed my secret online life, I’d become bolder and began positioning myself as something of a tastemaker.  I’d make playlists.   At first, I was really shy about them but over time I got more confident as my playlists were listened to and appreciated.  I’d make them based on themes: playlists of songs in French, playlists about murder and mayhem, playlists that were created to help you dissociate.  Music ignited something in me. Over time, it also started catalyzing my memories. 

I’d lay on my back in the rose gardens, looking up at the flowers.  Sometimes the song would make me cry or make me burn with fury.  I’d have flashbacks, but I didn’t know that’s what they were at the time.  As a song would play it would ignite like a tiny flame that lit up a fragment of a memory.  Curious, I’d tease it out in my mind, wanting to know where it went.  Until the story within that song would unfurl, blossoming within the sonic experience.  It was my story, they were my songs.  Outside of the songs I would not be able to access these memories, I could not sense them at all.   Without music, my memories were few and they were faded and one-dimensional; like random old photos pinned to a clothesline, blowing in the breeze.   They didn’t connect to anything.   Without the music, they were like phantoms.  I’d often play one song on repeat, over and over until it became part of me, until my heart beat to it.  The harmony would burn like fire in my veins.  The rhythm was a rumble that got stuck like a lump in my throat.  My story was in the song. 

One of the men I was involved with at that time was a particularly volatile guy, living in the Southeast. Our flirtation started out electric with lots of banter.  As with all of my online beaux, he was captivated by my mind; they met me in groups devoted to Philosophy and Politics and Psychology and Debate.  We had secret chat groups where we’d debate and fight for hours at a time and I developed a reputation as unbeatable. Online, lots of men claimed to love this.  It was a stark contrast to my real life, where I’d always fallen short of mens' ideas of the ideal woman.  We were all living a mutual fantasy.  In the real world, our relationships wouldn’t make it a day.   This guy and I flirted for a few months, but eventually he too began getting incredibly possessive and unhinged.   He was obsessed over how many guys were messaging me.  One day he sent me the song “Coming Down” by the Dum Dum girls and told me that it reminded him of me.  So unreachable and distant.   And as I laid there on the ground in the rose garden, listening to it for the first time, I realized that it was my song.  A song about dissociation and avoidance and the intensity of coming out of that to start to feel.   My passion for the song long outlived my interest in him.  By the time summer came around, I was already done with him but the song was evergreen. I listened to “Coming Down” on repeat.  Over and over and through me.  

With sudden clarity, I realized that I wanted to do something, I wanted to unlock more.  I wanted to change.  I got the idea to begin Ketamine treatment, which I’d researched for some time but never followed up with.  I found out that because of COVID, there were now doctors who could temporarily be licensed to treat me via a virtual visit; I discovered the name of one that was highly regarded online and made my first appointment with him.   He listened to my story and had me take several assessments.  The process took weeks.  This is a kind of PTSD, he said to me softly.  And I think we can help.  I met his wife, who worked as one of his coaches and whose own mental health challenges had motivated him to start prescribing Ketamine.  He began training me then on how Ketamine worked and talked me through the process of taking it at home. 

By the middle of that summer, I was ready to begin.   I set up my attic bedroom exactly as I’d been instructed and did the two test sessions, where you start with mini doses to get yourself used to the experience.  When I began Ketamine treatment, I immediately surpassed the limits of my dissociation superpowers and the paper thin isolated memories I had in my head began to take on a totally different character.  And I started to feel them, feel the oppressive killing weight of them.  You need a trauma therapist, the doctor told me.  What’s going to happen is going to be too much for you to handle alone. And I trusted him, like an oracle.  I trusted him in a way that I rarely trusted anyone.  For some reason, I just knew.  Everything was going to change and I was suddenly ready in a way I never had been before.   I found my therapist just as I was beginning the regular-dosed Ketamine treatments.   And for that first year, it was all I could do to take the Ketamine every three days and recover.   I was barely living through it.   But for the first time, I was really alive.  

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