Something Like Beautiful (11 page)

W
hen I began the process of excavation, trying to understand myself in a context that was both who I was and who I was a part of, I had to admit that this is the truth:

Sixty percent of Black women in the United States suffer from depression.

Forty-three percent of Black women in the United States report that they were verbally or emotionally abused during their childhood.

Forty-two percent report that they were sexually or physically abused during childhood.

Every single day in America, this big and wealthy nation of ours, somewhere there is a mother dying during childbirth, somewhere else there are four children who are being killed by abuse, five more who are committing suicide, another eight, still, dead from firearms, thirty-three from preventable accidents, still another seventy-seven who will not know their first birthdays.

The contributing factors for depression among Black women include sexism and racism but also economic insecurity. With more Black households headed by single mothers than not, we are at the top of the list of those at risk for depression and all its many symptoms.

And yet Black women are twice as unwilling as whites to seek mental-health treatment. We fear it. This is what we say. We are actually afraid of it. Indeed, we are more afraid of potentially getting well than we are of living in pain, living a half-life.

But this is also the truth, it's my truth.

I have been in therapy on and off since I was a teenager, most deliberately and intensely during my first years with Rashid when I was struggling to come to terms with the childhood sexual abuse. I don't wear this as a badge, and it is nothing I feel especially proud of. It's just how it was,
that's the truth,
whether or not I liked it, which I never have.

I have tolerated therapy because I had to. It is hard enough to face oneself, and harder still to do so with another person, a stranger listening in. Culturally, it argues against everything Black girls are raised to know and believe in. What we know, what we grow up knowing, is “Do not, do not, put your business in the street.” Lying on someone's couch and telling them how it was in your mother's house or your husband's house or just how it is to live in your own head—well, it simply is not done.

Two years after the storms, I was in New Orleans participating in a workshop about depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly but not exclusively in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. And sister after sister would come up to the microphone and speak of her life. And here I mean her life beyond, before, Hurricane Katrina hit. With each one, with each grown woman, we heard tale after tale of sexual assault, racist humiliations, missing fathers, murdered children, domestic violence.

At the end of the panel, after all questions had been asked, one of the women who worked in the venue approached the
mike. She said she simply could not understand all this talk. She said she had survived Katrina despite enduring the inhumanity we saw night after night on the news in the days that followed August 29, 2005. She said she felt that, yes, yes, she had indeed lost it all, but finally she was coming back and she was coming back because of one thing we had not mentioned in the space: God. She said she didn't know why anyone would need therapy if they had God.

I am no doctor. Nor can I prescribe what can walk someone back into their soul after an experience or series of experiences have worked to wrest it away from them. But I remember thinking that this is the advice I heard growing up—Let go and let God (although my mother's line was, Pray like it all depends on Him, work like it all depends on you). She was not unfamiliar to me though, this sister.

I believe in prayer. I believe that prayer can create belief and belief can inform action. I will never let it go. Prayer and meditation have been my morning ritual for nearly all of my adult life. But the setting aside of other interventions scares me. I want us to pray and then call the doctor, and if there had been time on the panel that day, I would have said that to this sister. I would have said that and then I would have asked her what I finally asked myself: If a car hits you while you're crossing the street, and you go flying five feet in the air and then come crashing down and your legs are broken and your skull is cracked, would it be enough for me to pray, or should I pray while whipping out my cell phone and calling 911?

I would have told her that sometimes the car is not a car but a broken levee and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center
or else the Superdome and a president and government who leave you there to die. You and your babies and your mother and your husband and your brother and your sister and all of your cousins too.

Sometimes the car is not a car, but a grown-ass man whose hands can't keep themselves off a seven-year-old girl or boy. Or a fifteen-or sixteen-year-old girl or boy. Sometimes the car is a best-selling R & B singer.

Sometimes a car is not a car but a neighborhood cop who thinks every Black child they see has a bull's-eye on their back, but that child was your baby, your baby named Timothy Stansbury. Your baby who was committing no crime. Your baby who died young because he lived Black.

Sometimes a car is a husband or a lover or a brand-new acquaintance with a quick hand and a vulgar sense of entitlement.

Sometimes a car is the father who left you or the mother who never noticed you. Or who cursed you or slapped you into a small, hurt, mean little shell of yourself.

But whatever it is, a man, a president, a cop, a father, a mother, whatever or whoever it is, you still wind up hit. You still wind up five feet in the air. And after, the broken bones, the cracked skull, may not be the broken bones and cracked skull the way we know them to be.

Sometimes, the broken bones are the nightmares that come back and back down through the years, no matter how many years.

Sometimes a cracked skull is the same bad relationship you enter—romantically or platonically—again and again. The names change, the faces change, but the relationship is the same and constant and your skull has still been cracked and gone untreated.

And sometimes, sometimes what is broken and what is cracked can only be seen as a rage you cannot release no matter how beautiful the day: the sky is a nearly made-up blue, shining within the push of light; and also there is money in the bank account; and the bills are paid; and you receive a kind phone call from a friend you'd thought lost. But whatever the goodness, it is lost to you, and on any given morning that will become an afternoon and night, there is only anger. And you wear it, your anger, in blinding, brutal colors.

What it is, is the feeling you have every morning that nothing is quite right, although neither can you put your finger on what is wrong. Sometimes this is the case. Sometimes this is the only evidence of the broken bones.

Of course, sometimes the only evidence is Newport Lights. Or alcohol.

 

T
HERE CAME A MORNING
when I was asked to help care for a friend who had come undone. We, his partner and I, had to rush him to the hospital. The danger presented at that moment was physical, but we knew that it was born of injuries we could not see, the mean loops in his brain. We'd seen him on rants and we'd seen him spiraling out, but before now there was no blood and so we just kept moving, kept telling ourselves it would all work out.

But before I could go and do whatever was in my power to try to help my friends, I had to drop my daughter off at her pre-K. Not just drop her off. I had to take time to sit with my Nisa, to sit with her friends.

I realized I needed them as much as they needed me as we
walked through the school door that early June morning. I knew that before I could confront a spirit torn down, I needed to look on these brand-new and emerging spirits, ones that were as yet unknotted, unbroken at their core. I knew that in order for me to withstand bearing witness to my friend, to the ever-widening space of his anguish and the anguish his behaviors imposed on those closest to him, I needed to be witness to who we all once were, who we all might be again: honest beings, and all the way in our humanity, all the way intact.

At Nisa's pre-K just then, when the beauty of the day belied the ugliness of the reality I knew was happening in the life of my friends not two miles away, I sat on the carpet with a small grouping of children who were three to five years old. They were children I had joyously been watching for two or three years as they grew and changed.

They were children who at different moments I had listened to as they expounded on the details of their life. But mostly when I was with them, what they wanted was for me, Mama asha, to read them a story, entertain them, make funny faces, use silly voices.

They did not ask for that though on that late spring morning. On that morning, for some reason, it was not books they wanted me to read to them, nor was it the retelling of a story they had pulled out of their dreaming and asserted as fact. It was wounds that they were speaking of and five-year-old Ciara was the one who set it off.

“Look at my boo-boo, Nisa-Mommy,” she exclaimed, and then directed me to a tiny, barely visible dot on her leg.

“There!” she yelled, triumphantly, and together we discussed it. We ooohed and we aaahhed, me and the other children. I
furrowed my brow, expressed sympathy, but mostly I noted her bravery, her crazy, hard-core survival skills.

And that's when the rest of them joined in: a months'-old scab on an elbow from one, a tiny scratch on a knee from another. I showed them my foot, the one that had been shattered. I showed them the scars from the surgery. They were fascinated by all the marks and together we continued to ooohh and aaahh. Then they each shared the gory details of their playground war stories, each one leaving us all wide-eyed and rapt, our mouths agape.

By the time my Nisa—who refused, of course, to let anyone upstage her in front of her own mother—was finished telling the story of her wounds, they had taken on such huge, shocking, and really tragic proportions, I thought it was a wonder, a miracle from the Universe that she wasn't laid up somewhere in full traction. With a patch over her eye.

Still, in all of our makeshift show-and-tell, it occurs to me that there is comfort in wounds that can be seen, these tangible, irrefutable markers, these hurts, no matter how small, that can be pointed out, proven. Man, there is nothing like a tangible piece of evidence!

Evidence of being wounded—and I mean evidence that's the kind we can see, the kind that is familiar to us—is so much better than the more shadowy sort, the sort you have to squint at and get real close to see. What do we do with evidence that insists on hiding, that nests inside of some dark part of the brain that even the doctors, with all of their fancy instruments, theories, and drugs, cannot find? That's the bad kind of evidence, the kind you can dismiss. Yet for most of us who have ever been blown to the border, looked over the very edge of it, and then
wondered—Could I go?—it is what we are left with.

My uncle, my mother's only brother, who was one of two children on a ward who survived a 1930s spinal meningitis outbreak, still lost much of his hearing. What I learned from my mom, what she learned watching him maneuver the world of the deaf, is that of all physical challenges, people who have lost their hearing get the least sympathy of all. We can see someone who is living with blindness or perhaps the inability to walk. But deafness does not jump out at us. In my uncle's case, he quit a better-paying, higher-ranking job that he had with an airline to be a janitor, because there, behind the broom, no one made fun of him, which is what had happened in his previous position. There is something about the wounds we can see. I am telling you this is true.

And on that morning, the children and I gleaned sympathetic eyes—however briefly—for the tragedy of our scars. And it helped, somehow. I saw it in the children's eyes and I felt it inside my own heart, the importance of this moment when our wounds were there, public and displayed. Our wounds, visible, and so our wounds, undeniable. Our wounds, acknowledged.

Months and months later when I returned to therapy, it was that morning and those children and my friends and our scars and all that I took from that experience that I was thinking about. And I said it to my doctor almost just like this:

I want my wounds acknowledged. I want them healed.

And I want myself back.

That's what we all have to say, at some point what we have to demand.

Give me back.

Give me back.

T
his is what it came down to. I had to leave much of what I'd known, much of what had been my life, behind. The entertainment reporting, the fancy hotels, the semi-high-profile position, the parties, the people who said they loved me but really did not, the people who didn't say that they loved me and really, really didn't, I left them all behind. And I took a fellowship at Columbia University, and for a year I lived a very quiet life.

I went back to the gym and I wore only workout clothes for a year and sort of got back into shape and I went to no parties and hung out with very few people and spent nights reading to my daughter instead of drinking on the couch, and once during that time I saw a baby be born, and also, then, I wrote. I wrote and published another book of poems a year after I'd lurched toward this self-transformation, all the contents of which were about violence against women. Not that I was aware of this.

I realized it only after a reader pointed it out, and because I had not recognized it myself, the content of my own work, I could no longer ignore how removed I had been from the details of my own life, which is probably what made me do it, made me
take the big step. I told a friend in a voice well above a whisper, I really need help.

I told her about the three years in the bottle and the violent relationship and the depression and the guilt and losing Rashid and losing my marriage and I told about the mean boss. I told everything and I told it without seeing myself as a woman who was violating some Black-girl rule.

I told it without the sense that I was, as someone once said to me, whining about “my tortured life” or embracing a “victimization motif.” I told it without looking to self-flagellate, and, most important, I told it because I believe in bearing witness to our own lives and when I had not done that myself, I disappeared.

I did not want to be a disappeared person. And I told because Gloria Morrow, a psychologist who practices in Pomona, California, and whose patient roster is ninety percent Black women, said simply, “There's nothing worse than suffering in silence.”

Morrow talks about the imposition of sexism and racism in our lives, how it plays out in our homes and in the workplace, and how both of these victimized,
yes, victimized
, us and finally we had to be able to say it. We had to say it even at the risk of being told to shut up, or stop complaining. We had to say it because not saying it, not facing it, was a direct route to anxiety and depression and all the ways each of these impacts our total well-being.

Given my choices, the self-defeating choices I made while grinning and meeting deadlines and pretending everything was fine when nothing was fine, I knew that she was right. So I told.

And then I went back to therapy.

 

M
Y DOCTOR WAS THE
real thing, a psychiatrist who did not just hand me some pills and send me on my way but was one who talked. A tall, imposing genius of a woman originally from Detroit, she was plain-spoken, and blunt, and she came to me at the recommendation of a dear friend. It's funny how life works, why I believe all time exists all at once. As it turned out, my doctor is also the first psychiatrist I ever saw, back when I was a sixteen-year-old student struggling at Howard University.

I can't remember how much time—one session, two—lapsed between my recounting of the last few years, the recounting of a lifetime, and her half looking at me, half pulling down one of her books to confirm what it seemed she already knew. She peered at me over her glasses, and directly, “Ms. bandele,” she said, voice calm and sort of midwestern flat, “you have post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Post-traumatic stress disorder? The war disease? The Vietnam legacy?

Yes, she said, but it doesn't affect only soldiers emerging from combat. It can impact anyone, she explained, who has lived through a traumatic and life-altering experience, one in which grave harm occurred or was threatened. Nearly eight million Americans suffer with it, albeit in varying degrees. And while symptoms of PTSD often show up within three months of an incident, often it can take years. It affects women more often than men and is characterized by a person who startles easily (check) or who abuses substances (check, check), emotionally distances themselves from people to whom they used to feel close (oh, God, Rashid, check, check, check).

For some, the condition is chronic. I was lucky. I was treat
able. I had access to treatment. For many of us, bent under the weight of either depression or its more intense relative, PTSD, there is nothing, no one to explain to us what we are dealing with, and explain that it may be the result of one thing or perhaps the result of many things. It may not be the childhood sexual assault, in other words, that sends you reeling headlong into the netherworlds of PTSD or depression. But that experience, that violence, retriggered by, say, a boyfriend who breaks you up, hospitalizes you two decades on, well, that can do it.

For me, for many, it was everything added up together. And none of it ever fully attended to. It is no different than if you have a broken leg and the bones don't get set quite right and afterward you keep falling, you keep reinjuring that leg. Each time you fall, the breaks, the hurts you endure, may not all be of the same severity, but taken as a whole, the result, the cumulative result, is devastating.

Still it was a big name, a big diagnosis. It sounded bigger than me, more important. I said this to her, that people who got this had lived through really horrible events. I talked about the men and women in Iraq, our soldiers, and also the Iraqi citizens trying to make a life in the middle of a war zone. “That's who's been through something for real, for real.”

“Like survivors of abuse, Ms. bandele,” she said, again in that matter-of-fact voice I came to rely on in the time we worked together. And just like that, there they were: my wounds, without recrimination, without minimizing, without excuse, simply acknowledged.

I would argue that that was when we really began to work.

We worked in ways I had never worked before with a doctor.
We worked until I was well enough to manage my own care. We worked for months that long winter into spring. We sat in my doctor's home office until we developed a clear plan about what to do going forward. We worked until I had no more money to afford the sessions and then she allowed me to barter with her—I did some editing for her—so that the work could continue.

We talked about why I needed to exercise and why I needed to stay engaged with my routine even on the days I most wanted to just sleep. We talked about strategies to help me sleep at night without any substances. Who knew that getting into bed with Nisa and reading stories with her at night was more relaxing than red wine? Who knew what I needed had been there beside me?

We talked about friends in my life whom I found hurtful. We talked about the right to release the people whose words and actions diminished me rather than strengthened me. She reminded me that I had no obligation to remain close to them. We talked about the right to say, No, a word that I, like so many women, struggle with.

“I feel bad if I let someone down,” I said. “But you're letting yourself down,” she reminded me. “Don't you count?”

She said guilt, as my mother has often said, is a useless emotion. We talked of shame, another corner of my depression, another part of myself that kept me from taking care of myself. Why take care of something you're ashamed of, even if that thing is the woman in the mirror? Shame is not positioned to help or heal anyone, though I know how we lean toward it, run toward it, wield it like a knife.

In the days before prison, long ago, on another continent, shame was the center point of punishment. An entire village
might turn its back—physically—on an offender (or perceived offender). It was, in some places, the worst punishment one could receive. Of course too, we know it here, in the American system of jurisprudence: from the seventeenth-century stockades to the twenty-first-century perp walks, shame is still very much a part of who we are.

And in some ways it is effective. It can elicit an immediate response. The shamed one offers an ocean of tears, a head hung low, followed by a deeply passionate and public apology. But it does little to transform much in any lasting way. If it did, of course, we would not see the same people making the same mistakes over and over. Shame may stop a particular behavior in a given moment but it does not move a soul, and when you want to shift something in a person so that it doesn't shift right back, there is only one tool to use and that tool is love.

It is the only proven method, the one that lasts. Cruelty and fear and shame work only until those who have been cowed get their own weapons. I was no different. Feeling ashamed of my behavior, my self-berating, the berating by some of the people I pulled around me, did little to make me a stronger, clearer—sober—person.

And now I look realistically at the people of this nation, realistically at myself, and know addiction and self-abuse and self-destructive behaviors are as American as apple pie. We may excoriate some and not others, but all that acting out begins at the same source, in the same river of pain, of disconnection.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse reported in 2004 that some twenty percent of our population—48 million people—
have used prescription drugs for nonmedical reasons in their lifetime. And these are
licit
drugs! Not coke or weed or meth or dope but the stuff that is in our parents' medicine cabinets. But for just the prescription stuff alone, 48 million! What, then, are the numbers when we consider all those who struggle with health and other issues, because from McDonald's to meth, from Vicodin to Valium, from weed to wine, from caffeine to cocaine, from shopping to sex, there's something out there, some vice, we cannot leave alone or moderate?

Working with my doctor helped me to finally begin to see myself without anger or recrimination and as just one thing: fully human.

“That's a good place to start,” my doctor said flatly, and then pushed me further. We talked more about Rashid and more about Nisa. She met Nisa. She led me to understand that feeling guilty about the breakup or not living up to some fantasy idea of the perfect mother was not going to change past actions. “You can feel guilty all you want, but are you going to get back together with Rashid?” she asked. “I can't see it,” I confessed, “not with the deportation order.” Admitting that brought me to a greater truth, a good one, if not an easy one.

I couldn't see being with anyone right then. I thought about all the years I'd spent, from fourteen to thirty-seven, involved, engaged, or married. “I feel good about being single, about getting to finally know myself as my own woman, not a woman inexorably bound to a man. I want to know Nisa better too,” I said, and then set about the business of making that happen.

Because when I looked at all of it, when I looked back through
all of it, I had no choice but this one, this one that required my real sweat and my real, real labor: not only the work of dealing with my own fears and demons, but the work of taking those observations and using them to change long-standing patterns of behavior.

In my own life, the war on terror has not been about distant shores or cultures, not about planes and buildings or suicide bombers. The war on terror was a battleground inside myself that I have fought on and fought on so that I could stand here now—not broken all the way, not broken so much that I can't be pieced back together, not broken to the extent that I would be rendered an ineffective and useless mother to my Nisa, my child, my bright light in the big city. I will never be that broken. I will never come even close to it again.