I don’t believe I’ve ever shared the story of my 25th birthday, and how it ended in a fit of despair, loneliness, and self-doubt on this blog before. Since the events of the evening that led up to this “crisis”, if we must call it that – much more like a spiritual feeling of being pulled apart by horses – have been drastically skewed on another blog (link at the end of this post, I figured I should tell the story myself first, as I do know myself and the tale of what transpired that night better than anyone else does (we all know ourselves best, no?), even though it is quite embarrassing now – I have learned a lot this year – and first and foremost, moving 2000 miles away from everyone I know and attending graduate school has taught me how to be tough as nails.
But that is now and this was then. I share my birthday with Sylvia Plath 0n October 27th. I still remember the looks of horror on the faces of my grade 12 classmates when I told them this gleefully – The Bell Jar had been required reading that year, and all others at my prissy high school could only talk about how incredibly stupid Esther, the main character, was, for almost every move she made. For me, it had been the first school-assigned book that I could relate to at all since Catcher in the Rye in grade 10. October 27th takes place during the first week of Scorpio, better known as “the week of intensity”, often cited as the most “supercharged” week of the zodiac calendar. The night I was born there was a very unusual late-fall thunderstorm in Winnipeg, my hometown. By the time I had popped out, and my dad returned home to pick some things up for my mom and get some rest, the heavy rain had turned into a blizzard and the streets were sheer ice. Ever since arriving to life on the Earth, my life has been incredibly intense!
Back to the story. “25″ has always been “my number”. Do you have a number like that? It seems to keep repeating and repeating itself in your life. Many of my closest friends’ birthdays have been on _____ 25th. A great deal of the most wonderful/horrible/life-changing days have been on the 25th of a month It is uncanny, I’ll say, “look at the calendar…” – and indeed, it is the 25th! Many of my addresses have had “25″ in there somewhere. I know that my parents’ “number” was 14, and this was the reason why the chose to buy their first home – the address was “14 _____ ____” So, I know I’m not completely off the wall with this. And I had high expectations for my 25th year, but so far, things looked cloudy at best.
I fell madly in love with Alarryyk the previous summer, but by October, he had gone “cold turkey” off his medication, rather than doing the slow taper that his doctor had recommended. I had just broken up with an addict, before moving to Vancouver, who did the same thing with his methadone prescription – he followed the doctor’s advice for a few weeks, and then decided to take matters into his own hands. Within about two weeks he was back on heroin. In Alarryyk’s case, within a few days, he was not acting like the man I fell in love with. He kept complaining that he knew nothing about me, when I thought he knew more about me than anyone in the world! Yet, when we were talking, he wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise – interjecting during one of his soliloquies was the ultimate crime. I never meant to interrupt – I just got so excited about being of like minds with someone that I wanted to add my two cents. It seemed no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get it right. One day I came home from work, and Alarryyk had promised to do some household cleaning while I was at school. Instead I turned the key and stepped into a room twice as messy as it was when I left, now filled with items he had purchased from RONA. The look of disappointment on my face did not go over well! However, I always loved Alarryyk, more than I had ever loved before – I just wanted him to be happy, and it didn’t seem like he was. He would have very excited moments after such a shopping spree, but then he would refuse to sleep in bed with me the way we did every night before. It took me some time to realize he wasn’t sleeping at all.
My “mood”, as doctors like to call the mindstates of “mania” and “depression” – pretty broad strokes – was falling fast towards the “depression” end of the spectrum. Grad school was not what I expected it to be. I felt so different from anyone else in my “cohort” the song “Subterranean Homesick Alien” constantly got stuck in my head! My only class was a “sociological methods” class taught by an old-school anthropologist, and I had no idea what he was talking about most of the time. Whereas my current university has a combined sociology and anthropology departments, my previous school only had a sociology department, very separate from the bioanthropology department. Meanwhile, I was in love with my students – teaching was the only thing that gave me a boost. When I got home all I wanted to do was curl up on the couch and watch some bad TV or a movie. However, I did not want to seem at all like Alarryyk’s ex, who apparently hid in the bedroom with the television set every day. Our relationship was new, and I didn’t want him to know how down I was feeling. Then, a proposal for the methods class I had slaved away at – as it was both academic and personal – about psychiatric pateints’ experiences of treatment in the emergency room was shot dow by the professor twice, and then by the chair of the department, I was crushed. I tried to block out the final words on the topic, “The professor doesn’t want any student’s project to speak to a larger political reality.” The only way I could express my rage was by dropping the class.
I have been through all of the same “behaviours” and “emotions” as Alarryyk – just because he was feeling “up” at the time and I was rather “down”, didn’t mean I didn’t understand where he was coming from – but for some reason he didn’t believe this either. When I came home and all of the walls had been written on with sharpie marker, I thought, “shit..” – but hell, I picked up a pen and added some of my own stylings. Our landlord was an asshole, and someone had written on the walls at nearly all places I had lived during my undergraduate degree!
On my birthday, that shit hit the fan.
Alarryyk tried to arrange a “perfect day” for me. He bought me a bouquet of beautiful long-stemmed red roses, something no one had ever done for me before. He cooked a fabulous dinner and bought me the best cheesecake I had ever tasted. But something – or rather someone – was missing – Alarryyk. He kept leaving and coming back and I would tell him, “just come and sit with me for a while!” There was always one more thing to do.
Finally, for the climax of the evening, we had a fire in the backyard using the fire-pit the upstairs neighbours had offered up to us to use. I love sitting in front of an outdoor fire and watching the flames – I spent my last night in Winnipeg doing this for hours. Fires are magickal to me too. The sky was clear and the stars were out for the first night in ages, and there was magick in the air. Yet much to my dismay, Alarryyk did not sit with me by the fire – he was busy making some kind of alteration to his motorcycle. I did a tarot spread by moon- and fire-light. By then it was after 2 am. I had gotten up early to teach, and I knew that if the evening were to be consummated as a beautiful ending to a beautiful, but slightly lonely day, it was time to head inside.
Alarryyk told me to go inside – he would be right in – he was still working on his bike. I peered my head outside to the patio where he was working a few times – “are you coming, baby?”
“Yep, I’m almost done, just get into bed and wait for me, babe.”
And so I did. I waited and waited and a couple of times, sleep all but overtook me. I almost wished it would take me completely, as I was no longer in the mood for what had been planned – I was in the mood for sleep! A couple of times he ran inside to grab another tool, and restated, “I’m aaaaalmost done, baby!”
He was finally “done” whatever he had been doing at 5:30 am. All I wanted was for him to curl up beside me and sleep, but I felt this would be most unfair. He had given me the most considerate birthday I ever had. Even before we really knew each other, or had been intimate, he bought me the most thoughtful gifts in the world – nothing expensive, but priceless in what they meant to me – like the Tori Amos for Easy Piano book that inspired me to take up the instrument again, and buy myself a used keyboard for Christmas. I loved Alarryyk, body and soul, and it was time to buck up and give him some physical love – you could see the hunger in his eyes, and the love behind there somewhere. I spread myself open for him. We tried a few different positions and I was making uncomfortable grunting noises the whole time. “What is it?” “Oh, nothing, baby, keep going.”
Then finally I felt a burst of sharp pain and withdrew. “Okay, you’ve gotta stop!”
My benign but annoying medical condition – endometriosis – can make sex painful, especailly if I’m not very turned on. It’s like a no ability to fake it button – unless a partner is poorly endowed enough 
“What’s wrong?!?”
“I’m sorry baby, it just hurt for a minute there, and when it hurts I have flashbacks to when it really hurt sometimes.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean, sweetie, I was regularly raped for three years, and that’s what I associate that pain with. And I never want to associate that pain with you! So we just can’t, tonight, baby, I’m too tired…we have the morning, and the afternoon…”
“You think I’m him! You think I’m Josh! What the fuck?!?!?!?”
“No!!! It’s exactly the opposite – I know you’re not Josh. But when your body has been through that trauma, it leaves marks that stick for your whole life, even though you want them to go away!”
“Yeah, right. That was then, this is now, get with it. How long ago was that again?”
“Five years.”
“And you’re still obsessed with the guy…you want to be abused.”
“No! I do not! I want you!”
“Then show it to me.”
“I can’t do that right now, I just can’t. I have flashbacks…”
“Yeah, right, ‘flashbacks’.” His tone became mocking and annoyed.
“Baby please try to understand, maybe you should come see my counsellor with me. You can’t just magically make it leave your memory, but I’m sure after being with you for long enough, it wil! You just have to be patient with me. Come on, babe, lie with me.”
“Forget it…FOR-GET IT!”
“What do you mean, ‘forget it’?!?!” The tears were already streaming down my face by now.
“FOR GET IT!!!! I make you this perfect day, and this is what I get?”
“What do you get? Me being exhausted and hacing a weird uncomfortable flashback? Fuck I’m sorry@”
“No you’re not. You want Josh. And I ain’t no Josh, sorry babe.”
“NO I DON’T! I WANT YOU, NO ONE ELSE, EVER! WE’LL GET THROUGH THIS, QUICKLY, you just have to LISTEN to me an TRY to understand!!!”
“Understand what? That my girlfriend is obsessed with a rapist? No way. I am outta here, man.”
“NO!!!!!! PLEASE STAY. PLEASE, BABY, I NEED YOU RIGHT NOW, YOU DON’T KNOW HOW MUCH…”
“Yeah, RIGHT! I’m getting out of here, I know when I’m not wanted.”
“I want you more than anything in the world…Fuck! Please stop!”
“No fucking way! And you know what? They were right about slamming your proposal. You need to be taught a few lessons.”
The door slammed shut. I curled up into the fetal position sobbing. The following thoughts were going through my head:
- Will I ever be able to have a “normal” sexual relatioship with a man after enduring so much past abuse? Another former boyfriend, who happened to share Alarryyk’s “real name” and who grew up in the swanky neighbourhood of West Vancouver broke up with me by stating that I was “damaged goods”. Was this the truth? Is this man who I fell in love with going to leave me because I cannot always “perform on demand” in the bedroom? Will all wo/men always feel this way about me? Will I, thus, always be alone?
- Was it a fluke that I got into grad school, and received the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant to fund my degree? Will I ever be able to meet the standards for this level of education? Was what he said true – that I needed to be “put into place”, so to speak, because my work is not up to the appropriate level? Should I cut my losses and drop out?
- The number 25 – was this to be the year not of success, as I expected when moving to Vancouver, or of my demise?
The combination of these thoughts drove me mad, and for the first time in five years, I felt suicidal. I had enough Effexor on hand to kill myself, and for a moment I contemplated putting it to this use. However, I decided instead to take 30 clonazepam, as I knew I had a high enough tolerance not to be harmed by the pills, but hopefully to sleep through my birthday, if not for longer. “Just in case”, I scrawled “Victim of Society” across my face in black eye-liner.
Much to my dismay, I awoke four hours later, to the sound of Alarryyk yelling again. Responsibly, I immediately called my doctor. Over the phone, she assessed my mental state, and determined this had been an isolated incident, mitigated by some terrible simultaneous circumstances. She recommended that I go out and celebrate my birthday as planned – to go see an Ani DiFranco concert I planned to attend with Laara far before I met Alarryyk – that getting out of the house would be best for my “mental health”, although she would be dispensing my pills on a daily basis for the forseeable future. I also followed her instuctions to take all of my extra Effexor back to the pharmacy (my psychiatrist from Winnipeg had sent me away with enough to last me six months!)
I suppose this was not the response Alarryyk hoped for, as he was going deeper into psychosis that would land him the the hospital within a week. He saw this as “taking one for the team”, when his violent, destructive behaviour was hurting everyone he loved. As usual, I had taken my anger out on myself, but not to a degree of crisis. I spent the next several months trying to save Alarryyk from destroying all of his relationships, and visiting him at the hospital on a daily basis. Whenever I arrived, his first words would be that I had “fucked up once again”, failing to bring all of the items he requested as I ran out of the house, attempting to balance a my second semester of grad school with making sure my baby got better, speaking to his doctors on a daily basis, and packing up my apartment (post-eviction) – our apartment at this point, by myself.
For Alarryyk’s version of this story, click here <taken down by Supreme Court of Canada, sorry folks>! He erased our old wordpress.com “Practice of Madness” site in favour of putting this up, in which he paints me as an absolute incapable, raving lunatic. I suppose the decision of who to believe is up to the public. Note that he mixed up the date of my birthday with my age. Nice touch!
scars xoxo
Actually, I am very thankful for this, as I certainly had no desire to speak with this individual again – he is so beyond help that not even the sound of his own voice seems to be able to satisfy him anymore.
. His attempts at “suicide”?:
Now that is sick.
, so as I said, watch this rare close look at the lives of psychopharmaceutically medicated children while you can.
