Get Me Out of Here (27 page)

“You're censoring me?”

“I'm pointing out exactly what's transpiring here—and letting you know I'm not going to go along with it.”

“Because you don't want to hear about it? You don't want to be a part of such a disgusting discussion?”

“Because, in your own way, you're trying to hurt yourself.”

Once again he left me without a comeback. The truth of his words stung, and I resented the way he had taken control of the session's direction.

But the blanket of shame receded a little. I knew he was right, but I was too proud to say so. Instead I pouted, unwilling to admit it. As usual he didn't force such an acknowledgment.

“I know the shame doesn't come from you,” he said gently, softening the blow. “It's sad to think that something so natural could be given such distorted connotations. You feel the shame because your parents were ashamed of your femaleness. Nature's sign of maturity became a curse you felt you had to hide. But that's not the way it's supposed to happen.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked, wounded pride still stinging. “So I guess you threw a party when your own daughter started.”

“No party,” he said, ignoring my sarcasm. “But I was proud.”

“For having her first period?” I asked, surprised to hear the word come so easily off my tongue.

“For being a woman. For growing up.”

I contemplated the notion for a minute, then asked him, “If I'd have been your daughter, would you have been proud of me?”

“Of course,” he replied gently, his tone soothing, bonding me to him. “A good and loving father is naturally pleased to see his daughter blossoming into womanhood. Proud to see his little girl growing up.”

“Dr. Padgett, did you ever talk to your daughter when she wasn't a little girl anymore? You know, about feelings? Did she ever cry in front of you?”

“Sure,” he smiled. “She cried; she laughed; she got angry at me sometimes. Some things she felt more comfortable discussing with her mother, but we talked about things too.”

“So, if she came home upset and locked herself in her room, you talked to her about it?”

“If she wanted to talk, we talked.”

“About everything?”

“About anything she wanted to talk about.”

“And she wanted to talk to you?”

“Yes.”

“She wasn't afraid?”

“Why would she be afraid?”

“Wow,” I said, struck by the stark contrast with my own adolescence. “She was lucky, you know. To have you as a father.”

“Thank you,” he said, graciously accepting my sincere compliment. “You deserved the same kind of father. It's a shame he didn't realize how lucky he was. But at least now you have a place to get what you always needed, always deserved and never got. You have a safe place here.”

My eyes were filled with tears, not of shame or anger, but of emotions so intense they could not be contained. I wanted to tell him how much I loved him at that moment, how grateful I was to have him in my life, but I couldn't find the words.

His warm smile told me he knew my feelings nonetheless. Some things just didn't need to be said.

“Well,” he said softly, “that's about it for today.”

The early spring air once again rejuvenated me as I breathed in the scents of blooming nature. The burden of shame had been lifted, albeit not completely, but enough that I could at least consider a different way of looking at my womanhood—as something not simply to be accepted with resignation, but something of which, perhaps, I could someday be proud.

Many more issues remained to be discussed, far more work had to be done in the area of my gender, but the wall of shame that had previously surrounded it had started to crumble. A seed had been planted within me that, with gentle tending, could someday bloom and flourish.

And my dreams, thoughts, and writings were filled with fantasies of how my life would have differed had Dr. Padgett been my real father.

A few more arctic blasts came and went—Mother Nature's reminder that she still called the shots—until the hint of spring became spring in earnest.

Dr. Padgett and I spent several sessions addressing the gender issue without reaching any final resolution. I couldn't discuss it at all without exploding. At first I had expected some kind of instant benefit from my newfound openness on a topic that for so long had been taboo. My disappointment and frustration increased as change only inched along. I felt as if I had hit another wall of resistance, and I could go no further.

In just one more month it would be two years since I had first begun therapy. I was getting better at controlling my emotional reactions. When feelings overwhelmed me, I learned to thwart the burning temptation to act self-destructively and to sit with the feelings instead. By now I had accumulated hundreds and hundreds of yellow legal sheets of paper containing my emotions—written down so I wouldn't take them out on myself or anyone else.

At 118 pounds I was healthier and stronger, although I still had mixed reactions when I saw the increasing number on the scale. I could still be belligerent and combative in therapy sessions, but not as frequently. It had been months since I'd contemplated suicide, although mine was not so much a full acceptance of life as it was a wait-and-see attitude, having decided to defer these thoughts until I had let therapy run its course.

These were definitely signs of progress that even I could not deny. Still an unreachable emptiness ached deep within me. I wondered if I had gone as far as I could in therapy. It was enough to keep me from wanting to end my life but not enough to make life satisfying and enjoyable. I felt like a paraplegic who could learn to do things she never thought possible when the car accident first occurred—but still could never walk. Perhaps I had reached the limits of my own handicap: borderline personality disorder.

Maybe this was as good as it gets. Maybe it was time to take my father's advice and pull myself up by my bootstraps, accept the reality that life basically sucked, and grow up and give up on fantasies that it could somehow be better.

Back in my college days I'd scoffed when several of my friends had enrolled in a three-credit course focusing entirely on dreams. I figured it was one of those classes designed to accommodate academically struggling scholarship athletes and those simply wishing to lighten their course load.

To me the conclusions of dream analysis had seemed as arbitrary and contrived as the kaleidoscope of written interpretations. A million different people with different attitudes and agendas could analyze the same dream in a million different ways. How could anyone say that they had meaning?

Two years of therapy had changed so many of my other strongly held convictions; the relevance of dreams was just one more. How could I doubt the existence of the subconscious mind when it pushed its way into my life nearly every single night and day?

No matter how resistant or obstinate I was within the therapy sessions themselves, my subconscious had been awakened and was making its voice heard. At night. In my sleep. My dreams, my nightmares, had become the window to the inner reaches of my soul.

The dreams I'd had in the hospital and afterward were gut-wrenching, horrifyingly explicit affairs, jolting me awake in a fury of screams and a pool of sweat, leaving me shuddering in the wake of emotions for hours and sometimes days. Along with my conscious thoughts and feelings, I had gotten into the habit of recording the dreams as well, with their plots, characters, scenes, and emotions.

Eventually I no longer screamed and cried when awakened from a disturbing dream. I saw it as an opportunity for insight. I didn't reach for tissues at 2:00
A.M.
, but the pen and yellow legal pad, not wanting to let a single detail slip from my mind.

As my behavior and emotional reactions both in and out of session grew less erratic and more focused, so, too, did the content and context of my dreams. They were far more complex now, more symbolic than horrifying, but still leaving a clear and intense emotional effect in their aftermath. Dr. Padgett, Tim, and the kids, who had been relatively absent from the earliest dreams, now appeared in many of them. I was no longer the little wooden infantile figure but a cross between child and young adult, filled not as much with screams as with angst.

For weeks now my dreams were set in an urban landscape of decay and deterioration as unsettling as a ghetto war zone—my own declining neighborhood.

In reality our historic neighborhood was still thriving with a population determined to thwart the tide of decay, ready and willing to keep up the fight for years to come. In the dreams, however, the battle had been lost, and nearly everyone had vacated—except us. We were trapped. The only other signs of other human life were the occasional gunshots that pierced the silence.

My favorite building in the neighborhood had always been a three-story brownstone commercial building, an old department store converted to an antique mall. The rounded turrets were reminiscent of an ancient majestic castle, painstakingly carved gargoyles at the cornices surrounded by intricate wrought iron.

In one of my dreams this landmark was also teetering on the edge of collapse. The wrought iron was detached; a second-floor window railing hung grotesquely from the masonry, waiting for the last bolt to give way. The entire structure was leaning precariously, the brick sidewalks in front cracked, peaks and valleys of crumbled red brick unearthed by a rapidly slipping foundation and the sinking ground below.

The green tile roof was disintegrating as well. The wooden decking beneath, showing in places, leaked so badly I could see through the cracked and broken windows that the floor was sagging from the weight of rainwater.

As I stared at this decay in my dream, I could not believe that this had happened. Tim and I, among many others, had worked so hard to preserve this architectural jewel that now was a dangerous eyesore. I was stunned to hear the stirrings of people inside. Didn't they realize how dangerous it was? “Get out!” I cried to them. “You'll die in there!”

“No!” cried a voice just like my own. “We can't let this place die; we can't let it go.” I heard a small child whimpering, and my heart raced in panic.

“You have to get out of there, don't you see?”

“No,” the voice replied. “If this goes, it all goes.”

Despite my better judgment, I went into the building to find them, to try and talk them out of there. Upon entering I was sickened by the sight of fallen plaster, the exposed and bowed walls of latticed laths covered with the spray-painted epithets of vandals. A second-story floorboard gave way as I leaped for safety. I could hear it tumble with a crash to the floor below. I heard a roof beam collapse above me with a sickening loud splinter. It penetrated the ceiling just inches from my head.

“Where are you?” I screamed desperately. The voice so like mine did not reply, although I could have sworn I heard soft footsteps. She was hiding. She and her entire family were in danger. But she did not want my aid, preferring to collapse with the structure.

Another roof beam collapsed, then another, piercing the ceiling until I could see patches of gray sky. Someone was frantically calling my name as I began to realize that I, too, could be destroyed. Suddenly an entire wall came crashing toward me, awakening me in a terrified sweat.

“Rachel! Rachel!”

Tim's face appeared above me, brows knotted in concern as he prodded me out of my dreamworld and into consciousness.

“What? What? It's caving in. We can't let it cave in!”

“Rachel, you're having another nightmare. It's me, Tim. You're okay; the kids are okay.”

I was still breathing heavily, the panic having not yet subsided, semiconscious, a limbo state between the horror of the dream and reality.

I rambled on about the dream, still not completely convinced it hadn't really happened while Tim, still groggy, half listened and fought the urge to fall back asleep. Sleep, for him, was peaceful. I envied that. I couldn't remember the last time I'd slept an entire night. Often the emotional terror that besieged me in my sleep left me more exhausted than if I had not slept at all.

Once he was certain I was completely roused and had escaped the riveting nightmare, Tim settled back into slumber as I furiously scribbled out every detail.

By the time I was finished, the sun was rising, and it was time to wake the kids for school. Cursing my subconscious, I wondered if I would ever have a peaceful night's sleep again.

With notes in hand to prompt me, still groggy from the lack of sleep, I told Dr. Padgett every detail of the dream in session.

“What does it mean?” I concluded.

“What do you think it might mean?”

The frustrating phenomenon of answering-a-question-with-a-question. What an infuriating habit. He always had his own views and perceptions. But he never shared them with me until mine were spoken first. It made me look stupid at times, as his perceptions were always more profound, made more sense, were better than mine. I sighed. It was another of those bizarre aspects of therapy, supposedly in my best interest, that still irritated me, but one I had come to accept.

“I'm not sure. That's why I asked you.”

“Well, how did you feel about it?”

“It was disturbing, really disturbing. I felt like I was trapped. There was no way out. It was really depressing—and so vivid. I had to drive by the place on my way over here just to make sure it was all a dream.”

“Anything else?”

“I wanted to save the building. It made me sick to see it like that. To see it crumble and collapse. Kind of ambivalent, I guess. Part of me was scared to death, just wanted to get out of there so that I wouldn't get crushed. But part of me was like the other voice; I didn't care if it was collapsing. It's crazy. I mean, the place was about to cave in. Staying would be suicide. But part of me felt just like that voice. I couldn't imagine leaving the place, and I'd rather die than leave it.”

“Who do you think the other voice was?”

“Me. Both of them were me.”

“And what do you think the building represented?”

“I'm not sure. I've been racking my brain over that one. I thought maybe it was there because I've been putting in a lot of time on neighborhood stuff and it's beginning to get to me.”

“That might be one meaning. Most dreams have several. I think there's a deeper one.”

I sat silently for a few moments, thinking, like a contestant on
Jeopardy!
racking my brain as the little musical score played on. Still I was drawing a blank. Bzzzzzz. Time's up. I waited for him to give his own answer.

“No ideas?”

“An honest blank,” I said. “I swear to you.”

“The building is the way you think and feel, the old ways and coping mechanisms you've used to view and deal with life.”

“Which is pretty shaky,” I added.

“Yes. The building represents your way of dealing with things, of seeing things. This worked for you when it had to work for you. But now it doesn't. Now it can even be dangerous.”

“But I don't want to leave it.”

“Exactly.”

“Even though it's dangerous for me, it isn't good for me.”

“Right. Because you're attached to it. It's all you've ever known.”

“Maybe.”

“In ways you'd rather die than let it go. You'd rather die than change.”

“Now
that
doesn't make any sense at all. Why would I want to stay in someplace that is definitely going to kill me, that's falling apart? And as far as the change goes, if I'd rather die than change, why have I been coming here for two years? Why do I keep coming?”

“Ambivalence. A part of you really wants to meet the goals of therapy. But another part, represented by the voice in the dream, would rather, as the old cigarette commercial goes, fight than switch.”

“But the dream wasn't about fighting. Fighting is what spared the building in the first place. The dream was about dying.”

“That too. A part of you would rather die than let go of the old ways of thinking.”

“So what are you saying? That I'm not out of the woods yet? That I haven't made any progress?”

“You've made progress but only to a point. And you can't go much further until that part of you that would rather die finally lets go. In a way it's a trap—your own trap.”

“It's that damned inner child again, isn't it? Why can't she just go away? Why can't I just overpower her and tell her to put up and shut up?”

“Because that inner child is you. You can't just banish her. Part of her problem is that she's been overpowered and told to shut up for all of her life. You've got to try and understand her, to listen to her.”

“I'd still rather slap her,” I sighed. “Besides, what on earth could she possibly have to say? She's completely unreasonable; she makes no sense.”

“She's afraid. And as long as she is paralyzed by fear, she's not going to let go, and you will always be trapped.”

“What could she be so afraid of? What could be worse than the whole building collapsing on her and crushing her?”

“Because as much as she might fear those things, she fears something else even more. If the building goes down, there will be nothing there to take its place. She fears nothingness most of all.”

Nothingness. It brought back shades of the night terror from my earliest years when I hadn't feared death nearly as much as I'd feared the thought of what I was before I existed. I'd feared the decades, centuries, and millenniums of nothingness from the beginning of time—a paralyzing fear of the unknown. At my core I'd feared being nobody. Perhaps the notion of wanting to collapse with the building wasn't so strange after all.

The dreams of urban decay continued to haunt me in my sleep. Dr. Padgett had helped me see a few pieces of the puzzle that were key to understanding them. I tried to listen to what these dreams were telling me, to hear the message beneath the terror. Until—finally—I could hear it.

The decaying buildings were, as Dr. Padgett suggested, my old flawed way of thinking and distorted perceptions, summarized by the label “borderline personality disorder,” but far more complex and deeply rooted in my being than even that. The familiar buildings represented all I had ever known.