I have been feeling my fear again. I’ve started doing EMDR with my therapist. She asks me, “What is one thing you want to change?” I say, “I don’t want to be so afraid all the time.” Then she asks me to go back, as far back as I can remember. I am in the room with my brother, he is dying. I look at this room in my mind’s eye almost every day, but I haven’t felt the feeling of it since I was there, since I was six.
I could sense my mind, my body resisting, but then, I felt it. I was there, I could see it, sure, but more importantly, I could feel it. I am a pebble sinking down to the bottom of a prairie lake.
It is an overwhelming, terrifying, but not unfamiliar feeling—of course the feeling I was afraid to feel is the feeling I am always feeling and have felt my whole life. It feels huge, too huge for anyone to help me handle—the original big feel. And I felt what my brother was feeling. I felt his terror as he approached death, my impulse being to crawl up on the bed with him, to hold him, but feeling frozen in place. I wanted to die instead. I wanted to know how to make it easier. I was six and scared and a statue in a room of moving parts, a room where it was every man for himself and everyone was just trying to survive this heartbreak.
My great fear was and will always be separation from my family. It’s difficult to take anyone for granted when you learn so early how distinct and definite life can be.
This fear of separation was stoked in a constant and steady way with religious end-of-the-world scenarios. It’s strange because I kind of place my religious trauma at the bottom of the list in terms of my life’s pain points, but it’s all connected, isn’t it?
Having so much to wade through with the grief of my sibling dying, the responsibility I had in my position in the family, and then having the apocalypse to worry about on top of everything felt like, oh my god, I have all this stuff to handle and now I have to figure out this?? The concept of being left behind on earth while everyone I loved and cared for could be whisked away to a different world entirely was bone chilling. I was paranoid and would say the sinner’s prayer at any chance, because maybe I had done it wrong last time—maybe I committed a sin I didn’t know about that would keep me from everyone for all of eternity.
I have a mystical mind and an active imagination, but it wasn’t like I created these fears in a vacuum. They were reinforced daily at home and weekly at church; and everyone in my community believed the same things. I wasn’t a kid who dreaded church or allowed boredom to carry me to a safer mental space. I was devout. I was disciplined. I would search even the dumbest sermons to find a lesson to take away. I was focused and alert.
There are two times I was left behind.
Once at my aunt and uncle’s in Southern Saskatchewan: I had a mid-afternoon shower after a day of running around outside. When I was ready and clean, I walked into the living room where I expected everyone to be, and no one was there. I looked out the windows, nothing. I listened in the hall, no one. It had happened, and it was exactly as they had said, that the believers would be taken when I least expected it—I had been left behind.
I can’t remember the moment of relief when I found them (I can’t remember where they all were), but I remember that moment of conclusive terror that I was alone in this world and it was somehow my fault but all I had ever done was love god and love everyone but I must have missed something important, I must have.
The second time, I slept over at my cousins’ house in Saskatoon. It was mostly a boys’ hangout, but I was there too. We watched movies a bit more strange and violent than I was used to. I slept in a room by myself that night. The room had tall shadows and I felt a dark presence (now, I can label this as anxiety, then I labeled it as an evil spirit). I crept through the house and down the stairs to confirm that everyone was where they were supposed to be. I swear to god, when I got to the couch my older brother was supposed to be sleeping on, there was no body. I swear to god it was just a crumpled blanket and his clothes he once inhabited (this was a big trope of the rapture, the bodies would be taken and little piles of clothes where the bodies of the beloved had once been were left behind). I went back to my bed and laid still with shallow breath all night, sure I would wake to the chaos of an apocalypse in motion.
In the morning, everyone was there, the boys stumbling, groggy, from the basement. My auntie made pancakes. We went to the mall.
They say trauma is not the event but the effect the event has on the nervous system. To say my system was nervy is an understatement, miluv. Since the EMDR, this fear has been rising up in me, like bubbles to the water’s surface. It does feel like I need to air it, let it off-gas, let it come through. I am surprised by the force of it. Surprised, and reminded how constant it used to be. When I think of how often I used to feel this, all I am is relief to be where I am now. Like, oh my god.
I tell my therapist offhandedly that as a kid I used to pray that I would die in a car crash with my whole family. I couldn’t bear for us to be picked off from this world one by one. The safest option was for us all to die a gruesome, metallic, tangled death all at once. She says, “You know that means you always knew you were going to lose them, don’t you?”
I am afraid to be separated from my family. I am separated from my family. I am afraid.
I am afraid to be myself. I am myself. I am afraid.
Of course, as a child, I did miss something important, there was something deep and true within me that (allegedly) signed the waiver on my eternal damnation. What I’ve been thinking about lately is this: if I wasn’t the gay one, would I be as supportive as the small few from my family who have stepped up for me? I don’t know. I hope so. I never put it past myself to fail, to fall short. Maybe that’s the remnants of the devout evangelical coming out of me—cast ye not stones, etc, etc. I am grateful not to have to find out.
When I talk openly about separation from my family, immediate or extended, present-day or imminent, it is not from a place of judgement or condemnation. I only talk about it because it is what shapes me. I talk about it because it breaks my heart. I talk about it because people keep telling me to let go and I don’t know what that even means. Sometimes I want to stop them after they say that and ask, “Okay but how? And have you ever? And what does it actually look like to let go when you only love god and love everyone, even still?”
Here’s to being afraid and to letting go (or not) and to being grateful for the ones who are brave enough to walk with us through it all.
Talk soon,
Natahna
The Recommends: Read Awfully Devoted Women, Lesbian Lives in Canada 1900-65 by Cameron Duder
Whew — I had (and have) fear of abandonment, but adding the rapture element truly takes it to the next level. Also, I love your mystical mind!