Sleepless Nights

For a long time after I left Bruce, I woke up nearly every night thinking he was in the room with me. My eyes would snap open, and I’d be frozen in bed, soaked in sweat, my heart beating like it wanted out of my body. I’d lay paralyzed listening for his footsteps or his voice, angry and drunk: Did you think you could hide? Did you think I wouldn’t find you?

It would take me a few minutes to realize that what I thought was happening was not happening. Just another nightmare, but a hyper-realistic nightmare like I’d never experienced before. Bruce was right there, close enough for me to hear him breathing and to smell him—the alcohol on his breath, the cigarette smoke on his clothes, the cat-pee stink of crank that mixed with his sweat when he was using. And by the time I left, he was always using.

The dreams weren’t the same every time, although they shared similar features: Bruce with me in a place where I thought I was safe but wasn’t. The dreams weren’t always things that had actually happened, like the nights he came home drunk and pulled me out of bed. Sometimes I woke from the dreams screaming or trying to scream. I’d get out of bed and go from room to room turning on all the lights in the two-story house where I stayed after I left him. I’d check all the doors and windows to make sure they were locked tight, and the alarm was set, and he wasn’t there, and I was safe, at least for the moment. I never went back to sleep after those nightmares.

When we were together, I didn’t sleep deeply enough to have many dreams. The few I remember were about houses and buildings and being lost in strange cities and needing a map.

On the worst nights of our years together, he’d go straight to the bar after work and come home wasted long after I’d gone to bed. He might wake me up banging on the door because he couldn’t find his keys, and I’d run to let him in before the neighbors could complain. Or I’d be fast asleep and wake up to him yelling at me or dragging me out of bed or choking me because he thought I was his ex-wife.

Before Bruce, I was fearless the way most sixteen-year-old girls are. As a kid, I loved camping and the deep woods and walking alone at night. I didn’t think very bad things would happen to me, and if they did, it was fate. Nothing I could do about fate. I didn’t want to die, but I also didn’t see the point in trying not to.

At thirteen I’d skipped school and stuck out my thumb to get in cars and trucks with people I didn’t know to go places I’d never been. I ran away in 1974, hitchhiking up and down the I-5 corridor during the Ted Bundy years. I thought if I carried a knife, I’d be safe. I thought if I didn’t take rides in vans, I’d be safe. Sometimes I was safe and sometimes I was not, but that didn’t change anything. I made up rules and practiced the art of magical thinking. For years, I pushed fear and reality aside to do whatever stupid thing I was about to do.

When I met Bruce, I was sixteen and ready for that part of my life to be over, although why I thought he was the way out is a mystery to me now. The red flags were waving like crazy. He was ten years older than me, had a drug habit, a prison record, drank a hell of a lot, and told me early on that he used to hit his ex-wife for cheating on him. I believed my love would change him. I had faith. I had hope. But I denied reality. After the first time he hit me, there was a second time, and so on, for fifteen years until the day I left for good. 

After I left, I thought that it was finally over. If I wasn’t getting hit or yelled at anymore and I didn’t have bruises and black eyes to remind me, it had to be over. I was ready for a new life. I believed if I was through with the past, then the past would be through with me. But not so much. I figured the nightmares would stop. I was used to not sleeping much anyway. 

At the time, back in the early 90s, there wasn’t a lot of information about post-traumatic stress disorder or chronic traumatic brain injury in women who survived violence. The Body Keeps the Score, the best-selling book by Bessel Van Der Kolk, hadn’t been written yet. Only football players, boxers, soldiers, and folks who survived some type of horrific one-time accident were the focus of PTSD and TBI research. Nearly all the people studied were men. But while the symptoms of PTSD and brain trauma are similar in both men and women, men’s physiology and hormones are different from women’s. For women like me, survivors of the specific types of violence common in domestic abuse—like choking, which deprives the brain of oxygen, and repeated mild concussions that are untreated and happen over years—there wasn’t much information or help. Mostly there was shame and fear. I didn’t talk about what I experienced. I wanted a new life, and that meant not talking too deeply or too honestly about the old one.

In the year after I left, when the nightmares and panic were at their height, I found new jobs and a new place to live. I met a good man with good friends and a wonderful family, got a restraining order followed by a divorce, and went back to school. I lived alone for about a year before I moved in with that good man, whom I would later marry.

But all that I’d lived through and done my best to ignore continued to affect me, my new partner, and my new life. The good news was that in my new life I had health insurance.

After a case of shingles in the summer of 2014, I didn’t really get better. The rash went away, but I lost my strength and balance when I walked. I fell sometimes. I had frequent debilitating migraines. There were blank spots in my memory and thoughts that scared me. I taught writing and literature, but I often couldn’t remember the content of essays and books I’d assigned. I couldn’t explain things to students. Commenting on their papers took hours because I had to read the same sentences over and over again. My own writing made little sense. Everything was like that: laborious, confusing, and painful, physically and emotionally. I still had nightmares and too many sleepless nights.

I went to the doctor a bunch of times. I didn’t bring up my history of abuse, and nobody asked. I was prescribed medication for migraines, which helped some. I was told I might have the beginnings of dementia. I found a different doctor in a different clinic. This doctor asked if I’d ever had a head injury, and when I told him not officially, he sent me to a neurologist and a rheumatologist. Over the course of a few months, I learned that I had untreated traumatic brain injury, PTSD, and fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition. None of this has gone away, but in the years since, I’ve learned how to deal.

Sometimes I am afraid of what the future might bring. On bad days, it feels like I have a bomb in my brain that might blow at any minute. Women with TBI are at a higher risk of dementia, stroke, depression, and anxiety. When I’m stressed out or tired, all my symptoms reappear, but I’m better at knowing what to do. I’m able to write again, and I can read novels. I just don’t always remember them.

What I do remember now are my dreams. They aren’t about Bruce anymore, and only once in a while do I have a nightmare. Sometimes I dream about bears. They follow me or sit outside my house, watching me. The bears aren’t dangerous and unpredictable like they can be in the wild. They might represent all that was dangerous and unpredictable in my old life. Or they might be a simple reminder of the strength and courage I hope for in the moments before I fall back to sleep.