As destructive as the secret eating could (and would) be, it was unfortunately not the only manifestation of my PTSD. Actually, it was only a small part of it, though there were characteristics of it that bled over into the other areas. The basic nature of the secret eating allowed me to enter a state of Shut Down. Emotionally and intellectually, I was not THERE. The extent to which I was an aware individual went away for a while and I just existed.
There were other areas in my life where this Shut Down began to happen that, quite frankly, baffled me. As a kid, I lacked the understanding of what was happening to me and had no idea how to stop it. The adults around me, guardians and teachers, did not find it needful to look for the root of why I was Shutting Down. Instead, they just opted to punish it.
I think the best example of this has to do with book reports. When we began the year, book reports weren't a part of how our grades were calculated. About the second six weeks of the first semester, however, our teacher decided that we would not only do book reports but that they would be a separate part of our grade. Her grade sheets were typed up already, so she just wrote 'book reports' at the bottom of the page in blue ink and would assign a grade accordingly.
I failed the book report line. I failed it because I could not bring myself to do them. Not WOULD NOT do them. I COULD NOT do them.
To this day, I am baffled by this. I was an avid reader. In fact, my stepfather had made the huge and very 1980s mistake of joining Science Fiction Book Club and I was pouring through books. When I would finish my work in class, I would pull out my book and read on it. Sometimes I would read through recess.
My teacher remarked on this one day. I was in the classroom before the bell rang, my book on my desk as I read. She watched me for a while and then sighed. I looked up a her and asked her what was wrong.
"I just don't GET you, Lilly," she said. "You are reading all the time. I know you understand what you are reading."
"Yes, I love reading."
"Then why won't you do the book report sheets? When you finish one of your books, you just need to fill out the book report sheet and you will pass this requirement. How can you be so lazy that you can't do that?"
Of course, she answered her own question . . . at least to the extent that she wished to consider it. She believed and my mother and stepfather believed . . . and therefore, I believed . . . that I was just too lazy to do the book reports. Just too lazy, as all fat children are lazy, to fill out a piece of paper talking about the book I read.
I started so many of those book reports. I would get the little form as had to fill out. I still remember them because they were photocopied sideways on a legal sized sheet of paper. I would begin to fill them out and I would feel so happy that I was making this effort to do them and that I wouldn't fail and . . .
And nothing. I would stop. Every time I tried to fill one out, I would Shut Down, stop, and never finish it.
I have no idea why.
Over the many years since then, I'm thought about this specific Shut Down and tried to figure out why it happened. My current theory kind of runs like this: at this point in my young life, I was so fucked up over chaotic situations and random bullshit that my mind, in order to protect me, would seek out structure and hold on for dear life.
When the school year started, my teacher explained how grades would be calculated and what was expected of us. My mind accepted this as the order and structure of things and felt a certain level of comfort. When she threw us this curve ball about book reports, it was OUTSIDE of the order and structure my brain had accepted. And, as school was one of the few places where I could find order, structure, and control, my brain basically refused to allow the changes to be made.
My mind would not accept the book reports because they were an alteration in the ordered reality. Because my brain would not accept them, my body could not do them. No matter how hard I tried to force myself to finish one of those reports, my mind would just shut me down, and I couldn't.
Of all the strange things in my life, I have to say that Shut Down mode is the most difficult for me to comprehend. It frightens me that my mind can do things like this to me. It also frightens me how unpredictable and destructive it can be. I almost screwed up college twice because I went into Shut Down about a couple of classes and wouldn't go to them, but wouldn't go drop them either. Like the book report thing, something in my mind triggered and past that, I couldn't force myself to make the physical motions needed to accomplish whatever it was. I simply COULD NOT do it.
Quite often, I hear people complaining about overzealous teachers who will call DHS on parents or people who will send kids to therapy over every little thing. It always kind of annoys me when they talk about how over-reactive these people are. It annoys me because when I think about my own childhood, I wonder how different things could have been had I been given a chance to have some serious therapy or if a teacher had noticed the signs of how truly damaged I was. Honestly, it could have made all the difference in the world.
Because when you are a teacher and you have a student sitting in front of you who is clearly bright and capable of doing the assignment and she isn't, it might be prudent for you to consider the why of this. If that teacher had paused for a moment past her conclusion of "must just be lazy" and started asking me questions about my home life, she might have saved me a lot of painful years.
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