Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story

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About the Author

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For Nico

and for Chris

PROLOGUE

He was on his knees when he did it, but I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing at all. Or rather, I was doing what people are supposed to do, which is cry, but not like that, because I’d
been
crying, for hours already, before he slid off the couch where were we sitting, dropped down in front of me, and proposed. Actually I’d been crying, choking—sobbing, really—on and off for three days straight in our rented room in a winter-abandoned wine village. Or actually, since almost the moment I’d arrived in France. Or, in fact, since I’d been diagnosed seventeen months earlier, when these kinds of episodes became part of my personality, when it became not at all unusual to break down like this. Just that now, something electric bloomed in my gut and shot through my torso, constricting my throat. So I turned my face away from him and cried some more.

Nico did not say “Will you marry me?” That is not what the French say. A few months before, he had seen the English version of
Jerry Maguire
for the first time and learned that Tom Cruise had not asked Renée Zellweger if she
wanted to
marry him as he had in the dubbed French translation—
Veux-tu m’epouser
—but if she
would
. “Do Americans really say that?” he’d demanded. “It’s so …
aggressive
.” So he’d inquired after my desire instead.

“This is as bad as it gets,” he said about my crying. “But I still want to make my life with you.” He said, “Even though you tell me this is what you’re really like.”

I’d been telling him that since shortly after we met, a year and a half ago, while he was peacekeeping and I was reporting a story in Haiti—where I’d experienced something that had shaken me such that I’d never managed to properly put myself back together. Where two days later I’d escaped an isolated room where a stranger stripped down to his undershirt had backed me into a corner and promised me that my father should be worried. I’d told Nico that I had nightmares, flashbacks, that I dissociated—an interruption of normal psychological functioning in which my consciousness was suddenly and completely unable to integrate with reality. But he hadn’t really seen what that looked like yet.

“You tell me this is what you’re really like,” he said. “And I tell you I’m still here.”

Empirically speaking, he could be forgiven for thinking that I was good wife material. I had a job, and a savings account. Straight A’s all through school, master’s degree, summa cum laude. Culinarily and sexually outgoing. Tall. Healthy hair. Relentlessly on time. I’d kept my shit relatively together during a year and a half of brief reunions with him in Dutch hotel rooms, Belgian B&Bs, a borrowed Parisian apartment, rented Riviera or French Caribbean abodes, in cities on the way to one of my assignments or to which he’d been deployed. And the few scenes I’d caused could be mistaken for jet lag or disoriented fatigue or even a penchant for high relationship drama instead of what they really were: symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

But then the other morning, I’d been stepping into our chalet bathtub when I glimpsed myself in the mirror, and paused.

No
, I thought.
Oh, no.

Changes in self-perception and hallucinations—those are some of my other symptoms.

Historically, I was on good terms with mirrors, which generally told me that I was lucky for having been born with the long, athletic shape that happened to be popular at the time. But now, the two big mirrors hanging on the walls to the front and side of the bathtub were saying something else.

All I could see was a boy. A flat, weak, castrated, insubstantial fragment of a boy. The curve of my hips seemed medically wrong. Awful.
I shouldn’t be showing any of this to Nico
, I thought urgently.
I shouldn’t be letting him see this disgusting thing
.

I ducked down into the tub, out of sight of the reflection, and pressed my hands into my face.

You are fucking insane
, I told myself.
You know it’s not true. Look again.

I hesitated, remaining crouched, nude.

Look at it again.

I popped my head and chest up.

No. Not better. I could see breasts this time, but they were misshapen, meaningless lumps.

I went about turning the water on and washing myself, careful to keep the mirrors out of my line of vision, but by the time I emerged from the bathroom, I was nearly hyperventilating, partly because I was the grossest thing I’d ever seen, but mostly because I couldn’t convince myself that it wasn’t true, even though I knew for a fact that it wasn’t. I couldn’t trust myself. I’d lost all credibility with, of all people, myself. And I’d been in rough shape already; the day before, I’d woken up incapable of believing in possibility.
Can you make a coffee cake?
I asked myself on days when I suspected I wasn’t mentally well, and when everything in my being responded,
No
, though everyone knows my blueberry coffee cake is delicious, I knew I wasn’t stable, and shouldn’t listen to anything else I said.

After the bath, I turned shameful and cold. When I walked into our bedroom, Nico told me I was gorgeous, and I yelled that he was a liar. Started screaming when he tried to touch me, pulling clothes on spastically, strangled by tears. Hurled myself around the kitchen, fuming that we’d let a baguette go stale.

I knew that one thing that would help alleviate the grief and fury suddenly charging through my veins was opening up my mouth and throat and screaming and screaming. But I wasn’t going to do that in front of another person. As usual, I considered how effective it would be to do myself harm, open my skin up or shatter a bone, perhaps, get a
real
crisis on my hands, the kind of crisis people I met the world round were uniformly impressed I took in such stride. But even when I was alone, I acknowledged that that was a line I wasn’t supposed to cross—doctor’s orders—and if I did it in Nico’s presence, he might have me committed. Half a liter of Johnnie Walker would have done the trick, too, but I didn’t consider that, because I didn’t have any, and because it was 9
A.M.
, so Nico would be alarmed.

Compared with these, crying was the best option. I let it overtake me and flush out, and after I sobbed for hours, I sat an exhausted Nico down. “I know I’ve been telling you this the whole time we’ve been together,” I said. “But now you can see what I mean. Sometimes I can’t experience emotion, when I go into self-defensive shutdown. And when I can, it often looks like this.” I told him how unpredictable and nonsensical the PTSD triggers could be, how a month ago on a subway platform I’d become engulfed by a rage so strong I couldn’t take it standing still, honestly fearing that if I hadn’t started running up and down the platform my arms would take hold of my left leg and rip it out of my pelvic bone as the first step of my body’s tearing itself to pieces. Just because I missed a train. Even though the next train was coming in seventeen minutes. I told him how when I was in Congo I interviewed people who swore to me that if I didn’t help them they would be murdered, and my translator was shaky and breathless, as any normal person would be, and I … wasn’t. I told Nico that I had days like this all the time, when I could not stop crying, even if I was only watching TV, much less trying to have an intense romantic relationship. Especially once I had already failed the coffee cake test. Then everything flooded in worse, and it wasn’t better until it just was, no matter how hard I tried to make it otherwise.

Now here we were again. Another night, another breakdown, because of the tone of something he’d said. Because of my sudden conviction that I was a monster. Because I’d awakened from a nightmare that morning with all-day pain and fear quaking my limbs.

And he still wanted to marry me.

Could I be forgiven for consenting, when, empirically speaking, I knew the things that I knew? Like how many people with PTSD never recover? How many spouses contract PTSD from their partners, the symptoms of one traumatized person absorbed into another through psychotic osmosis? How long and sob-strewn the path to “normal” sex is for trauma survivors?

Over the past couple of days, I’d already made Nico cry. Two days in a row. And hard, hard enough to shake his sturdy frame one of the times, then hard enough to put him in a bed, temporarily immobilized, during the other. An otherwise healthy twenty-six-year-old soldier, he wasn’t much of a crier. But he’d been blitzed by my sickness. When, finally defeated by my paranoia, panic, and despair, he couldn’t stop his own tears from coming, he looked more than sad. He looked surprised.

“Just think about it,” he said now, repeatedly, after proposing. “Don’t answer me now. I just want you to know that I’m ready.”

Well. I certainly wasn’t. Since my diagnosis, I’d written about PTSD, researched PTSD, was taking more assignments about PTSD while still trying aggressively to treat my own PTSD. There was no way I was permanently attaching Nico to me until I knew more, did more and better work toward recovery, even if he was the best thing about being alive, one of the only good things left that I recognized, the most magnificent miracle of a being. Not until I was sure people who were “severely impaired,” as I’d been deemed in a state-certified psychiatric evaluation, could get better, and how much better I could get, and what impact I would have on my loved ones in the meantime. I hadn’t even got to the point where I thought I had the right to
be
traumatized and impaired—acceptance being one of the earliest getting-better steps.

That night, I woke to moonlit silence and trained my eyes on the strong, smooth back muscles under Nico’s skin. He spent 230 days a year in barracks and was accustomed to being disturbed in the middle of the night, but never by something as pleasant as a naked lady. So he was never mad to be awoken by a kiss to his shoulder or hand on his chest, no matter how tired he was or what he had to do the next day. But this time, for the first time since we’d met, I stayed alone, restless, watching him.