Last night I dreamed I had breast cancer and I’m worried it might be prophetic. The surgeon found a lump. Unconcerned she sent me away for three months but when I returned, it had transformed into something deadly. It would have been fine if she had removed it, but she had been too busy to operate and I, in an uncharacteristically carefree and happy state of being, hadn’t insisted.
As a child, each traumatic and neglectful experience I suffered reinforced my body’s fear of life. Mistrust of others and of myself grew like that breast lump and I matured into a fearful, dissociated, traumatised adult. I’ve always had a fear, a terror even, of ‘letting go’. If I relax, if I unexpectedly find myself feeling ‘happy’, I will fall catastrophically ill. It’s not a rational fear and is seemingly impossible to shift with affirmations and talk therapy because these experiences have hardwired hypervigilance into my being.
The fear derives from my limbic system, a part of the brain that reacts to triggers in the environment faster than the neo cortex, which is a newer addition, the thinking brain, so there is no talking myself out of it. Through the chaos of my early years, brought up by mentally ill parents, I learned that life wasn’t safe, and my nervous system perpetually overreacts to non-threats.
From the time I can remember, my mother never held or touched me. When I was two and a half until the age of five, she sent me to pre-school and each morning as she left, I was abandoned again. On my first day of primary school, I clung to the only part of Mum on offer, her middle finger and before I was ready, she shook me off to disappear again through the classroom door. I stood terrified in a corner, crying silently.
Worse was to come. When I was eight, Mum and Dad underwent a trial separation. My little brother and I were told by way of a letter written by Dad but read by Mum in his absence, as he was on an intrastate business trip. Perhaps he thought it would be easier on us if he wasn’t around, or perhaps he was just too gutless.
As Mum began to read the letter, my brother, thinking it was a game, toddled over to stand in front of her rocking on his baby feet, a Matchbox car in one pudgy hand and his ‘scratchy’ (a scrap of old pillowcase) in the other, his face politely curious, watching her with guileless, blue eyes. He would never understand the meaning of those devastating words, even years later when he drank blindly in search of relief from a dreadful, aching wound he can’t remember sustaining.
Not that I could fathom the meaning of those words either. They washed over me like a numbing tide. Only my slippered feet took them in, and my toes gripped the ground as it began to wobble. ‘Did you have any counselling’, a psychiatrist asked me 48 years later. ‘No’, I told him, while the voice in my head said, ‘Are you kidding, nothing…not even a hug, a touch of Mum’s hand to my ashen cheek….’ He shook his head dismally.
With no conscious knowledge of what had been said, I must have drifted back to my colouring book, while my feet continued to negotiate the shaking ground, skirting the sink holes that were blooming over the old lino floor of my bedroom.
And I had finally been feeling more comfortable at school with my lovely grade three teacher and had a passionate crush on my tin of 36 coloured Texta’s and big book of flowers to colour. I had spent the summer running around the neighbourhood with Debbie in bare feet, catching cicadas, straying onto bindy-eye-infested buffalo grass, hopping in agony, sprawling on the hot concrete path to pull them out before running off again, laughing, yelling, riding my scooter, drinking cordial and eating crisp, tangy apples and suddenly BAM — the letter, the earthquake, the sink holes. Somewhere inside of myself, I fell over and never got up again.
