Waking Up

I used to wake up screaming.

I used to wake up screaming in one of the bedrooms of the Craftsman bungalow I rented with two of my best friends in Pasadena, California. It was always the middle of the night—I can’t imagine waking up screaming when it is daylight out, but I suppose people do.

The dream might start any number of ways. I am at a literary conference, at a huge labyrinthine venue, cocktail tables dotting the hallways like so many cacti in the Sonoran Desert. I am on my way to the grocery store, driving down Val Vista Boulevard in Mesa, out to collect a long list of items, a list given to me by the mother I haven’t lived with in years. I am on my way to meet friends at a coffee shop or bar, but an ex from my early college years keeps trying to come with me, and I know I have to shake him, have to get away from him because if I don’t, it will likely lead to my demise.

No matter how the dreams started, they could always end in spiders. Dozens of spiders, crawling on me, crawling in my bed. And so I would start screaming, because I needed help with all of the fucking spiders.

I am not especially afraid of spiders. Growing up in the American Southwest, I learned to identify the potentially dangerous ones (black windows, brown recluses). If I saw a spider, I would try to leave it be whenever possible. But if it was one of the poisonous ones and was inside the house, or too close to where one of our standard poodles or cats might sit outside, I would kill it. All other kinds of spiders I would leave to their spidery devices. “They eat the bad bugs,” I could hear my parents telling me, as they did over and over again when I was very young. “Let’s leave them to do their job”.

I went to see the movie Arachnophobia with my parents when it debuted in 1990. Despite my parents’ respect for a spider’s role in our ecosystem, they were still scared by the movie. My father, who was much bigger than any spider at 6 feet and 230 lbs, scrunched up like a ball in his theater seat, shielding his face with his hands, in case the arachnid villains of the film managed to leap from the screen and onto his seat.

And so, in a similar fashion, when a slew of spiders would descend upon me in my dreams, all of my circle-of-life practicality would vanish. And I would wake up screaming.

My dear roommates, Jason and Anthony, would always come my aid. The sound of their footsteps across the hardwood floor would start bringing me back to reality. I always felt embarrassed that I had caused such a fuss, and more embarrassed that I had been so afraid of our friends, the spiders. I knew there was really nothing to be afraid of. Right?

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I try to always talk about the dead. By that I mean I will not steer around or otherwise avoid a point in conversation to avoid talking about the death of someone I loved. This may not seem remarkable, but in my observations of American culture as I have spent the last 15 years gaining more experience than I ever wanted in mourning, I think continuing to articulate our memories of the dead instead of sitting in uneasy silence is more uncommon than we realize.

Our most recent losses in the last year have been Aunt Terry (October 2018) and Basil’s son Octavian (July 2019). Octavian comes up a lot in conversations at work because after clients or co-workers learn about my happy marriage to Basil, they start asking about if we have kids or are planning to have kids. Octavian also sometimes comes up in conversation when people ask about Basil’s potential areas of focus for his fledgling counseling practice, and I answer one of the groups of people he enjoys working with is single parents. People ask me why and I explain he raised his son as a single parent.

“How old is Octavian now?” they often ask.

“He would have been twenty five,” I reply, “but he passed away unexpectedly in July.”

The next response is something like, “Oh my god! This July? I had no idea. How is Basil doing? How are you doing? I had no idea you were going through something like that.”

I try my best to succinctly explain Basil is doing as well as a person could possibly expect to be doing. Enduring a loss I cannot imagine experiencing, he has gone about adjusting to the recent move to Colorado, to his ongoing graduate school education, to building his new counseling practice in Denver, and to all of the daily assaults that life in a time of grief brings you. I would understand if the trauma folded him in half, rendering him immobile for some period of time. But in his incredible resilience, one of the many qualities that made me fall in love with him, he has managed to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

We have both done the same with the loss of Aunt Terry, who we lost unexpectedly last fall. Basil and I, having spent our lives not being able to trust our own mothers for positive care or nurturing, were both so glad to be finally building a deeper relationship with Aunt Terry, who felt to both of us like the mother we never had. And just as we were beginning to build traditions, to finally look forward to holidays with family for the first time in a long time, Aunt Terry died.

Our grief is invisible, nearly weightless, and it permeates our lives each day.

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I didn’t understand when I was living in Pasadena and I was waking up screaming that this may be occurring because of unaddressed trauma. I chalked it up to being afraid of spiders, even though I knew I wasn’t really that afraid of spiders when I was awake.

When I moved to New Jersey and finally took meaningful steps to seek counseling, my first counselor mentioned post-traumatic stress disorder. The idea seemed silly to me: PTSD was something soldiers had, or something hurricane survivors had, or people who escaped genocides. I was just a queer trans kid with a shitty mom and a dead dad.

I think part of how I got through hard days, and how I get through days that seem hard to me now, is telling myself that I am going to be okay, that these sad, soul-crushing losses are part of the human experience. I find myself walking a fine line between compartmentalization and sublimation.

This morning, as I was walking around the house getting ready to do my Sunday yoga workout, I found two biggish spiders in two different rooms. I caught each one in a Maker’s Mark rocks glass and escorted it outside into the cool mile-high morning.

When Basil awoke, not too long after I had rolled up my black yoga mat and put it away, he said I had started screaming about spiders in my sleep last night. I haven’t done this in quite a while. I don’t remember doing it last night at all.

“I tried to tell you you were seeing things. You said, ‘No I am not. They are here.'”

This is the impossible balance of participating enough in our fears, our sorrows in our conscious hours and not banishing them all for our minds, not pushing them down too much. We do not want these things to simply be waiting for us when we finally manage to fall asleep.