At the end of one of the corridors of my mind, there’s a locked door, the key for which I’ve kept but deliberately forgotten where. Behind the door, I’ve stashed the moments of my life that are too dreadful to see the light of day, a macabre jumble of snapshots from my Life Before. Before, when I was a victim, confused and heartbroken, slowly retreating from life on the sinking ship that is domestic violence. There’s nothing about me that isn’t defined by my choice to survive, my choice to fall down and pick myself back up as many times as it takes, despite the fact that I refuse to open that door.

Certain people are uncomfortable with my approach. There’s a label for it: repression. I don’t care. I embrace my other label: survivor. Survival implies whatever it takes to go on. My God, that’s the truth.

Yesterday, I had that door blown wide open.

It started, fittingly, with the slamming of a real door. The neighbour’s door, slammed loud enough to shake our apartment, to suck the life out of the room. I knew right away what was in the air, recognized it, that hungry rage looking for a place to land. We heard yelling and went out into the hallway to figure out for sure where it was coming from. It became obvious within seconds that we needed to phone 911, and after making the phone call we commenced an impossibly long and frantic wait for the police. (It took close to 10 minutes—ample time for things to escalate out of control.)

We stood in the hallway, helpless, listening to the crescendo of rage, the litany of insults and accusations. While Kieran provided a running commentary to the 911 operator, I restlessly paced between Kieran and the neighbour’s door, occasionally feeding Kieran any information that might speed the arrival of the police (“He’s threatening to kill her! Tell her he’s threatening to kill her!”).

And then the sickening, unmistakable sounds of a beating.

I couldn’t bear it; I went and pounded on their door. I wanted at least to interrupt him, to let him know that we were listening to what was happening and we weren’t going to stand for it, and at most, I was ready to fly in with both guns blazing and yank him off of her myself. Of course, no one answered my knock and I was left to stare helplessly at someone else’s closed door.

At the moment I ran back into our own apartment to buzz in the police, our neighbour’s girlfriend opened the door and fled into the hallway in her pyjamas and without her shoes. She called the elevator twice and didn’t get on. Kieran went over to her and she told him she wanted to leave but couldn’t go anywhere without clothes or shoes but she was too scared to go back into her apartment. Kieran told her the police were on their way and that he’d go downstairs and wait for them with her in the lobby. They got in the elevator and she started to cry.

In the end, we spent most of our Valentine’s Day with a police officer in our living room. As we prepared our written statements, the officer sat on our bar stool, awkwardly holding his body so that his gun wouldn’t butt up against the bar, and gingerly trying to avoid our cats because he’s allergic. He smiled, commented on the view, tried to reinforce normalcy. I wanted to be a good witness, to make things right by remembering as much as I could, but it was all a mash-up of desperate moments and interminable waiting. The officer read over my statement and handed it back to me, telling me I should explain what I meant when I said I’d heard “punching sounds,” said that I should include anything I’d heard the girlfriend say or do after I heard the punching sounds.

Until that moment, my heart had resisted descending into that tender spot in my soul where it’s dark and sad, but I had no energy left to hold it back anymore.

Punching sounds, I clarified, are the sound that’s made when someone pounds their fist against something. Sometimes it sounded like he was hitting something hard, like a wall, and sometimes the punching sounds were more muffled and it sounded like he was hitting something softer, like a body. After I heard the punching sounds, I went on, I heard his girlfriend crying “Stop it!” over and over.

The description of “punching sounds”, I think, is pretty much synonymous with heartbreak.

Our neighbour was arrested and taken away. The last we saw her, his girlfriend was in the lobby with a team of officers. I have no idea what either of their fates will be.

***

I do, however, know two things for sure.

One, domestic violence relies on silence. It feeds on it. To participate in the conspiracy of silence, to turn a blind eye, puts you on the same team as the abuser, makes you complicit in the abuse. The harassment and assault involved in an abusive relationship are considered to be clear-cut cases of criminal behaviour in other contexts. In the context of a relationship or a family, these crimes are ignored. People look away, disgusted by the victim’s choices. Certainly, the victim has made a poor choice, but who among us hasn’t made poor choices, whether in a relationship or otherwise? Harassing and physically assaulting someone is a crime; having low self-esteem is not.

Secondly, it just takes one. One phone call, one act of kindness, one open display of respect extended at the right moment in time can lift a victim of violence up out of her life.

For those two reasons, if my neighbour’s girlfriend decides to return, if she isn’t ready to leave the cycle with which she’s most familiar, I’m prepared to give up as many Valentine’s Days as it takes.

***

I had a bad sleep. Nightmares. Today, I have a migraine that’s nothing short of hallucinogenic. Today, I can’t decide if my choice to lock away those memories and close that door has made me an unwitting participant in the conspiracy of silence. Have I put self-preservation ahead of my beliefs? I really just don’t know.

I do know for sure a third thing: survivors of domestic violence are tattooed with heartbreak, doomed to carry in their hearts a sadness that aches unbidden, old injuries of the soul that groan when the air changes.

To that end, I’ve decided to post something I wrote a few years ago (here) because it speaks to that lasting sadness. And because it represents a rare moment when I stepped outside of my own silence.

This is another long one. Perhaps you might want to get yourself some popcorn or something first.

Resolution 2. I will not succumb to pressure—neither external nor internal, nor implied, explicit, or the product of my own paranoid imaginings—to Get a Job and Be Successful.

I suspect there will be times when this New Year’s resolution will come into conflict with New Year’s Resolution 1. Nevertheless, I’ve decided to forge ahead with both.

I have found that being honest about not wanting to work is a great way to stop a conversation. It turns out that telling people you’ve decided to take a break from the whole big career…thing is tantamount to announcing you have leprosy. People will just kind of blink at you, speechless, while trying to find a way to take an imperceptible step away from you. Because when you say, “I’ve decided the best thing for me is to not work for a while,” what people hear is “I’ve been sizing you up for the last ten minutes, trying to gauge the size of your savings account while simultaneously performing a discreet assessment of how gullible you are.”

The fact that, previous to this decision, I was employed for 17 years without break seems to have no bearing on the perception that, obviously, I am a BIG LAZY MOOCH. Entitled! Directionless! I’m not especially defensive about any of this, as I’m quite secure in the knowledge that I’m not any of those things. I do tend to bristle at it, regardless, which I suppose is natural. Although, the people who imply such things are generally people I don’t care for anyway and, if I wasn’t supplying them with such easy fodder, they would be busy finding other aspects of my character to snip away at. On the whole, I think, most people are just a little taken aback because it’s an unusual decision from which a number of taboo questions regarding my finances arise*.

All the same, I have to say that, despite whatever mild social discomfort arises from this decision, I’m incredibly proud of myself for making it. It’s the most adult—the most honest—thing I’ve ever done.

Here’s a sort of Cliff’s Notes, PG 13 version of the story: Last year, while I was in the thick of my dreadful job, I started to get sick. Not, like, cold and flu sick (although I was, at that point, rundown enough to be chronically ill in that sense). In fact, I don’t think “sick” is quite the right way to put it. It’s more like…really weird things started happening to my body. At dinner one night with my family, apropos of nothing, my vision became obscured by weird flashing lights and bright colours; for about half an hour I could barely see. Then, as quickly as it came, it went away. I get migraines, but I’d never had an aura before. In fact, I’ve yet to have an aura that produces an actual migraine, so neither I nor my health care providers were entirely confident that it was an aura.

Within a day, the aura phenomenon began to repeat itself, only with the unpleasant addition of random, wild, stabbing pains in my eye that eventually gave birth to a permanent blind spot. Within a week, my ear and the area behind the affected eye filled with fluid, causing a persistent dull throb behind my eye and sometimes causing my equilibrium to skitter out of whack. In fact, I could track the throbbing in the blind spot, which would swell in tandem with my heartbeat. By the by, if you’re an editor and you’re curious about a highly effective method of driving yourself to distraction, I’m here to tell you that a pulsing, relentless blind spot that tracks your vision across a page will do the trick.

None of this went over very well with my doctor. There are a number of things that can cause sudden, unilateral visual disturbances and almost all of them are Bad. (I’m telling you peeps, if something weird happens to the vision in one of your eyes, get thee to a doctor.) When the doctor’s office personally calls you a cab to whisk you off to the hospital for a series of expedited tests that simply can’t wait another hour, you don’t know whether to be grateful for the level of care you’re receiving or deeply disturbed by it.

Among my least favourite of the possible diagnoses was brain tumour. (See? Bad.) I don’t suppose my distaste for this possibility needs a whole lot of elaboration. At one point, during a battery of questions regarding the exact nature of my migraines and the auras (“Do your headaches get worse if you bend over?” “Yes, much”), my doctor looked up sharply and then quickly reassembled her face into passive neutrality when she saw that I saw her reaction. A tiny quiet moment passed between us. “You think it might be a brain tumour, don’t you?” I said bluntly. “I’m going to send you for a CT scan so that we can rule out the possibility of a tumour,” she replied, gathering her professionalism around her.

Ouch.

My appointment for the CT scan happened so quickly that I barely had time to work myself into a panic, except to note that, once again, I was being ushered in for tests with disconcerting efficiency and haste. Of course, we all know by now that I do not have a brain tumour, so there’s not a lot to the whole CT scan story. (Which..Sweet baby Jesus in the goddamn manger, it is not a tumour. I mean, really, anything but a tumour, right?) This was confirmed again by the neurologist to whom I was referred and by the follow-up MRI to which he sent me. (It turns out they’re quite thorough when dealing with the spectre of a brain tumour.) I won’t bore you with the entire litany of specialists I saw and tests I endured, although this anecdote is amusing. As are these pictures. (Stoopid, unnecessary eye patch!) I will, however, take the time to relay that getting tested for a brain tumour sucks. Like I said, I somehow managed to muster a certain amount of grace in the face of these tests, although I think denial played a large role in the whole thing. All the same, I managed not to panic until I was actually IN the test. That is to say that not until I was inserted into the giant roaring machine that looks and feels very much like the inside of a coffin did the rats get loose in my mind. The MRI is long and noisy and coffin-like and there it was. Brain tumour. Death.

I didn’t want to be sick and I didn’t want to die. Not just because I didn’t want to leave behind my husband or my family and friends, although that certainly weighed most heavily. But I was also so miserable in my life, so dissatisfied and hurt, that I would have felt cheated. Petulant, perhaps, but true. To that point in my adult life, I had hungered for something more, and the harder I’d tried, the longer I’d extended my reach, the harder I’d fallen short.

But I wasn’t dying. The dark moment passed and faded, and although I knew it was important, I didn’t know what to do with it or about it.

In the end, it took the better part of eight months for a rotating cast of doctors to figure out what was/is wrong with me. Less than two weeks before we were scheduled to leave on our bike trip, I was peered at and poked and prodded by a team of ophthalmologists, one of whom, upon watching me all clenched and hunched in the chair began to ask me questions about stress and muscle tension. He reached out and gently but firmly squeezed a hot spot in the shoulder on the same side as my affected eye. I jumped as though he had electrocuted me, bonking my head on some of the equipment with a musical clang. “So that’s sensitive then?” he asked unnecessarily.

If they gave me the medical term for my problem, I’ve forgotten it. It doesn’t matter. The non-medical term for it is stress. Plain and simple. I’d become so tense that the muscles in my shoulder were clamping down on nerves that affect my vision. I was literally and metaphorically blinded by stress.

The whole debacle just goes to show that if you ignore the more casual symptoms of stress, the back pain, the headaches, the insomnia, the chronic illnesses, and, hell, even the crying jags to which you occasionally succumb, if you ignore all that and insist to yourself that you keep going, your body will totally make something up. Your body knows when you’ve had enough and it’ll let you know; if you ignore your own squeaky wheels, they squeak louder and louder until they get some grease.

I have to say that that bloody awful job was the best thing to happen to me. By the time I took that job, I had been functioning at an ever intensifying level of burnout for a decade. The job was terrible and extremely stressful in almost every way, and it provided a series of last-straw events that went beyond my threadbare coping skills. I went down and I went down hard. Physically and emotionally, I just fucking ate it. I maintain a heartfelt belief that I came as close as you can possibly get to having a nervous breakdown without actually needing medical intervention**. But for the fact that I was going blind, of course. Who knows how long I would have gone on half-living if it hadn’t become painfully obvious that I couldn’t pull it off any longer.

By the time I left that job and had biked my broke-down body 1000 kilometres across the Rocky Mountains I realized that I could, obviously, function quite well regardless of how intense my burnout was. We all can. Hell, we all do, at some point.

By the time I had biked the remaining 6000 kilometres and found myself gazing out over the Atlantic Ocean, I’d had, as you can imagine, a lot of time alone with my thoughts. Somewhere along the way, day after happy day of sunshine and hearty eating, night after night of easy, undisturbed sleep, the burnout began to peel away from me. I could feel it leaving my body, the stress. Some days it just seemed like the heaviness of the stress my body had been hoarding in its muscle memory would take flight like a flock of birds startled from their roost and I would suddenly feel lighter. It did not take long for me to realize that I’m much better off without stress roosting in my bones or gnawing at my gut. It did, however, take me a long time inside my head to accept that I was prepared to take the necessary steps to preserve my newly found well-being.

I never expected to take off more time from work than the three months that we had planned for the bike trip. But each day that passes, I realize I feel that much better than I did the day before. I can never get over how physically different I feel. And not just because my eye and shoulder have been slowly healing all this time. But, like I said, without the sick weight of anxiety, I feel lighter. I’m sleeping. I have a healthy appetite. I can’t believe it, but I had literally forgotten what normal felt like and, quite frankly, I’m revelling in the opportunity to enjoy it.

But, best of all, better than how physically well I’m starting to feel, each day that passes, I realize how blessed I feel, how blessed I am. I’m no longer that broken, myopic girl who felt cheated by life. I’ve been given a chance to grow into someone else (me).

I really don’t know how long my healing will take, but I feel pretty sure that, just as my body let me know that it was time to throw in the towel, it will let me know when it’s time to suit up and get back in the game. In the meantime, I’m gonna polish off this long, tall drink of happy.

———————–

*I’m temping. Part time. This prevents me from having to mooch off of the system or anyone around me. You can get that harried, suspicious look out of your eye. Anyone looking for an extremely flexible, easy, yet relatively well-paid source of income (as in more money than you probably think, but, fairly enough, less money than most salaried career jobs) should consider temping. It’s entirely up to you whether you take a gig. And someone else finds the gigs for you, so all you have to do is answer the phone and decide if you feel like working. It’s absolutely ideal for someone suffering from burnout and/or looking to kick start a career as a freelance writer. Not that we here in the blogosphere know anyone like that.

**What I find odd is the vague sense that, socially speaking, it seems that going on medication to deal with the fact that you can’t deal with your life is deemed more acceptable than changing your life (i.e., taking a break) as necessary. To me, it seemed absurd to forge ahead on a path where anti-anxiety medication and anti-depressants were inevitable when I could take steps to create a life in which I wasn’t anxious and unhappy. Also absurd is the sense that it seems it would have been more forgivable to choose not to work if I’d actually had a nervous breakdown first, instead of just coming close and realizing that this break is what’s needed. To that I say: What-EVER, crazy, workaholic, myopic, North American society! If you wanna lumber ahead, drinking the rat-race Kool-Aid and gagging on its bat-guano aftertaste, that’s your business. Me? I’m out. Your Kool-Aid gives me the shits.

Actual happy is the best drug you can find. You do have to be careful, though, because it’s highly addictive.

NB: I’m not trying to be all Tom Cruise about this. I firmly believe that medication is an absolute saviour for some people and encourage anyone who is struggling emotionally to at least consider it. But I also firmly believe that suffering from burnout is a far cry from having a chemical imbalance.

Finally: The sweet Jack Johnson song from which I got the title of this post.

A few years ago, I was a freelance technical writer. Which meant I was one of those mythical creatures who worked from home. Although technical writing is, quite simply, not for me, working from home was at once the best and worst thing to happen to me.

It was the worst thing to happen to me because I’d never worked from home before, so I didn’t yet know that unless I make a conscious effort to meet my daily physical and emotional needs, I’ll inevitably find myself slouched on the couch, dissatisfied and lonely, suffering from a case of self-inflicted immobility and watching with mild, disaffected horror as cat hair sifts through the air to settle in layers on my wilting pyjamas. I had no idea that inertia isn’t just something I learned about in Physics 10, but that it is, in fact, a cult in which my brain is a zealous and devout member. Since I began each day at rest, my brain went to fanatical lengths to convince me to stay at rest and would resist my (its?) attempts to change my velocity. Having never been in charge of my innate forces before, I’d always thought that my brain knew my needs best because that’s, you know, kind of its whole purpose. I had no idea my brain would argue with itself if it told me I was hungry and I would feel a resulting urge to move from the couch to the kitchen, only to have my brain turn around and deny that urge in a shrill, hysterical voice because that would involve STANDING and using my limbs to bear my own weight and then using my digits to chop things and press buttons and that’s TOO MUCH VELOCITY AND CHANGE and it’s really probably best to just wait this whole thing out until another being comes along and forces us/me into motion because you CAN’T ARGUE WITH INERTIA. It’s one of the LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE.

Because I am not, in fact, physically or mentally handicapped, I no longer wanted to live in a world where I considered it a triumph to brush my teeth. Because hey, brushing your teeth is something. And brushing my teeth meant I didn’t technically do nothing for yet another entire day*. I wanted to return to a world where I could focus on a bigger picture, where success was measured in terms of being able to achieve things beyond the range of activities I’d mastered as a toddler. So I found work in an office and promptly realized that working from home was the best thing that had ever happened to me.

It was the best thing to happen to me because…for a million reasons because. First and foremost, because I got enough sleep. Every. Day. I really can’t emphasize this enough. I have a tricky biorhythm that simply doesn’t conform to the 9–5 world and when I am forced to live in the 9–5 world, I am hopelessly and chronically fatigued, prone to migraines and illness, and generally miserable. I also got to be chronically fatigued and miserable in a toxic workplace. That was fun. When you work from home? You have complete control over with whom you come into contact, which can have a resounding positive effect on your mental health.

And, oh…I could go on and on. So I will just for a minute. When you work from home, you don’t have to invest any energy into maintaining the ridiculous facades we’re required to maintain in an office environment. If there’s no work to do, you can just leave; you don’t have to find inane busy-work projects to fill your time until you can be released according to the arbitrary schedule. If you work better listening to really loud music, you can do that. If you can perform perfectly well with the TV on, you can do that too. You can swear and snack and wear sweats instead of pantyhose and talk to your friends when you’re feeling uninspired or you can get up and leave for two hours if you’re too frustrated to continue. It doesn’t matter how you do it, just as long as you do it. In other words, you’re freed up to do whatever you need to do to improve your own well-being and productivity. (The Man has yet to figure that whole well-being to productivity ratio.)

And, fool that I was, I flushed the whole thing down the toilet.

When I was working from home, I allowed my life to suffer. I was in control of every aspect of my day and my happiness; I just didn’t realize it. When I worked in an office, my life suffered and there was little I could do to control it. I tried—hard—and it didn’t work. (Ergo, sabbatical.) I have since learned that my brain’s fervour for inertia is as easily dismissed as the rantings of any religious wing nut. I can do things, lots of things, amazing things, like bike across Canada, when I defy my brain. In fact, the best things happen when I defy my brain.

Why am I telling you this? Because I want a job working from home. I’m writing it down, putting it Out There, making it official. I heard that this works. (Besides, isn’t that what that book Oprah went nutty for says to do?) So, Universe? I want a job working from home. And this time I’m gonna rock it.

———————————————–
* It should be noted that I never, ever, missed a deadline during this time. I did do work, and did it well, despite the fact that what I mostly remember from those days is all the sitting. The latent over-achiever in me never allowed my work to suffer, just my life. BECAUSE I AM A FOOL.