Holiday Hell: Days 10-11

If We Make It Through December

This story starts here: BLAM - My Dance with a Drunk Driver

Fade to black-and-white

✨ Holiday Hell - Day 10 ✨
December 30, 2000
28 years old

…nobody was going to be available until after flippin' New Years, so all I could do was hold onto the ledge by my claws. Good thing I needed a lot of sleep in those days. I was only capable of staying awake for two hours at the most, so that helped speed through those days I have almost no memory of.

I was so messed up and exhausted I wrote three-sentence letters and called it good.

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✨ Holiday Hell - Day 11 ✨
December 31, 2000

Galen was scheduled to play at a big New Year’s Eve party with one of his bands. Since I was incapable of performing for my own ball-drop bash, it was decided that I would go with him and sit at the table reserved for the Band Babes, now that I had become one.

As a belly dancer, I hadn’t had a New Year’s Eve off since 1992, when I went to the Duluth Entertainment and Convention Center in a mask and my outrageous junior year prom dress with my fiancé from college. I’d ushered in 1993 by auditioning at my first Greek restaurant, and had been the New Year’s shimmy-rific party girl every year since.

New Year’s after-party, January 1, 2000

It was strange to be a simple partygoer on the last night of the year, rather than an entertainer, but after everything I’d endured since Winter Solstice, I was determined to enjoy the heck out of it.

I took a shower. I slapped on a little makeup. I corralled my hair into the world’s most simple up-do: an off-center half-ponytail with a sparkly black scrunchy. After wrangling myself into bubble-bedecked, black lace thigh-highs and a garter belt, I slithered into my never-worn lime green evening gown. It was floor-length with spaghetti straps and the sheerest film of black netting over the top. Gigantic and midsize and tiny bubbles had been sewn onto the netting with black beads, creating a dramatic sheathe of underwater sherbet for my (un-bruised, un-lacerated, un-scarred) pale skin and my (covertly battered) curves.

I looked like half-a-million bucks.

I felt like twinkle lights draped over a totaled car.

By the time Galen arrived to pick me up, getting dolled up had completely wiped me out.¹ The vice of pain around my skull was cinched so tight I thought my eyeballs would pop out. Thankfully, I had those spears through the back of my occipital bones to keep them skewered inside my sockets. I could barely hear my parents’ voices welcoming him into my apartment over the tinnitus. I could barely register his tuxedo through the slits of my heavy eyelids.

He definitely looked like a million bucks, my gorgeous new boyfriend with his waist-length hair and his long elfin limbs and those entrancing, dark eyes.

All I wanted was to collapse in his arms, curl up, and play dead until morning.

Instead, I had a Show Face to paint on. Because that’s what we do for the holidays. That’s what we do as Minnesota Nice people who would never dream of ruining an important event over something so trivial as our pain. That’s what we do as low-maintenance and therefore desirable women. And that’s what we do as professional stage performers. The show must always go on, you see, and it must be accomplished with a carefree smile—something I’d been a pro at for years.

I didn’t know better yet. I didn’t understand what my body and especially my brain were screaming at me:

STOP.
NOW.
GO BACK TO BED.
DON’T DO THIS.

I did it. I pretended that my spine and neck weren’t on fire when I hunched over on my parents’ guest futon bed to strap on my sexy black heels. I pretended that my back wasn’t spasming when I stood up on said heels. I pretended that the knife in the base of my spine wasn’t stabbing me with every step I took.

I didn’t have to pretend swooning gratitude when I let my tall drink o’ gallante hold my coat for me like the gentleman he is.

And that was as far as I got.

I honestly don’t know how it happened. Somebody probably said…

Something?

Words.

In truth, somebody probably breathed in my general proximity. It wouldn’t have taken much more, because my body knew what I was about to put us through. I had no clue. In that second of trying to force my feet onto the doormat and out into the winter night, something in my battered brains just…SNAPPED. I lost my ever-lovin’ shit right there in the front hallway, three steps shy of the door on the way to Galen’s and my second glitter-fabulo-shindig—our first as a couple.

The official term for it is “meltdown” and, I assure you, this is no temper tantrum. This is no simple asshole conducting themselves like a spoiled four-year-old. This is no fit of anger that can be curbed with a little “woo-sahhh” and some bootstrapped adulting, yo.

Meltdown is a complete and utter system failure as one’s neurological reactor goes Chernobyl. It stems from something called “sensory overload.” I had already been born with a hypersensitive nervous system (something else I did not know back then), so to have all those sensitivities exacerbated by a new brain injury made me a walking disaster teetering on high heels.²

Knowing these facts doesn’t make it anymore fun or easy to deal with—not for the person experiencing it and certainly not for anybody in the blast radius.

I remember my parents’ horror-filled eyes.

I remember Galen’s, too. His look was a much more subdued version that also included having no idea how to react—not only to his first time meeting my parents in these awkward and unnavigable circumstances, but to his first glimpse of what we now call THE BEAST around here.

This is not The Beastie. You know, that cute little fanged monster who gleefully pounces upon gigantic meals that seem way too large for her little body.

This is not Little Viper or Tiger Burning who has chopped big dudes and small badasses down to size on the martial arts deck or the battlefield of a medieval reenactment event.

This is not even your friendly neighborhood Morning Bear that you don’t want to poke with a ten-foot pole before she’s quite ready to be awakened.

THE BEAST is…

…

…

I hope you never have to meet it.

That’s all I can say about it right now. There will be plenty more in forthcoming pages.

When IT slides into my driver’s seat, there is no stopping that train wreck. There are no emergency breaks and there are no parachutes to save anybody’s ass. There’s not even an eject button. All we can do is ride it out until it finally decides that’s it’s had enough. Or until it runs out of fuel and face-plants to ooze drool out its snoring gob.

To me, it feels like being booted out of my body and watching from above as the entirety of who I once was careens down the mountainside in a cacophony of screeching metal rims and exploding gears. Black smoke billows noxious clouds out my pretty, sparkly lips. Flames blast from my eyes and my asshole, raging down everything in the way.

If I’m lucky, I only burn down myself rather than the relationships with everybody around me.

I am miraculously fortunate enough to be one of those TBI survivors whose damage has caused The Rage Thang, but who does not turn physically violent upon other living beings or other people’s belongings. Neither do I become verbally abusive AT other people.

Verbally caustic AROUND other people?

Mmmmph. Yeah. You remember the uncontrollable pukes of profanity I can’t keep from uttering when I’m having a simple conversation right? Meltdown profanity takes that to a whole new level.

As for abusive at myself?

Yeah.

Real pretty, I’m tellin’ ya. It’s one of the most mortifying, damaging, embarrassing maladies of my condition. With a damaged frontal lobe failing to regulate the base makeup of my original neurodivergent hard drive and half a century of PTSD, this is the TBI symptom that makes it the hardest to deal with me.

Flippin’ seizures are easier to deal with than this crap.

This is why, when the small warning signs start rearing their heads, we tap out. Become “a flake.” Hide. Cancel at the last minute. Disappear into a dark corner of a public building. Walk straight outside with no shoes on and keep walking. Stay in bed. Stay at home in jammies. Go home early. Sit in the car for twenty minutes. Sleep in my back seat in public parking lots. Sleep at tables of crowded restaurants. Sleep in corners of convention centers and auditoriums with music and countless voices blaring overhead. Go MIA for weeks.

But on New Year’s Eve, headed into the first day of 2001, none of us had the slightest inkling about any of this. Heck, we’d only started suspecting I might have “a concussion” a few days before.

We could not begin to imagine what this actually meant.

So I lost my ever lovin’ marbles while standing between my beloved parents and my squeaky-new boyfriend. When everything that was ejecting from my hole like pyroclastic vomit finally started filtering into my awareness, and when I realized that I was pulverizing the air with my fists, there was only one thing I could do with that caliber of mortification.

COMPLETE AND UTTER SHUT-DOWN.

That produced a different variety of horrified expressions in the faces of my loved ones.

I have a vague recollection of my mother suggesting that I just call it a night and go to bed.

Ohhhh, I needed to.

But I didn’t want to call it a night. I didn’t want to go to bed. I’d had my entire fucking holidays, work, dance, parties—my whole fucking life canceled by that drunk driver and I wanted to have just one fucking moment of some fucking sparkle, goddamn it! Because this entire Holiday Hell had been nothing but a cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, lowlife, snake-licking, dirt-eating, excruciating, crap-stuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, donkey-kissing, brainless, dickless, hopeless, heartless, splat-assed, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, hammer-headed sack of monkey-shit! Hallelujah!

HOLY SHIT!

Where’s the Tylenol?³

So no.

I was not fucking going back to my cave-of-a-bed where I’d been cowering from the simplest fucking lightbulbs for the majority of the past eleven fucking days. But in order to get my volcanic-sherbet ass out the door and to that party…

I have no idea where the glaze-eyed, head-cocked, Stepford Wife singsong-voice came from but it slid out my mouth like somebody had just pulled a body-snatcher on me. “I’m fine,” I intoned. “I’m just fine. Let’s go. We have to go.”

And…

Well…

We did.

That airy-fairy “Bella Has Left the Building” voice and those unblinking doll-eyes allowed me to stop spraying bile all over my mother’s Christmas cat socks and my dad’s leather slippers long enough to get me out the door with my date.

Not that Galen seemed comfortable with the creature who hunkered in his passenger seat with its fangs hidden behind that smiling, coppery-gold lipstick. (Who could blame the poor guy?) And not that my parents had any clue who they had just sent off into the night with a stranger.

Correction: another stranger.

At least they’d been properly introduced to Galen Leyforth. But the latent monster lurking inside that bubble-tastic lime green dress? Heck, I’d never been properly introduced to it, so I certainly couldn’t have presented it to anybody. (Wouldn’t have wanted to either.)

Pretty sure I slept most of the way to the ballroom.

Which allowed me to corral enough Spoons back into the drawer that I could make it on time to a party without melting down.

---

At the shindig, the Band Babes were amazing with me. So were the Bandmates, and Galen himself. Everybody was decked to the nines and the music was rockin’.

Alas, so was my head.

Eventually, they played a song I couldn’t resist for any longer. I accompanied the Babes out onto the dance floor, wearing the sax player’s sunglasses at night. (I hadn’t yet learned to equip myself with those yet, or with the earplugs that now live in my purse.)

For a brief time, I shuffled my lacy feet from side to side (the heels had long since vanished under our table) and propped up the corners of my mouth into what I hoped looked like a smile, instead of a pained grimace.

Because I really was happy. I was thrilled to still be alive. I was thrilled to be there at such an awesome New Year’s bash, making awesome new friends. I was thrilled to be dating such an astounding guy. I knew in my soul of souls that I would dance again someday—RAWR—so I shuffled my feet and wafted my hands and faced away from the blinding flashes off the disco ball and the stage lights.

For the last part of the show and the entire time while the band packed up, I crashed out, burrowed underneath the nest of fur and leather coats that the Babes had made for me in the farthest corner of the ballroom.

When the year 2000 finally ended, I can’t tell you if I was awake to receive a midnight kiss or not, because I have no further memories of that night.

But at long last, January arrived. Woot. I had survived.

UP NEXT:

© 2023 Hartebeast

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This tale begins here:

1. Spoon Theory & The Hidden Injury - why the simplest daily acts that we take for granted are exhausting nightmares for someone who is injured, ill, or living with a chronic condition in spite of “how great they look.”

2. Why controlling irritability, anger and aggression can be so difficult after TBI

The difference between a Meltdown and a Tantrum

Sensory Overstimulation & Overload after Brain Injury

Highly Sensitive Person

3. I cannot take credit for this particular puke. It is inspired by Clark Griswold losing it during Christmas Vacation. But it gets the point across.🤪