I took the bed out of my office
the internal walls
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For three weeks I lived somewhere else and worked on my book. That was the stated purpose of the residency—to write, to be diligent in the manner that home does not easily permit—and I did write, more consistently than I have in a long time, which is, for me, a tremendous triumph. But the writing is not the thing I brought back with me.
I was calmer there. Not in the way one is calm on vacation, where the stillness is borrowed and you know it, where you’re already half-dreading the return even as you settle into the unfamiliar sheets. This was different. For one, I was there to work, and I did more intently than I have at any other residency since 2014. What happened was that by the third day, after one night of ferocious dreaming created by my nervous system’s desire to scan for danger everywhere it goes, something in me leveled out. I could sit in silence, which I rarely do at home; at home, silence is a thing I rush to fill, as though quiet were a crack in a wall and my anxious thoughts the plaster. I needed my medication less. I slept through the night. My moods, which I have come to think of as weather—unpredictable, sometimes violent, always in motion—became a kind of long, clear afternoon.
This was, to put it plainly, not what I expected to learn at a residency about my book.
When I mentioned this to C—tentatively, because I understood how it sounded—he said something like, I’m sorry that you’re so much happier there than you are at home. And I kept telling him: that isn’t what this is. It isn’t the place. If I moved to Arkansas and stayed there a year, I believe I would eventually build the same elaborate architecture of worry that I maintain here at home; I would find new fragile things to monitor, new cracks in new walls. The anxiety is not geographic. It’s structural, and it lives in the proximity to the creatures and people I love—who are here, in this house, where I am reminded daily of their mortality and the terrible fragility of everything I cannot protect.
At a residency, I am one woman with a laptop. The people and animals I love are elsewhere, and because they are elsewhere, I am not running the quiet, ceaseless perimeter check that constitutes so much of my waking life at home. My body, unburdened of its sentry work, turns out to be capable of a calm I had begun to believe was simply not available to me—that the hum of dread was original equipment, part of the blueprint, something I was built with rather than something I was carrying.
It is a strange thing to learn, in middle life with a complex PTSD diagnosis, that you are not as broken as you thought. That some of what you attributed to permanent damage is, in fact, a response to load.
