Dear Starlight,
This is an attempt at something different. Meaning, I am typing in the passenger seat as my husband drives us out of the Hudson Valley and onto the highway to visit my mother for the weekend. It is a grand gesture of distraction. Typing in the passenger seat.
I am a PTSD passenger driver, which equals every driver's worst nightmare. It has taken me a very long time to recognize the truth of this uncomfortable routine pattern. It took me years before I knew I had PTSD, and I still haven't found a way to be comfortable in this seat. I'm not so sure my Aries-Sicilian husband cares what it is, "it" being my crazy; he just cares that "it" makes him crazy. Most of our drives devolve into crying and screaming.
So far, we have made it twenty minutes, and there have only been the following:
"Not this again! Here we go all over again! Just do your own thing. I'm trying to drive and fix this (fiddling with the phone maps)!" He barks in response to my telling him he doesn't need to adjust the maps.
I feel my energy rise, heat in my cheeks. "Yes, here we go again, you being a total insensitive asshole!" I don't say out loud.
"I'm just going to listen to the music on my earbuds so I don't have to listen to you two fight or your annoying typing," casts my teenager from the backseat in a voice that feels like a fish hook, hoping to catch a fight.
My cheeks flush. I don't say anything out loud. Instead, I click clack these words.
When I was seventeen, I was a passenger in a drunk-driving car accident. I was in the middle back seat, squished between a bunch of beer-guzzling, bong-hitting boys. The driver was racing down a dark dirt road in the pine woods. We were either chasing another teenager or being chased. It was all dusty, demented, and dreamy. We drove headfirst into a tree.
Next scene, us falling out of the car and groping for one another in the dark with the warmth of fresh blood gushing out of various parts of our maimed bodies. I couldn't see my wounds. I felt wet blood running down my face and into my eyes stinging them shut. Later, my head would swell, and keep my eyes closed shut for a week. Fortunately, no one died, but our lives were forever changed. One of the boys would never play basketball again and, therefore, would not be going to college on his basketball scholarship.
When I was eighteen, I was a passenger in a drug-driving car accident. It was early morning. I had accompanied my very intoxicated friend to the ER to have stitches in her face after she had fallen even earlier that morning from her bike, opening her chin in a way that we hysterically laughed at. I was also intoxicated and had no sense of what was safe. When we left the ER, my friend drove us straight through a red light, and a car to my right drove straight into me.
The PTSD didn't show up immediately. Neither did my commonsense or self-respect. I still did stupid, dangerous things for a few more years. This was a period of my life characterized by despair. Hopelessness is a grave threat. I am lucky I survived.
In my twenties, I started to experience irrational thoughts that I couldn't shake, thoughts that felt like feelings. After meeting and falling in love with my husband, I would find it difficult to be without him. I would start imagining some terrible atrocity would kill me, including but not limited to tsunami waves. Sometimes, I couldn't sleep because my body was too full of fear, and my mind wouldn't stop replaying terrifying catastrophes. When I was with him, these idiosyncratic terrors took the backseat, and life went on as usual.
Then 911 happened on a morning following a grand fete where we danced to Perry Farrel DJ'ing at Marc Jacobs epic fashion week party at the Chelsea Piers. I wore high heels resembling ballet point shoes and shmoozed with Flea from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. We woke up that morning to hammering in our heads and a phone call from Sicily. My husband's mother was calling to tell us to look out our windows, that the city was under attack. It was incomprehensible. I said it had to be an accident. I needed to go back to sleep. The following days under ash got weird.
I started to notice that when I drove over a bridge, I would feel as if my car was being pulled forcefully to the right as if it would drive off the bridge. I began to not be able to breathe on a bridge. I began to not see clearly on a bridge. I began to cry uncontrollably on a bridge. I began to not feel my body on a bridge. I began to avoid going on bridges.
I started to notice I couldn't breathe in subways. I began to avoid going on subways.
I noticed I couldn't breathe on buses. I started to avoid buses.
Luckily, I moved Upstate and felt safe that I wouldn't have to drive over bridges, get on subways, or ride buses anymore.
Then, I began to imagine crashing in planes.
My husband is from Sicily. We have been going to Sicily annually for the last twenty-five years. I knew we had our summer trip coming, and I began to obsessively imagine us dying. I started not being able to sleep well. I would be on the couch next to my husband, trying to watch Saturday Night Life, but meanwhile, I was keeping the tears in tightly as the only thing flashing before my eyes was our imminent explosive death as actors screamed, "It's Saturday Night!!!"
I started to make up reasons why I couldn't go to Sicily that summer. Some part of me knew I couldn't comfortably say the real reason, "I am scared of dying in an airplane bombing," but eventually, the real reason came out, and as I imagined, I was met with, "That's crazy." I also knew it was crazy, so I bucked up and went. As I buckled into my seat, I noticed the one "Muslim" looking man whom I had been taught to look for despite my rational mind knowing it was crazy to cast all middle easterners in a terrorism plot. Shortly after casting the innocent man in the role of my murderer I left my body in a panic attack. I survived the plane travel but barely survived my panic. I also became friends with the man from India who I learned suffered from hemorrhoids. His suspicious activity was his discomfort in motion.
I began being unable to be a vehicle passenger.
At this point, I didn't know what to do or who to speak to about my fear that had overgrown my life like a thicket of nightshade.
This is what I really want to get to with this detailed accounting of my terrors. It took me over a decade to recognize that something was irrationally tipping inside me, something beyond my will or control, and that my outer world was being affected. It took me this long because I didn't know how to feel safe to say anything. I discounted my feelings and did everything I could to convince myself there was cause in the moment to not go over a bridge, not drive with a friend, etc.
Sometimes, we are each other's angels. Which is what a woman named Mary was to me. Mary came into my shop (then I had a shop) and told me a sliver of her life story as she perused the wares. A woman I felt safe to say, "No one knows this, but I am so scared I cannot stop thinking about dying in plane crashes." She kindly told me I could talk to my general practitioner and that I didn't need to go to some particular psych doctor. She opened a gate, making help easy to find help.
I went to my doctor and received a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder, panic, and PTSD. I felt relief. But that didn't guarantee lasting relief. It only meant I could understand what was happening and have a name for my feelings.
So, here we are now in the car. I'm still here typing away and occasionally reaching up to grab the handle that hangs from the ceiling by the window. A handle that is undoubtedly designed for terrified passengers because why else would they have it?
I think what's hard is that my husband cannot understand that I cannot not have terror whip through my body as soon as I see a red light break. So, he experiences a rational frustration towards my irrational somatic trauma response. What I cannot understand is his stubborn insistence on driving when he knows I will feel misery as a passenger and therefore emote misery, and therefore he will feel misery, and therefore I will feel misery, and as the wheels turn, we will turn this round again, and so he says "Not this again!"
If we break up someday, it will likely be because we have not figured out how to do this rotunda differently.
How would it feel if my husband offered an acknowledgment or a gesture to do something different on his part to help me feel comfortable? Maybe that is what we all need—more people to ask us what we need to be relaxed instead of insisting that we get more "right."
Ok, my threshold is met. Son in the back seat farting. Husband going too fast and then exclaiming "You want to drive?" His threshold is met with my white knuckle, knee-jerk, high-pitched. "Slow down, please!"
"Yes, I want to drive."
What I really want is that we both feel safe to drive together. Not safe from big trucks smashing us (well, that too!), but safe from inflicting discomfort on one another. Safe from fantasizing about this being the end because we don't know how to not "do this again!".
You're reading this letter because we made it. No crashes. No tears. Typing this letter helped, and here is my little highway PSA: For any friends reading from the driver's seat, please experiment with asking those you drive how you can help them be comfortable. This could extend to leaders, facilitators, teachers, caregivers, all of us drivers. What might change in shared movement spaces if we encourage comfort over "rightness."
PS when I said your husband can’t understand you don’t trust him to keep you safe, of course I meant that that is not what you mean (it sounds like you do very much trust him as a partner) but rather that your fear is not about him, but something else entirely. Except since he is in the driver’s seat, he believes it is all about his abilities and intentions. No idea, I’m just imagining a possibility
I appreciate your honesty and vulnerability in sharing. It’s possible your husband can’t understand how you do not trust him to keep you safe and he is offended/wounded by your fear- maybe not even at a conscious level. Just a thought. It sounds hard to deal with PTSD because it is rooted in the real events of the past but then grows disproportionately in the present. This is some philosophical/metaphysical rabbit hole about when the real stops being real because it’s no longer in the present. But interesting to think about. Also, your body doesn’t engage in such philosophical questions - it just says “it’s happening again- that same thing. All systems go!” I have been designing and running groups for children who are living in domestic violence shelters. I try to provide them with ways to live in their bodies in the present moment, through movement, art-making, breathing. It’s not my role to work out all the details of their psychological stories with them, but I am there to ask, “where is your heart beat? What color is it?” Glad you made it to your destination, D.