Turns Out They’re a Memory Trying to Burst Through

All this time, and I mean since childhood, I thought I was fighting off a mental illness. I’d be going about my life in as normal of a way as I can (I’m not normal, but I’m not crazy either), and all of a sudden I would hear the voices.

I don’t know how many poems and stories I’ve written about them. And now I just feel stupid.

Of course, if you were me and had my brain, you’d get it. So many voices at once, talking and laughing, having dinner. Forks scraping on plates and glasses tinkling like they’re toasting each other—a holiday or something. But it was always the laughter that drove me to the brink and made me think I was losing it. All the roaring laughter!

It was just too much, and I always blocked it out. I couldn’t stand the noise, the laughter, the feeling of being an outsider, trapped in my head.

I’d just finished my second book, which is a book about my childhood told in a humorous way and with just enough exaggeration to make it a work of fiction, when it hit me like a bolt of lightning!

I wasn’t hearing different voices, and they were never telling me to do this or that and were never destructive in any way. It was always the exact same scenario. Forks, and glasses, scraping and tinkling, noise and laughter. An occasional chair being pushed back. And me in the background.

A memory.

Here’s the deal, though.

I know there’s a reason I keep pushing the memory away. If something traumatic wasn’t associated with it, I wouldn’t remember an ordinary dinner at all, would I? And it wouldn’t come in flashbacks.

Post traumatic stress disorder. My whole damn life.

I’ve fought this memory and fought it with every breath I have in my body. And I’ve gotten to be strong from other terrible and traumatic events that I had no chance to push away or forget.

So next time the voices come, I’m going to try to listen to them. I’m going to try to remember. I want to know what happened to me to make me lock my mind up so tight that I couldn’t face it.

The boogeyman has already come for me. I’ve already buried my son—three sons in fact, if we’re really counting. Two babies and my sixteen-year-old. I’m no stranger to loss. I’ve been hurt before, and I live in a duality of joy and sorrow.

I can handle whatever this is. I need to know. It’s time.