Part One can be found here.
When I was in the eighth grade, I was unbelievably shy. I blushed when anyone spoke to me and I had a devil of a time looking people in the eye. I tried to fly under the radar as much as possible. For reasons I’ve never quite understood, when the time came to sign up for electives for the next year of school, I chose Speech as one of my elective classes. The class description clearly outlined what would be required of students who signed up for the class and it was obviously geared toward people with a more outgoing nature than I possessed. But, I remember thinking that it would be a good way for me to overcome my shyness, so I took a deep breath and signed up for it.
The first time I had to stand in front of the class to give a speech, I was, of course, terrified. I had worked diligently preparing my speech, practicing in front of the mirror for hours on end to make sure I remembered every word, but also that I paced my speaking in a way so as to meet the required three-minute length. Standing in front of that mirror, practicing away, three minutes didn’t seem all that long. I’ve got this, I thought. I could not have been more wrong.
When it was my turn to get up on the stage, my heart was in my throat and I was sure that my classmates could see my pulse thumping wildly in my throat. I broke out in a cold sweat, focused my eyes on a spot in the back of the room just over the heads of my audience of peers, and took a deep breath in preparation for speaking. I then proceeded to spit out my entire three-minute speech in such rapid-fire prattle that I finished the whole speech in just under thirty seconds, which was, coincidentally, the exact same amount of time it took for me to run completely out of breath. So out of breath was I, that I literally bent forward at the waist, greedily gulping in huge mouthfuls of air with a great gasping, sucking noise that surprised not just me but the entire class and my wonderfully supportive teacher, Sue Patton.
Mortified though I was, I had to stand there, motionless, until the bell dinged to signal the end of my allotted three minutes. The room was deathly quiet as I walked back to my desk to take my seat. Then, mercifully, Mrs. Patton called upon the next victim… err, uhh… speaker and the world started to spin on its axis once again. Another very important part of Speech I was critiquing the work of our fellow students. When I received my stack of critiques at the end of class, I was shocked to find that there wasn’t a single unkind note among them. The one I remember best said simply, take a breath every once in a while.
Speech class became my favorite class and I even participated in debate exercises… and loved it.
All these years later, I still don’t know what part of me found the intestinal fortitude to face my shyness by signing up for that speech class, but I surmise that it is that very same sense of self-preservation that, at the age of 53, made me decide that cowering in a self-imposed corner for more than five years was quite enough and I should find a way out of it.
Reluctantly, I found a therapist and did the unthinkable. I asked for help. Against my better judgment, during our very first meeting, I poured out my sorry tale of woe in its entirety; even going so far as to tell her that I was sure my dad had been murdered by his wife. I was sure she would write me off as some crackpot with paranoid delusions or, worse yet, label me a certifiable nut job and send me on my merry way. Amazingly, she did neither. Instead, she listened to me and never once looked askance at me. She scheduled me for several more sessions during the next few weeks – two a week, at first, because, she said, I was clearly in crisis. She did not say that my imagination must have run away with me or yeah, sure your brother was innocent – ha, ha, wink, wink, or oh, yeah, right, the bank illegally foreclosed on your father’s business. And when I told her that I had always been a fairly successful person until the last five years when I became intimately acquainted with being a failure, she gently told me that my thinking was skewed and that I was not a failure. When I cried to her that I was angry with my dad because he had dumped this mess in my lap by not leaving a will, she reminded me that I had told her that he made a will and had told me where to find it. Remember, she said, you told me the will was not in his safe and you said you thought his wife had disposed of it?
Yes, that’s right, I said, how did I forget that? How did my thinking become so distorted? I can’t even keep my facts straight, I despaired. It was then that she carefully explained to me that some very horrific things had happened to me and my family and I had clearly done everything humanly possible to right those terrible wrongs. She told me I had not failed. It was simply an impossible task and one that was out of my hands. I’m not a failure, then? I didn’t fail?
No, she said. You’re not a failure. She let me sit with that knowledge for a while before she asked me the next crucial question. Perhaps, she said, this is not merely depression you have been fighting. These are very traumatic events you have been through. I think you need to consider the possibility that you have been experiencing PTSD.
A light bulb moment, if ever I have experienced one. A rush of emotions overtook me. I’m not crazy, I’m not a failure, traumatic things happened and I had no control over them. For the next week, I could think of nothing else. Finally, I began to understand. My therapist told me, just as depression is treatable, so is PTSD.
I realized I still had a life ahead of me. There was a reason for the black pit of despondency I had been living in and there was a way out of it. It would be impossible for me to overstate the significance of that revelation. As the weeks passed, I realized that I had stopped waiting for the next devastation and had begun taking steps back in to my life.
I feel as if I recently emerged from a long, dark tunnel. I’m still amazed at the ability of an excellent therapist to help me reframe thought patterns that had twisted and distorted into a veritable prison which had held me captive for five long years. As we are wont to say here in Texas, God bless her heart.
I know that I am still gleaning lessons from the ordeals of the last several years and that it will take me time to process everything that happened. I also know that I am finally standing on solid ground and I am once again looking forward to the future.
Five lost years was quite enough. I have time to make up.
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