Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story by Mac McClelland

I’d also yet to feel like I was of my own self.
    I treated Isaac to the same spectacle Tana had been party to so many times: watching me drink while I recounted, thin-voiced, heart racing, some of what had gone down. When dinner was over, and we were back out on the sidewalk, I was a little calmer. By which I mean drunker.
    I proposed tequila. And a sleepover.
    My new general anxiety, that too-heightened idling state and incessant hyperarousal, returned full force as soon as we got into bed at my apartment, tequila or no.
    What , I agonized, was my stupid brain going to do?
    The moment we started making out, my violent feelings welled up. I stopped for a moment, and looked at him.
    “I’m gonna need you to fight me on this,” I said.
    He paused, weighing that.
    “OK,” he said. And because I was different, and the stakes were different from those of any fun tussling we’d done before: “I love you, OK?”
    I know, I said. OK.
    And with that, he was on me, forcing my arms to my sides, then pinning them over my head, sliding a hand up under my shirt when I couldn’t stop him.
    The control I’d lost made my torso scream with anxiety.
    I cried out desperately as I kicked myself free. With all the strength in my limbs, I managed to knock him over to the other side of the bed. And then again, when he came back at me. But it didn’t matter how many times I tossed him off and escaped. He had sixty pounds on me, plus the luxuries of patience and fearlessness. When I got out from under him and started to scramble away, he simply caught me by a leg or an upper arm or my hair and dragged me back. By the time he had pinned me by my neck with one forearm so I was forced to use both hands to free up space between his elbow and my windpipe, I’d largely exhausted myself.
    It had taken less than ten minutes. Just like that, I lost. It was what I was looking for. But with no free hands to defend myself, my body—my hard-fighting, adrenaline-drenched body—exploded into panic. The comforting but debilitating blanket of tension that had for weeks been wrapped around my chest solidified into a brick. Then the weight of his body, and of the inevitability of my defeat, descended on my rib cage. My worn-out muscles went so taut that they ached. I stopped breathing.
    I did not enjoy it. But as it became clear that I could endure it, I started to take deeper breaths. And my mind stayed there, stayed present even when it became painful, even when he suddenly smothered me with a pillow, not to asphyxiate me but so he wouldn’t break my jaw when he drew his elbow back and slammed his fist into my face. Two, three, four times.
    My body felt devastated. But relieved. I’d lost, but survived. When Isaac lay down and gathered me up in his arms, I shattered into a thousand pieces on his chest, sobbing so hard that my ribs felt like they were coming loose.
    “One tried-and-true impact of trauma is people just really shutting themselves down,” Meredith told me when we talked about it. “Also, stuff comes up for people like the way it came up for you: Folks can have a counterphobic approach, moving toward fear instead of away from it. And sometimes people have fantasies like that after trauma, putting themselves in dangerous situations, almost to try to confirm with themselves that they were not impacted. ‘Look, I did it again. It’s fine. I’m fine.’”
    Isaac pulled my hair away from my wet face, mustering a supportive mantra and repeating it to me while I cried. “You are so strong,” he said.
    “You are so strong.
    “You are so strong.”
    I didn’t believe him. Not that day. Not anymore.
    *   *   *
    The flashbacks of the witnessing and screaming every time I thought about intercourse did stop. Isaac and I went through a miniature renaissance, celebrating, happily and filthily, the successful safe space we’d created.
    As exes, we weren’t beholden to each other, and my reclaimed sexual functioning seemed to extend