A Million Little Truths

Posted on February 1, 2006 in Memory PTSD

Blame this on shrinkette. Those psychiatrists will do it every time!

I’ve thought about my memory quite a bit especially because of my Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. When I go back to examine what happened, I realize that I don’t have a seamless story. I can’t tell you what my abusers wore. I can describe the room where it happened, but that is often jumbled — changes in furniture happen retroactively. And I often metaphorize — I see the sticks my father used coming down and breaking blue bones clad in navy blue muscles, for example.

But there are slivers and fragments which I can count on. The memory of my skin being hot — from the beating and from the fear. The feel of the stick. The look on my father’s face which wasn’t, as you might think, twisted into a gargoyle’s grimace but very businesslike, to the point, as if he were in uniform and carrying out a drill. My mother crying “Don’t bruise him! They’ll see it in PE!”

From the point of view of some my memories might not qualify as authentic testimony of abuse. I know, like sera and Warrier know, that this is bona fide, that just because it doesn’t fill the expected suit — that it isn’t a neat story — I can trust them.

Neat stories can obscure the truth. We’ve seen so many Hollywood sagas of atrocity against persons that sufferers of PTSD may believe that our ripped up stories cannot be true. Where’s the story? James Frey fabricates a whole life and Oprah rewards him with a slot on her book club. His lie sells because he tells a story. False memory addicts and victims embellish empty parts of their childhood with satanic rituals. and human sacrifices. For a price, they can buy a lousy childhood –which gives them meaning that I cannot embrace.

Somewhere, I remember reading Elizabeth Loftus(?) writing that the way she could tell the false memories from the real ones is that the people with real ones wanted to forget what was done to them and couldn’t. I make a bad subject for a crime investigtion because I can’t get up on the stand and deliver the grand soliloquy. I can’t tell you the color of my father’s shirt, my brother’s pants, or the jewelry that my mother was wearing. Devils did not dance on the carpet and aliens did not fade in through the walls. The cells of my memory read more poorly and with less linearity than a ripped up volume of poetry. I want to take a match to it all. Every now and then, though, — in the way that radio stations intrude on each other in the desert — I hear snatches of bad songs in my heart.