A Whisper On A Scream
It’s a common aspect of a nightmare-- to be confronted with something terrifying and not be able to scream. You think you are alone in your kitchen, then you turn around to see a knife-wielding clown, a large man in black clothes and a ski mask, or a translucent apparition in a Victorian mourning costume. Even in a dream we revert to our natural instinct of crying-out, either to beckon help or to intimidate the ghoul that caused our instantaneous terror. Suddenly, our fear no longer lies with the villain, but rather with the fact that no matter how much we force, and strain, and exert our voices, we are silent. Helpless. Devoid of our most useless defense mechanism.
My experience with this nocturnal phenomenon was entirely on-the-nose. My psyche is unevolved, to say the least. In my dream, I was 10 or 11-years-old, standing in the backyard of my childhood home, when I happened upon a baby black bear. I panicked. I knew three things about black bears: never back them into a corner, yell loudly and intimidatingly if they approach you, and where there is a baby bear, there is a momma bear. And a momma bear don’t fuck around.
Sure enough, when I turned around to avoid the furry infant, momma bear was already on my tail and she did not look happy. I froze, I raised my shoulders, I puffed out my sad, training-bra clad chest, and I conjured a holler to end all hollers. But when I opened my mouth to roar, I found myself entirely mute. Across the yard, my father was working in the garden with the sprinklers going and AM radio blaring from the basement window. I turned to get his attention. I figured, if I didn’t have the lung strength to thwart a bear, I at least had enough screech in me to alert another kind of bear to come to rescue. Again, no sound escaped my quivering lips. I spent the remainder of my nightmare swiveling between my father and a wild animal, huffing and retching to avail. I was silent therefore, I was helpless.
I only had the scream-less dream once. Don’t envy me, I’ve repeatedly had the “teeth-falling-out” dream, the “naked” dream, and I have lost so many restful nights to the “waitress-in-the-weeds” dream. The catastrophic inability to communicate desperate pleas doesn’t haunt my slumber, but it constantly plagues my conscious hours. If I had to describe what it’s like to have so much to say to so many people regarding an abundance of emotions, but to be stifled at every turn… well, it’s a nightmare.
In addiction recovery, we are forcibly unstifled. In twelve step meetings, in group therapy, in individual therapy, we are required to participate because “our secrets keep us sick.” In those environments, it’s easy to open-up because your statistical chances of being understood are much higher. My emotions rest at sea level most of the time, but there have been a few moments in a room full of the similarly afflicted when empathy and understanding were yanked from my core. I was present for someone’s unstifling. The volume was turned up on their voice and they were heard—maybe not by the person that needed to hear them, but heard by someone.
The first time I met Jessica*, she was entirely disagreeable. Jessica was bitchy, and bitter, and while she was verbally silent, I’d swear you could hear some of her facial expressions from the space station. She didn’t think she belonged in treatment because, like me, she wasn’t a 19-year-old Fentanyl or cocaine addict with an immortality complex. Jessica didn’t have any legal charges, or overdoses, or even “incidents” that harmed her family or friends. In fact, the only reason her husband found out about her habit was because of the increasing amount of money she was having to spend as her tolerance for Percocet grew. $350 a day is quite noticeable for a family in suburban Indiana.
Jessica softened a little over time. She assimilated with the adult female alcoholics and we bonded over our “walk-in closet,” “glove compartment” addictions and never having suffered a felony or Hepatitis C. Instead of holding onto her narcissistic attitude of, “nothing bad has happened because of my addiction, I don’t need to be here,” she evolved to the gratitude of, “thank God I am here and that I am tackling this now, before anything terrible happened to someone I love because of my addiction.” She finally understood the reality that she was no better than the heroin shooters—at $350 a day on pills, she was centimeters away from resorting to shooting heroin herself. Still, Jessica couldn’t let go of her addiction “logic.” From day one, she made it clear that she was not an addict. She was just a person who had hip surgery and was given Percocet and Percocet is addictive and her body chemistry formulated a craving and that was the end of the story. But no, not an addict, she definitely wasn’t that.
I was chairing a meeting of about seventeen women one night, and we were about to bring it to a close. I took a quick gander and mental inventory around the room to make sure everyone had shared and I saw that, not only had Jessica not spoken, but she seemed to be ruminating in an uncertain fog. I had to flail a bit to get her attention. When she looked over at me, it was unignorable that she was holding something incredibly heavy. I encouraged her to put her burden to the group—it was all women so half of us were already crying and the other half were either painting their nails or eating ice cream directly from the carton. It was a safe space for strong feelings.
“I feel really silly about this… I’m 45-years-old and I’m still pouting about something that happened when I was 14.”
Polish bottles and bent spoons ceased their movements across the room.
“My Dad and his best friend owned a landscaping business together from when I was a kid up until… I don’t know, two years ago? Anyway, they did payroll once a week because most of their workers were broke. Richard, my Dad’s partner, would come over to our house every Friday afternoon, they’d open their first beer at 3:00, look over the timesheets, write out the paychecks, then sit on the front porch and get drunk while the guys came by randomly throughout the evening to get their money. Some of the guys would stay and drink, the neighbors would wander over, it would turn into a cookout and a party. Around 11:00 everyone else would start to leave but Richard would stay and my parents insisted that he sleep on the couch instead of driving. Every Friday they had this routine, and every Friday, after my parents had gone to bed, Richard would come into my room.
“I don’t remember how old I was when it started, but I was 12 when I realized that something was wrong. I tried pretending to be asleep, even when he pulled the covers off, even when he shook me, I wouldn’t open my eyes. I tried hiding in the closet or under a pile of laundry and stuffed animals—I thought that he might not be able to find me, and even if he did, I thought that the things he was doing couldn’t happen anywhere but a bed. I would plan sleepovers at my friends’ houses on Friday nights as often as I could, but it only worked out once a month or so. When I was 13, I decided that I needed to tell my Dad what was going on. It took me until three weeks before my 15th birthday to get the guts to do it.
“One morning, my Mother had left with my younger sister to drop her at the middle school and my Dad and I were eating Corn Flakes together at the kitchen table and I just said it: ‘Dad, Richard comes into my room every Friday night after you and Mom go to bed. I can’t deal with it anymore and I need you to make it stop.’
“I thought I did a great job. I had practiced what I was going to say for months and I was confident. I assumed my Dad would do what Dad’s do in that situation—I thought he’d be mortified and destroyed for a while, but I also thought he’d take care of the problem. I thought he’d be proud of me for leaving Mom out of it and he’d be grateful to me for sparing him the graphic details… In the moment, he didn’t say anything. He stood up from the table and put his full bowl of cereal in the sink and walked out of the kitchen. Like I said, I knew he’d be upset. I assumed he was storming off to murder his best friend and that everything would be fine. Then Friday came. Richard’s truck pulled up to the house, he came up on the porch, Dad handed him a beer, they sat in the rocking chairs laughing and shooting the shit all night like they always did. At midnight my bedroom door cracked open again and my world stopped.
“I still don’t understand what happened. I mean, I do understand what happened: a pedophile who happened to be my Dad’s best friend and business partner molested, assaulted, and raped me every week for at least five years. I’ve made my peace with that. I have not made my peace with the fact that I told my Dad about it and he did nothing. We still pretend like it never happened. He’s still alive! He’s probably sitting at the same kitchen table right now where we had that conversation 30 years ago, eating Mom’s pot roast and talking about the weather.
“I guess I am an addict because that’s what addicts do, right? We hold onto things. For decades. I had to take a pill that made me feel numb entirely for me to feel to numb to the fact that my Father, not only didn’t stop my rapist—he invited my rapist into our home for a beer.”
Jessica stopped speaking abruptly. She had heaved her burden into the middle of the floor for examination and that was where she wanted to leave it for now.
The girl next to me broke the silence with her delicate Waxhaw accent and asked, “when did the abuse finally stop?”
Jessica shrugged stoically. “Oh, it stopped on that last Friday night. Turns out, all I had to do when he reached for my covers was scream. I woke up everyone on our block and it scared him from ever trying to touch me again.”
The situation Jessica had to live through at such a young age was repulsive and it would have scrambled anyone’s psyche for the proceeding 30 years. It was somehow refreshing to see a person travel the road of “I don’t have a problem,” to “I have a problem,” to “I am the problem,” then start to realize that the truth is actually a combination of all three. I’m also glad that she had a place and a people that allowed her to speak through her problem, away from the “yeah, but…” When I say the “yeah, but…” I mean the common conversation that occurs when an addict tries to dissect their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in the presence of someone that they wish would understand. It goes a little something like this: “My Dad’s best friend repeatedly raped me when I was a child and when I told my Dad about it, he didn’t care or he didn’t believe me, either way, he did nothing. The dismissal I felt from the one person in the world that was supposed to protect me has plagued me for my entire life. I never knew how much I was hurting until I took a substance that stopped that hurt. Once I got a taste of how great it felt being free of that existential encumbrance, I became manic and terrified of that hurt coming back. So, I kept applying the substance.”
“Yeah, but… you drew money out of our retirement account to pay for pills. So. Who is the real victim here?”
As an addict, I can relate to the scratching, gnawing realization of “all I had to do was scream.” I also know what it’s like to work up the strength to admit a shameful secret and beg for help, only for that help not to come. It’s not a blatant failure as Jessica’s story. When I finally stooped to asking for help, I didn’t know what kind of help I needed, the people who were desperate to help didn’t know what kind of help I needed, the help they gave was the wrong help even if they were busting their asses to give me all the help they could, and it culminated in complete confusion and painful misery for everyone involved.
Just because addiction is the product of a deep hurt, doesn’t mean that addicts are the only people who hurt deeply. I hate on the “yeah, but…” Yeah, but I also understand the “yeah, but…” Nobody wants to relinquish their pain if they feel that they are still owed something for it: an apology, an explanation, a pound of flesh. That kind of pain can only exist when the harmful actions beget harmful reactions between two scorned people. Soundless screams fall on deaf ears, nobody wins, and everyone is sore.
A simple conversation could have saved Jessica from 30 years of repressed neglect and anger. Maybe. But do you realize how risky that is? Hurt that causes addiction or results from addiction is combustible hurt. This is “get high, get drunk, or kill yourself because you aren’t a viable human being” hurt. It’s “I might still love this person, I might not, I don’t know where they end and their addiction begins and I have to get the Hell away from them,” hurt. The stakes are high when you ask a question like, “Dad, why didn’t you stop your friend from raping me?” The results can only be a dissatisfying answer, a different but equally dissatisfying answer, or silence. Anytime you reopen a wound, there’s a chance that it will heal better this time, but there is also a chance that it will be salted.
I use a lot of words. I read a lot, I write a lot, I greatly esteem varied vocabulary, articulate messages, poignant poetry, and complex feelings being simplified into pithy, resonating sentences. I’ve also found that in the moments of highest emotions and greatest pain, words will not do. There are no words for the profound feeling of wanting to apologize to someone you hurt with such vigor that you would put your life up as collateral to prove the sincerity of your atonement. There are also no words to describe muzzling that apology because… Goddamn… they hurt you so bad right back.
Last week, with the help of a qualified librarian, I got the opportunity to look at words and language in a different way. It was high tech, because we used a Mac as a simulator, but low tech because we used morse code and light sequences to send messages via telegraph. It was tedious, it was time consuming, and it made me thankful for my smartphone. It also made me hate my smartphone. In 2021, there are situations where there are no words. There are situations where there are too many words. Regardless, if the person you are addressing is covered in fresh wounds, they will hate you for your explanations and they will hate you for your silence. Silence is especially vicious in a time where I have a hundred different ways to reach out to someone, they have the same hundred ways to reach out to me and neither of us is saying a damn thing. Our experiment made me envious of a time when we paid by the word, the message was always urgent, and you didn’t have the time or the money to say anything but the short, imperative truth. Since instant responses were also not possible, the brusque sentiment that you carefully tapped out would just float there… between sender and receiver, the way that some messages should. Not being read just to be responded to, but being read to be digested and understood.
