8. The Perfect Storm - Part 2
Sometimes there just aren't enough rocks.
Gmail’s parameters tell me I “should” chop this post up because it’s “too long.” I’m not doing that. I didn’t write it that way and it’s not meant to be read that way. The threads are too intertwined and tangled into knots. Besides, some of you are already rolling on the floor groaning, “You’re killin’ me, Smalls!” from the previous cliffhangers.
No cliffhangers today. We’re going straight through to the end. And yeah. It might be “too long.”
Too bad, Gmail.
That’s what the CyberGods made e-reader percentage trackers and bookmarks for. If you’re totally down for this clown-ride—first off, whuff…I salute you. It always blows me away that y’all are still here with me. If you need any of this stuff in smaller chunks, I do not flippin’ blame you.
You can handily find e-book tools on the desktop version or in the app.
Or heck, binge at will, good citizen.
Honestly, my stuff has always been meant to be read like a book that you can consume as much of or as little in one sitting as you like, slapping in a bookmark and coming back to it later, rather than having it parsed out in email, but…well…book publishing has never worked out for me, and Time keeps breathing down the back of my neck, so here it is. Email is not the ideal for my writing—I don’t even use Substack that way for my reading. I stick solely to the desktop and the app. This place is simply one of the few that won’t ban or censor me for what I write. (For now. Knock on wood.)
Speaking of…
WARNING: It’s about to get icky in here. Predatory violence. Child abuse. Sexual trauma. And the consideration that, under those circumstances, life might not be worth living.
Spoiler alert: I keep discovering that it totally is.
If you’re considering that it might not be, please, PLEASE always reach out for help. I’m not qualified to offer that. These people are:
For me, it was not one house. It was not one particular individual. It was That Fucking Town. Where all Those Fucking Things happened. With Those Fucking People.
And no.
Sometimes there just aren’t enough rocks.
Unfortunately, I didn’t return to my childhood hometown in 2001 with a Forest Gump beside me. I also was only just beginning to develop the one inside me. Instead, I returned there with my soon-to-be White Knight who had been abusive to me in subtle and not-so-subtle ways for months. I just couldn’t remember it.
Was that because of my new Traumatic Brain Injury?
Or was it my mind’s old trusty, musty habit of carving out chunks from my memory and shoving them into the Dungeon until I had the wherewithal to deal with them?
Both at the same time?
Does it really matter? The result is the same. If you read PART 1 OF THIS POST—the first half of the list that created my Perfect Storm for developing non-epileptic seizures1 —then perhaps you’ll understand why my psyche may have decided to dungeon my memories overnight.
Any time I’ve ever read my journals from those first few years after being hit by the drunk driver, I have been stunned to realize how many of those things happened simultaneously, and how many shocking betrayals and abuses I kept forgetting about when I went to sleep at night.2
There’s a reason why I can only write the story of that car wreck recovery for so long before I need to take a break from it. Because it’s just too fucking much all at once.
So whatever was the mechanism—TBI or traumatic repression—there are ways in which I’m actually grateful for it in the long run. Because if I’d been forming proper memories in the aftermath of that…if I’d woken up morning after morning and remembered everything that had happened the day before, the weeks before, the nine months before…
I might not have survived that.
I might not have chosen to survive it.3
Just like I might not have chosen to survive the nine months with Martin Fucking Burns in my freshman year of college.4 The psyche knows this. It knows when the organism is in danger of being overloaded with Too Much To Handle, so sometimes it takes measures to ensure its survival.5
I Dungeoned massive swathes of memories from my time with Martin until one mind-warping night when I was twenty-four. All those memories crashed over me like a tsunami that would ultimately tear apart my life in Minneapolis.
Bonus: that spurred me off to Colorado, which I absolutely needed, so there’s another very painful but divinely gifted blessing.
Remembering my oldest repressed memories (that I know of) was not nearly so traumatic. It came in pieces. The first hints seeped in two months after my car wreck when the TBI had taken my ability to compartmentalize traumas and bothersome problems anymore. I awoke one morning from a dream/memory thinking…wellllll…maybe there are other incidents I buried besides Martin—much older things from when I was very, very young.
I was correct. I finally got confirmation of that during the two years when I did EMDR,6 so that was an even more gentle and well-supported return of what I had buried. I was just starting to wake up from a snooze when it quietly toddled out of the shadows and sat down beside me.
I really should say “she.”7
THE BOOK
The littlest girl who lives in the deepest, murkiest places of my heart and mind has a very, very big book. It’s fancy and heavy. Black with gold engraving in a language only she knows. The pages are gold-edged, whereas the stories written there are as dark as the cover.
This tiniest girl carries that book around at all times. It is her job to carry it. To guard it. She doesn’t say much. In fact, she only spoke to me for the first time a couple years ago, toward the end of my weekly EMDR sessions.
(Just-waking is a very common time for my psyche to bring this stuff to my attention.)
(Huh…fascinating that just-falling-asleep is the most common time that I have micro-seizures.)8
What the littlest girl showed me deserved the Jenny-Throwing-Rocks reaction. Not that I really needed to do that by my late forties. I’d thrown enough broken pottery down a ravine in the shadow of Mesa Verde. I’d gone ape-shit on my mattress enough times. I’d unleashed on punching bags and hurled enough blood-curdling screams into the silence of my apartment or into the roar of thunder.
Because I had known.
In spite of that therapist. She was the first one to whom I ever confided, “Welllll…maybe I was…”
She pooh-poohed me and tried to convince me that I have an overactive imagination. A lot of people have done that.
Or they’ve tried to convince me that it couldn’t possibly be what I think it was. Surely I’m interpreting it wrong. Like the first two people I ever confided in about Martin, and my suspicions that what he had done to me was…
Gulp.
That Word.
I couldn’t even say it.
Because he was my boyfriend so…
So I took those jagged pieces of memory and I buried them where I wouldn’t have to fucking look at them anymore.
Again.
The very tiny girl gathered up those pieces and she tucked them between the pages of The Very Big Book. She held onto them for me until I was twenty-six. Then, on the day my psyche determined that I was ready to finally deal with them, she handed them back to me. They’re rather like shards of a broken mirror, those particular memories from my freshman year of college.
You remember the mirror, right?
The mirror in my parents’ bathroom that I broke while losing my ever-lovin’ shit at the end of those nine months with Martin?9
In August 2001, I returned to my parents’ house for my 10th year class reunion, and for a party with my family and old friends so everybody could see me and put their arms around me in as much of a hug as my damaged spine could tolerate in those days. That time returning to my hometown, I didn’t lose my shit.
I didn’t scream.
I didn’t cry.
I didn’t break anything or throw anything or bellow what would have been well-earned profanity about anybody I encountered or anything I learned.
Instead, I had seizures.
THE PERFECT STORM - PART 2
THE OLD TRAUMAS I FACED IN THAT TOWN
MY CHILDHOOD BEDROOM
That room was my refuge.
I don’t want to get into this topic too deeply. I just lost my mom. My dad and I have our hands clasped tightly together as we weather that like two lone peas rattling around in a very empty pod. The amount of repair to our relationship that he and I have experienced since I moved to Arkansas in 2013 is nothing short of miraculous.
How often do people get to heal some of their deepest parent-child wounds WITH the actual parents in question?
That’s really rare.
It is one of the greatest blessings of my life.
That bedroom was my refuge...
I keep trying to explain why when it comes to the two people who raised me. With everybody else, it’s easy to explain. It let me escape them. But with my parents, I keep having to hit the DELETE button and start over so I’m obviously not ready.
Don’t get the wrong idea. I wasn’t that kid who was backhanded from one room into another. I wasn’t told over and over that I was a worthless POS. So much of it is a sign of the times, or it’s a mark of what we didn’t understand about neurodivergence and patriarchal domination. Those things were just hailed as “the way to be a good, involved parent and raise good, polite, healthy kids who are ready to face the world.”
Intention doesn’t mean it damages any less.
But it is easier for me to forgive.
Let’s leave it at:
That bedroom was my refuge.
In my mind’s eye it is always full of slanted shadows. Sometimes a sheet-and-blanket fort is up. Other times, I see my trundle bed. Sometimes the guest bed is tucked under mine; sometimes my first best friend Johnny is grinning up at me from down there.
Often, younger versions of me sit in the window, listening to the block party going on up at the bar on Fourth of July. It’s hot as Hell on those night. No air conditioning back then.
Other times, I head outside in the middle of winter when the snows used to pile up to the roof. Once the plows came through, the jagged mountains of snow-chunks at the end of our road would tower over the house. The one at the bottom of our driveway was monstrous. I didn’t build snow forts in there. I built mazes of snow tunnels.
This was the Safe Place I used during EMDR. Cool. Calm. Solitary. Silent.
I could breathe and relax in there. The world was muffled. Everything was frozen, and I could just exhale, letting it all slide off me for a moment.
❄️😌❄️🌬️❄️❄️❄️
Nobody ever found me when I hid in there.
In the middle of summer, I missed that snow maze, so I had to find other mazes in which to hide.
In that little town in Northern Minnesota, at the end of the road where I grew up, The Woods would spring back alive after winter. In those woods, there were trails. There were teenagers. There were younger kids and their little dogs, too. Mean dogs.
But there were other hidden places where nobody ever found me.
There were also a few magical spots that I favored because they were gorgeous and because hardly anybody thought much of them. One of them was a hill. For a couple glorious weeks at the end of May and into the earliest part of June, that hillside would be covered with tiny purple flowers. If you crouched down and got your nose up close to them, you would see that they looked like miniature tulips, perhaps as big as your pinky nail. They were lavender with the tiniest star-shoots of magenta radiating from their hearts.
Within all that soft pastel, other flowers transformed the once-green hillside into a purple carpet. Most were johnny-jump-ups or purple violets. Here and there, yellow violets also grew. Soon, it would become grass and ferns and clover. But at the end of May and the earliest part of June…
I would sit out there in those flowers, just marveling and breathing, and nobody ever disturbed me. Not once.
Blessedly, I could hear my nemeses coming. After they ate, their voices carried across the stream, yelling and laughing and jeering and sneering at each other. The moment their feet hit the wooden plank bridge over the water, I would bid farewell to my flower carpet.
Then I would sneak through the back part of the trail that popped out beyond my favorite hangout at the Old Fallen Tree, and well beyond their treehouse at The Main Fork. They would be busy playing in The Woods instead of in their yards, so I had a clear shot home, undisturbed.
It was my favorite time to be outside in That Town all year.
In August 2001, I brought my boyfriend into those woods for an afternoon walk. Really, I needed to go there for me. I needed to stroll those trails and smell those scents and speak with old ghosts I’d been trying to ignore since I graduated and bolted, never looking back.
I hadn’t been in those woods since high school.
Alas. The big fallen tree was barely a mound of mulch anymore. The trails were mostly overgrown. My favorite hidey-hole paths were nonexistent. The only significant trails out there, on the far side of the stream, were machine-made for ATVs and snowmobiles.
“Oh, no,” my parents’ best friends assured me. Their property edged The Woods. “Kids these days don’t really play out there.” A lot of Indoor Kids, don’tcha know, or kids whose time was sewn up in a myriad activities. A very different generation from our “get yer ass outside and don’t come home until dark go away kid ya bother me!”
My boyfriend and I had to tromp through the ferns and ticks and scrubby foliage to reach that secluded hillside. I don’t think he was terribly impressed about that. Indoor Boy, don’tcha know. But hey, it gave us the opportunity to check each other for ticks…
Quietly.
In my parents’ house.
In my childhood bedroom with its slanty shadows and lurking ghosts, and my forgotten memories of him forever drawing lazy, hazy corkscrews between us. Serpentine corkscrews. Intangible.
With a sharp, gouging point that always prevented me from sinking into true trust with him.
Rightfully so.
Good psyche. Good body.
The body knows. Just like the very tiny girl knows.
Behind my boyfriend, just off his shoulder, stood the closet door where my mom had taped up a paper bag when I was in second grade. Into it, she had suggested that I hurl all the bad things I wanted to say to Those Kids. All the bad things I couldn’t get off my mind. All the bad things inciting my uncontrollable crying and meltdowns that nobody could figure out WTF.
I filled that bag in the first week. Pretty soon the crap flooded out across my bedroom floor and piled up to the ceiling. So she steered me toward the pillow for the screaming. Whenever nobody was home, I became a flurry of after-school fists on the mattress with projectile-snot as thick as the bellows of incomprehensible, throat-ravaging rage that ejected from me, day after day for years.
I kept having to open the windows and dump it all out on the back lawn where I would trip over it as I taught myself how to do back-walkovers.
Those Kids would pass by sometimes and catch me back there, practicing. I have mostly wonderful memories in that backyard. But beyond it, alongside the row of pines where I would dart home from the store next to the bar…and the chainlink fence where I would skirt the neighbors’ yard in tears because The Pack had followed me home…same fence line I barreled alongside like a bug-eyed cat outta Hell after being chased by the first fucker who forced me to touch his dick.
A lot of force in that town.
Shhhhhhhhhh…
Don’t tell.
Don’t you dare say one word about this or I’ll…
🙊🙈🙊
HUSH-HUSH
The brother of my dad’s brother-in-law has a son. That son now lives in my hometown. With his wife. And his young children.
At my uncle’s funeral a few years ago, I sat next to this son in the classic Minnesota funeral home basement with the classic scrumptious food and the classic casual conversations with people I love very much. For years, I’ve been hearing tales of this son and his brothers and the other young guys who have taken up the mantle at the hunting shack.
But that was the first time I had ever actually met this vibrant, personable, twentysome young man.
Our chit-chat inevitably turned to That Town.
You remember that I am hyper-honest, right? You remember that this has always been a problem, especially for Minnesota Nice, right? Yeahhhhh…he wasn’t too thrilled to hear me snarl out a snide laugh and make a few cryptic comments about That Town. He’s quite protective of it. Of its ideal and reputation.
All I could think was…yeah, dude, you’re not a little kid in That Town. And if you were, I figured out by talking to you for the first minute-and-a-half: you were not a little kid like me.
Towns Like That are not good places for kids like me.
So many people assume that small, rural towns are the safest, greatest places to raise their kids.
So many people are dead-wrong.
Because places that are that rural and that secluded and that attached to their reputations as “such a great, safe place to raise a family” offer really great places for the monsters to hide. The small-town pressure to not rock boats or air dirty laundry is one of their most effective shields.
Really bad stuff happened to me in That Town. Really bad stuff happened to some of the most popular and easygoing kids in That Town. Really bad stuff happened to a lot of kids who came in a lot of different flavors.
Some of it was done by other kids. Bigger ones. Older ones. Smaller, younger ones with huge chips on their shoulders. Classic bully stuff encouraged by parents with too many isolated, closed-minded generational habits. Or outright cultish codes.
Shudder.
Some of it was done by diabolical predators with nice uncle-type smiles (and dagger-glinting eyes when no other adults were around).
Down the other street—on the opposite end from The Woods—there was That House. I had to pass it on the way home from school. Eventually, I was introduced to another sneaky-deaky trail. For a time, it allowed me to lose The Pack after school by slipping out the side door near the lobby and zipping across the parking lot to catch that trail.
Alas. They eventually found me.
Stalked me.
Hid behind a tree until I strolled onto the trail alone, then jumped out.
With That Dog.
But for a few blissful weeks, I got to dart home and lock them out, unmolested. It also meant I no longer had to pass by That House on the way home from school.
Not like I remembered why this was important.
Doesn’t matter.
Because that very tiny girl carries the Very, Very Big Book. I now know that she has carried it since I was at least two years old.
Shhhhhh…
If you sit very quietly, if you sit very still, and if you don’t look her straight in the eye, maybe she’ll toddle over to you and thfrump her butt down next to you. (She makes a very loud thfrump-sound when she plops down, because that book she’s got clutched close to her heart is very heavy.)
Maybe, if you are very quiet and you are very nice—
She does not like that word.
Neither do I.
None of us do.
But if you are very kind and if you are half as inquisitive as she is, maybe, just maybe she’ll tell you what she once told me, the first time she ever spoke to me.
“I have a book.”
“Oh,” I said, nodding in encouragement. “Yes, I see. That’s a very big book for such a little girl.”
She nodded up at me, owl-eyes alight as she peeped a very matter-of-fact, “Mm-hmm.”
That was all she said to me.
That’s all she has ever said.
(Okay, there was also that one other time that she plugged her ears and bellowed in her Very Big Voice when all the rest of us were arguing and getting mean about it. Needless to say, we apologized to each other and invited her to come sit with us, but she was still very mad at us for a few days. She turned her nose up, took The Book and her toys, and went home to…wherever it is she lives.)
(We do not seek out her hidey-hole lair. That would be a violation. We only invite.)
Tell ya what though, she doesn’t hide in the shadows much anymore. When we all convene at the Big Kids’ Table to discuss our Very Important Things, she often plops down on the floor against the wall with The Book in her lap and her very big eyes absorbing it all.
There are many other things in those gold-tipped pages that I have never read. I don’t think I necessarily need to. She is their keeper. If she ever determines that I need to know something, I’m sure she’ll show me.
Suffice to say…
I have a list.
That list swirled with my other list—the list of Today Things I was experiencing on August 4, 2001. These two lists created the Perfect Storm that sent me into seizures.
And That Bedroom
In That House
Edged by That Fence and Those Pines
On That Street
In That Neighborhood
Near Those Woods
In Walking Distance of That Fucking School
Of That Fucking Little Town
In That Fucking Idyllic Region
Of That Fucking Gorgeous State
With Those People
MY 10TH YEAR CLASS REUNION
Some of Those People grew up to be really friggin’ cool.
Or maybe I finally became cool enough to get along with them.
Ahem.
Others of them sneered, jeered, or ignored me like they always had.
Eh. Fine by me.
But a few of them…
Yes, a few of the old cadre went out of their way to stab me. And rest assured. It hurt. Well-struck, girlies. Well struck.
It truly astounds me that, after a fucking decade, they would still go to so much trouble to pull shit like that just for the pleasure of watching my reaction. Who the heck am I to have—?
I dunno, man. I guess I must have been one heck of a villain in their history to invoke that kind of reaction ten years into supposed adulthood.
Partway through the night, the bonfire started to die down so somebody threw tires or something toxically noxious onto it. What the—?
Typical.
I had forgotten to grab my avocados for the potluck. Good. That meant I got to eat them all myself. (My family and boyfriend turned up their noses. More for me.)
Woot.
So yeah. That happened on Friday night.
THE PREDATOR
The morning after the bonfire, we needed some more ice before the family shindig, so I skirted Those Pine Trees and I wandered up to get some. It also allowed me the chance to say hi. I’ve known the individual who was there for many, many years. We shot some shit. It was great, like always.
Until he said, “Hey, ya know…one of your ex-boyfriends lives here now.”
My eyes popped open and my brows lifted. “Oh?”
And then he said the name.
That Name.
Why wouldn’t Martin Fucking Burns have moved into My Fucking Hometown after marrying one of the sweetest of my church-friends and fellow Nice Girl Valedictorians?
“Yeah, he was totally bragging that he dated you.”
Is there steam coming out my ears?
“In college, wasn’t it?”
My teeth grind down on my response: “Mm-hmm.”
Have my eyeballs been vaporized by the inferno raging inside my skull as all the memories from That Year mix a toxic cocktail with the images of Martin now living so near my parents?
“So,” I growl. Was that an earthquake? Or is it just me? “Do you ever see much of him?”
“Oh, yeah.” Blasé hand-flick and disapproving sniff down the nose. “He’s a regular fixture at {That Bar.}”
“Oh-ho-ho!” I chortle. Wow! Yeah, that rumbling earth is definitely emanating from me. “I bet he is.”
Ole Burnsy did always love to tie ‘em on.
“So what about Elissa?” I ask. “Do you see much of her, too?”
Now this answer I am really, really interested in, because I want to know—no, I need to know. How is she? Is she okay? Does he do the same kind of stuff to her that he did to me? Does it show? Can you tell that—
“Oh!” Wrinkle of nose and retraction of head. Quizzical expression. A little bit of bafflement. “Huh. Actually, now that you mention it, we never see her.”
“Yeah.” I’d be quite curious about a seismograph’s assessment of me right about now. “That does not surprise me one bit.”
My friend’s eyes snap onto me, round and full of alarm at how menacing my voice and my gaze have grown. I give him a look that says that there is a whole lot more to that statement than is coming out my mouth. “Let’s just say that he was…not very nice to me while we were together. And that I am not surprised if he never lets her out of the house.”
(No doubt she’s been kept consecutively barefoot and pregnant since she popped out the first one. Wasn’t that his greatest log-cabin-in-the-hush-hush-woods-flavored dream? Boy, I hope it was her dream, too.)
And that is all we say about that.
Because in the parts of Minnesota from which I hail, especially in towns like That One, you do not say anything more about Topics Like That.
Shhhhhhhhhhh…
Unfortunately, this memory is about to be buried under an avalanche.
Because we’re only a few hours out from The Storm now.
NEUROLOGICAL OVERLOAD
In the middle of my class reunion, a really wonderful family party at my parents’ poolside allowed me to skip out on one of the too-big, too-loud, too-bright activities with my old classmates. It let me spend the afternoon surrounded by people who loved me, and who I loved in return.
Alas. The pool party was also too big-loud-bright for my overloaded neurons.
Right there on my parents’ backyard lawn, my brain finally short-circuited. I had my first absence seizure that afternoon. That night, back at the class reunion, came the first myoclonus head-snap-crash-n-burn.
I have had non-epileptic seizures ever since.
UP NEXT - CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE:
STUPID PTSD - Every breath you take, every move you make…
Or if you need a break and a bit of inspiration, this is a tale from the summer before my car wreck, which gave me one of my superpowers that helped me get through all of this:
PURIFICATION BY DELUGE - My evening is halted by a violent storm. Best thing for me, really.
© 2025 Hartebeast
Suicidal risk is greater in autistic people, especially in autistic women who are Level 1/Aspergers. Especially if they are undiagnosed or late diagnosed.
The same is true for those with the combination of TBI and PTSD.
(And no, you don’t have to worry for me. The amount of people who have my back combines with the amount of things I am burning to do with my life, which keeps my claws tenaciously on the ledge and my fangs gritted in determination to hold on and fight back.)
My art & nature publication:
You might not remember, but your body and your subconscious often do. One of the best books I have ever read in my life: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind & Body in the Healing of Trauma
Don't want to read the book? Here's the basic premise of what trauma does to the body and why talking about it, even in therapy, so often doesn't solve the problems: Short Version. Or Long Version by the author himself
Internal Family Systems - one of the other trauma therapies that currently helps me. “…a transformative tool that conceives of every human being as a system of protective and wounded inner parts led by a core Self. We believe the mind is naturally multiple and that is a good thing. Just like members of a family, inner parts are forced from their valuable states into extreme roles within us. Self is in everyone. It can’t be damaged. It knows how to heal.”
Something we’re currently exploring: the way that I instinctually attempted to deal with my traumatic circumstances using a defense mechanism that makes me such a natural practitioner of IFS. Because I’ve been aware of my Parts since first grade when I initially started differentiating, consciously segregating, and trying to name them. So what is it? Partial DID or OSDD? No clue. A lot of that is because this is another condition that the professionals are still really hazy on.
Maybe it would behoove them to look a little more into IFS, I dunno.
Because this tendency in me actually no longer concerns me. It used to. It originally scared the crap out of me and brought me horrific shame. But now, I’m pretty impressed with this little girl who stumbled upon a home-grown version of what has become one of the most recognized healing therapies for trauma.
The very tiny girl who carries The Very Big Book - I call her The First Exile and we’ve been thrilled to find her intently watching from her spot on the floor near the Big Kids’ Table. Occasionally she even sets the book down beside her to enjoy a nice round of play.
Wow Alexx! It’s impressive that you was able to pull so much out of your memory (and by sifting through those handy notebooks I assume) to trace your way back to when you had your first non-epileptic seizure. And it is gnarly what you uncovered/remembered by doing so.
I heard a saying once that I really like, which is: “we find what we need where we least want to look”. I think it’s true to some degree, the trouble is, though, when we don’t want to look at things that’s bad, we tend to lose access to them by way of our psyches protective mechanisms, which makes resolving them very hard.
I thought it was also really great that you wrote all of this out in that cryptic way where you never really said what the bad things were, but you were so clear in your cryptic writing that we can all gleam what they were. Writing it like that served to emphasise the quiet-town vibe you discussed. We have some of this quiet-towns in the bush down in Australia too. Not nice stuff at all.