Might have. Never could have at all.

Last updated on: February 15, 2016 at 6:18 pm by Anne Carpenter

Might have. Never could have at all. 2016-02-15T18:18:19-08:00 Anne Carpenter

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“The empty mask,” Rene Magritte

“How does it feel, knowing that your emotions limit you while your mind is capable of much more?” I glanced at my therapist and attempted a sarcastic “AMAZING,” but all that came out was a shaky “Frustrating.”

I do have a therapist. It’s not at all like confession. It’s not a replacement for religion. I find it helpful, and that’s really all there is to it. I’m troubled by things like PTSD, anxiety, depression, so I find that I need a professional to help me understand what’s happening to me. I’ve suffered abuse and such, and it’s hard to wrap my head around. Never would I require anyone to do what I do to deal.

Since this is my first explicit mention of such things here, I thought I’d be clear. I’m not offering a theory or advocating anything; I simply want to talk about what it’s like to be limited.

And I am indeed limited. I’m hard-working and productive, especially considering the intensity of the things I’ve endured. I can be quick and attentive. There are also days that vanish without warning, consumed by aching stillness. Simple reminders of past violence can lock me in that same past for hours. I can be overwhelmed. It is as if there are two sides of me, the capable and the incapable. Both are equally me, and I am equally them. I’m not the same as my successes or my scars, but I do live with and through them.

I don’t like thinking about how much more I could do if only I did not suffer in these ways. If only I hadn’t been born the way I was; if only I didn’t have the childhood I did. It’d be great if I’d never been taught how to be terrified of being touched. I do wish no one had touched me like that. I’d have been so much less lonely. But it is agony to confront loss that deep – God, just having friends – and everything in me resists it sometimes. I don’t want to break under the weight of things I never had. Never had even a chance at having. All those hugs I could have felt safe within – impossible, when every touch wasn’t safe.

Perhaps because my work centers on the intellectual life, I am most aware of my intellectual losses. Here is where I know I have talent and potential – and immense, immense loss. Sometimes I find myself literally grinding my teeth, frustrated beyond speech. Did I finish reading that book? I might’ve in a day. Or I might’ve spent a day afraid to go outside. I’d feel proud that I still do what I do if I weren’t so busy feeling angry about all that I could do. If only.

I cannot turn off either my intellect or my feelings. Or rather, I cannot split apart my injuries and strengths. Human consciousness is intellect and feeling, is a massive dynamic range. It is a fantasy to imagine that my thoughts exist apart from the rest of me. Thomas Aquinas doesn’t even think that. And mental scars almost always span the secret reaches of thought and feeling.

They are different. These aspects of me. The part that can keep up with an argument and the part watching hands, making sure they don’t touch. Both faculties as automatic to me as breathing, and in certain ways equally as mysterious. But one gives life while the other once protected me and doesn’t anymore.

The more I heal, the more I am aware of the things I’ve lost.

One of my least favorite feelings is the exhaustion that creeps into my bones after a day teaching, after hours spent with my gaze flicking across classrooms, noting every single facial expression. Every single one. Every damn twitch of shoulders. So aware, so prepared to be hurt. And all I want to do is read, after. That thing I’m so good at doing. But I’m so tired, too.

I have no idea what it would be like to have all of my wits about me. To have that half always on the lookout for a threat. I imagine it would be wonderful. Peaceful.

I imagine the people I might’ve known. The things I could’ve done. Instead of hiding from the hands that hurt me so, so much. I imagine the things I could’ve known instead of learning the terrible secret of violence, which is that it doesn’t always have a sound. I try to picture what it would’ve been like to be touched affectionately rather than…not.

The raw unfairness of it.

It never quite becomes real in my mind. All those might-have-beens that never really could have been at all, because that wasn’t how it was. They exist as imagined possibilities, but they never really were. That is what is perhaps most sad. Every couldn’t that is also loss. The “never” that should’ve been “always.” And I don’t know how to mourn those losses, how to live with them, though I do think I need to.

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