Swimming Through an Avalanche

"Blood like rain come down
Drum on grave and ground
Part vampire, part warrior
Carnivore and voyeur
Stare at the transmittal
Sing to the death rattle"
- Maynard, Vicarious

Let me spell it out for you. I still get hit by these crippling waves of grief on a regular basis. They are not always as devastating as they used to be because my capacity is so much greater but in a way they are harder now because the nervous system doesn't spare anything. It takes up all the capacity that's available.

I can usually feel it coming hours before, sometimes days. And it first descends on me like a shroud then hits me like a moving train. Sometimes it's just a slump of energy with no story. Other times, like yesterday, it's a massive amount of pain and insight. There are often things that trigger them but I have moved beyond blame years ago. I'm generally grateful for the triggers.

The amount of pain is crippling. I stop being able to function. I get extremely irritable and disconnected. Any amount of noise becomes unbearably torturous. And I want to numb and distract myself because even now after hundreds of these waves I never want to experience one again. Even though I know I can and I know that they are necessary.

If I'm alone I often just curl up in bed and bawl out loud. Sometimes for hours. When I'm taking care of my children I steal small bits of time where I can. Sometimes it's crying behind sunglasses while driving them to school. Sometimes I lock myself in the bathroom and set a timer for 10 min and bawl into a towel. Crying with a timer is an old Tommy classic. Then I wash my face and go make dinner.

It's all old unprocessed pain. It is all very young. Sometimes there are stories and memories that come with it, sometimes it's just the felt sense of terror in my bones. It's mostly from being abused as a child.

It's the pain of a three, four, five, six year old me. When I was locked up in a box 24/7 with a crazy person, my mom, who treated me like a doll and lost her mind when I didn't behave like one. Then she would take notes about my crimes in little notebooks and go over them with my dad when he would come back for a weekend from his med school. Then my dad would lash out the appropriate number of strikes with his belt.

This happened for years. Over a hundred Fridays like that. I couldn't make sense of it all then. I was just a kid. I was terrified of being with my mom because she was so unpredictable. I was terrified of my dad coming back because he would punish me. I felt like I was such a bad person to put my parents into this position. I didn't feel the pain then, only the terror. My nervous system could not handle it. It just stored it in whatever corners it could find in my body, so it could fall apart later.

This didn't happen on a blank slate. I was three when I was beaten bloody by my dad in rage after I goofed off at the dinner table. And that's just the earliest one I remember. There was violence before my prefrontal cortex was developed before language before memories. Who knows how old of a baby I was when I was beaten for the first time. My parents never told me.

I want to make it clear this was not just random acts of domestic violence. This was systematic conditioning: surveillance, records, judgement, punishment and terror. I was tortured. Hundreds of times. As a child. For years. With no external reference point to maintain sanity. And then a lifetime of denial. No one came to save me. No one came to say yes, this happened. No one could.

Most of my life I couldn't make sense of the waves of grief that would hit me. I handled them however I could on my own. It was always crippling and I did everything I could to avoid it. Even now knowing every dark tunnel of the maze of my trauma and coping, I still avoid them, postpone them as much as I can because the pain is so much to handle. No wonder I couldn't feel it as a child.

My complex PTSD was severe. I would have qualified for Borderline Personality Disorder through my twenties and most of my thirties. I was highly suicidal. I still am perplexed at the fact that I'm still alive.

I had no context for it. My parents didn't deny what happened. But they denied that there was anything unusual about it or that there may be consequences to it like depression and grief. They denied me any possibility to process with them, so I was left to my own devices. They denied me my reality.

Don't get me wrong. I don't need rescue any more. I built a life. I consider it a privilege to wrestle the demon of trauma and come undefeated and I'm proud as hell of the man it forged me into.

But being alone with unbearable pain is the story of my life. It's been too much for one person. It still is. And I'm still alone with it. Most people don't have the capacity to help me with this. My extended family included.

That's why I write here. It's not fun. I'm terrified of the exposure. But it's also existential. I need the world to know. After a lifetime of denial, I need someone to say yes this happened. Most people who have known me will never read this. Fuck them but they don't owe anything to me.

But there are some of you here who have read most of the posts. Well, at least you opened the emails, who knows if anyone reads anything any more these days. I'm going to make this very clear. Every one of these posts was written in blood. Every one is an emergency flare. They all cost me something. This is not content. This is contact. This is me begging you to help me. I was not supported as a child. I am not supported now. I need you and you know this.

Some of you have been reading for over a year and haven't said a single word to me... Do you have any idea how that feels to me? I need you to understand something. Silence is not neutral to me. Not with this. Not after this life. So let me help you. It's not hard.

Say: Tommy, I see you. What happened to you was terrible. It's not fair that you had to deal with it all on your own.

That's all. It's not a big fucking ask. You can copy and paste it. Stop being complicit. Stop being passive. Fucking help me out here for fucks sake. Do better than the people around me when I was growing up. Tell me I didn't crawl out of hell into an empty room for nothing.