Tag: attack

You Choose to Exist Here: Reliving Deep Space Nine

Deep Space Nine has always been my favorite of all the Star Trek incarnations. Sweeping in scope, meticulous with character, and challenging my moral intuitions, I got the feeling from the entirety from Deep Space Nine that one gets from a rich and satisfying novel: I felt like a better person for having experienced it.

Occasional viewings of particular out of context episodes aside, I’ve been through the series twice. Once when it originally aired in the 90s when I was in high school and college, probably missing a view episodes due to the ephemeral nature of fixed-schedule TV airings (which seems an absurd way to watch a series now); and in the aughts when I was in my twenties, mostly via torrented downloads on my computer and old-school video iPod.

I am now beginning a third time around, in my late 30s, this time alongside my wife who, while no stranger to Star Trek, never saw DS9. We’ve just watched the pilot episode, titled “Emissary,” and there was something different about it this time, some things I truly didn’t expect.

First of all, I think I expected it to seem more dated and hokey. Instead, it came off as rather mature, far more sure of itself than most TV pilots, and head and shoulders and freakin’ torso over other Star Trek pilots. Jessica, to my surprise, said it seemed a little more mawkish than she expected, but within acceptable parameters (my words, she never talks like that). But not for me. It really held up. I rarely felt taken out of the action by something that seemed forced or overdone.

Also, I know that DS9 has the reputation of being the “downer” of the franchise, the “grim” series, but coming back to it, from the beginning, after all these years, this really was something of a shock. The original series, The Next Generation, Voyager, and Enterprise all began their runs with heaps of wonder and optimism. (Things of course go badly wrong for Voyager in order to set the stage for the series, but the hopeful “second star to the right and straight on ’til morning” spirit was always there.)

The series opens with a flashback to a massacre, and our lead protagonist unable to save his dead wife, and having to abandon his ship to a relentless zombie-cyborg force. Being stationed then at Deep Space Nine, née Terok Nor, we are placed in the midst of an ugly transition out of a brutal occupation. In the pilot episode of a Star Trek series, we are immediately faced with violent, pointless deaths and several characters absolutely spilling over with anger, regret, and helplessness. It’s quite stirring, and it all works.

But there was one part that hit me the hardest, that sunk deep into me, and oddly it’s something I’d almost entirely forgotten about from past viewings.

Toward the end of the episode, Ben Sisko is conversing with the skeptical wormhole aliens, non-physical entities who don’t even experience linear time as we do. They speak to him by taking the form of people in his memories, in the very settings he originally experienced them. So, for example, he discusses how humans experience time with his “son” Jake as they sit by what appears to be a lake, or with his late wife “Jennifer” as they walk down the beach where they met. It’s not really Jake and Jennifer, but wormhole aliens who have assumed their forms, taken from Sisko’s memory.

Somehow, Sisko repeatedly finds himself talking to the aliens amid his memory of the day his wife was killed by the Borg, where he sees his wife, dead, under a pile of rubble, as he’s about to be pulled away toward an escape vessel by his Bolian crewmate. Memory after memory, conversation after conversation, Sisko returns to the place and time he lost his wife.

Throughout their conversations, which are some of the headiest and evocative pieces of dialogue one was ever likely to hear on prime time commercial television, Sisko struggles to explain to the aliens how humans and other “corporeal beings” do not exist in a timeless state, but begin an existence, live their lives through a chain of causal events, and then cease to exist. The aliens are entirely unfamiliar with such an existence, and they ask increasingly probing questions in order to grasp the concept.

One thing doesn’t make sense to them. Remember, they only have Sisko’s memories as a frame of reference. Sisko is telling them that corporeal beings travel along a timeline, and make the best of their lives from one moment to the next, aware that each choice affects and allows the moments to come. And yet, they keep returning to the scene of Jennifer’s death. One of them asks Sisko, “If what you say is true, then why do you exist here?!”

It’s not the aliens taking Sisko to this scene, it’s Sisko taking them.

“I never left this ship,” Sisko says, a realization dawning on him.

“You exist here,” the alien in the form of Jennifer says, also beginning to understand.

“I exist here,” says Sisko. “I don’t know if you can understand.” He begins to sob, increasingly so as he speaks. “I see her like this, every time I close my eyes. In the darkness, in the blink of an eye, I see her… like this!”

“None of your past experiences helped prepare you for this consequence.”

“And I have never figured out how to live without her.”

“So, you choose to exist here,” says the alien, and Sisko nods. “It is not linear.”

“No,” he says, drained, exposed, defeated. “It’s not linear.”

In previous viewings, this scene was meaningful, but to the extent that it was a character I was interested in coming to terms with something painful. It did not truly resonate with me.

Now, as I approach 40, with a wife and two children that I love beyond measure, and with an ongoing struggle with my own post-traumatic stress, I understood.

For so long after I was attacked, I existed there, on that sidewalk, in the dark, with the sounds of footfalls running toward me, of the blows to my head and body, the impact of the concrete, the vertigo of the stumbling walk home. I existed there.

I existed in the throngs of middle school classmates joyfully mocking me, I existed in the oppressive air of the abuse and scrutiny (real and imagined) of my preteen and teenage years. Decades on, I stayed there.

And much to the sadness and frustration of those who loved me, but couldn’t understand, it was not linear.

I suppose I simply hadn’t yet lived enough to truly understand Sisko’s journey before. It’s amazing to me now, to think that this profound, climactic lesson of my favorite show just flitted away in previous viewings. I’m so glad I came back to it now to experience in earnest. I wonder what else Deep Space Nine will show me this time that it couldn’t before.

If you like my work, please consider supporting it through Patreon.

August 30, 2016

attack, deep space nine, ptsd, star trek, television
The Attack, Four Years Later

As you might know, a ways back two thugs beat the shit out of me outside my home Metro station when I lived in DC, and it was really, really bad, and it changed a lot of things for me. Of course, right? Well, last night marked four years since that event, and I thought it might merit some brief reflection here, because it’s impacted so much of my life, my thinking and, of course, my writing here.

To start, here’s my first telling of the event itself, a few weeks after it happened, around my 33rd birthday, wherein I mused at the idea of relative levels of misfortune:

I don’t feel “lucky” as many have said I should. It usually goes something like “You’re lucky you survived” or “You’re lucky they didn’t have a knife” or something like that. I understand the sentiment, but no, I’m not lucky. If I’m “lucky they didn’t have a knife,” that assumes a world in which the zero-point, the point of normalcy, is to be severely beaten by two anonymous thugs and then stabbed. Only then are you “lucky” not to be stabbed. Though I suppose it’s a good thing that my attackers were caught and convicted, I don’t feel triumphant. I know they will likely only come out of prison worse than when they went in. There is little vindication in this.

A few months later, newly transplanted to Maine, I recounted a kind of superstitious milestone in which I was surprised not to be beaten anew.

Speaking of superstitious milestones, as the first anniversary of the event passed, I experienced both anxiety and distraction:

What’s odd is that I had been kind of bracing for the first anniversary of the event, as though there was a sort of rent in the universe where it happened in time, and when the Earth passed through that space once more, as it will with every year’s revolution around the Sun, I would somehow feel it; almost as though it would happen all over again. Of course it didn’t, but even more surprising to me is that on the actual day, it barely registered.

Shortly after, I mused about the futile “what could I have done differently” question, the presumption of some that I should/could have “fought back”:

It’s an absurd question, really, because I know that I could not have. I was snuck up on from behind and hit extremely hard on the back of my head, which knocked me straight to the ground, after which I was pummeled mercilessly by two assailants whose faces I never saw. My neocortex knows there was nothing to be done but survive. My lizard brain, and a small handful of males in my life who I presume are well-meaning, tell me otherwise.

I totally forgot about the two-year mark. Which was kind of good.

After being “discharged” from my first experience with post-attack therapy (I still see a guy), I wrote at some length about the process of working through all of the pain and fear, about how there already existed a roiling undertow of PTSD in my psyche, and how the attack brought it raging to the fore:

Therapy, if you’re doing it right, will get to work on the problem you came in for, yes, but will also address whatever might surround the event in question, other things in my life and mind that gave the attack the meaning that I would come to give it. I think we did it right. The work we did in therapy certainly targeted the assault — heavily — but managed to clean out a lot of other cruft that had built up over the years, over the decades. The attack was an extremely traumatic event, of course, but it had been colored by myriad other events from my past, a sickly array of self-conceptions and assumptions that I had spent a lifetime inculcating myself with, being miseducated about by the world around me. We targeted that stuff, too.

We didn’t fix it all, but we shrunk it. We got me to perceive those things as closer to their actual size, to their actual power. I didn’t lose all my misperceptions about myself or how others see me, but I learned to at least acknowledge that they may not all be true. Guys, I’m telling you, that’s huge.

About a year ago I looked at how PTSD was portrayed in Iron Man 3, and I was mighty surprised how true it felt to me, and how seeing someone else experience the panic, even in a fictional setting, was somewhat triggering:

We see a lot of troubled superheroes. Too often, though, their traumas exhibit themselves in brooding or vendetta. It was extremely refreshing to see a trauma manifest clinically in a superhero character, in a way I as a fellow-sufferer recognized.

And now it’s been four years. It’s obvious to say “so much has changed,” because, well, of course! It’s been four freaking years! But so much has changed directly because of the attack. Perhaps Jessica and I would have eventually decided to move to Maine anyway, it’s certainly something we’d been thinking about, but we certainly wouldn’t have moved when we did. We knew we wanted a second child, and eventually we did, but of course it would have been a different child than the one we got (who is awesome).

But as I talk about in my piece on therapy, I wouldn’t have done the work that I clearly needed to do (and continue to do) regardless of the attack. I had shit that needed dealing with one way or the other, beating or no beating, and I might never have begun to deal with it if I’d not been pushed so terrifyingly far.

I’m not glad in any sense that it happened. It was a nightmare. But it did happen. And here’s where I am now.

October 27, 2014

attack
Tony Stark and Me and Our PTSD

On an episode in May of this year of the podcast The Incomparable, which is a great panel discussion show about whatever bit of culture, entertainment, or literature strikes their fancy, the topic was Iron Man 3. Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, Guy English takes the temperature of the group concerning the introduction of Tony Stark’s panic attacks, a symptom of his PTSD following the harrowing events of the previous film, The Avengers. There was general agreement that, yes, what Tony experienced battling the aliens at the climax of The Avengers would definitely fuck one’s shit up, but there seemed to be some ambivalence about whether it out of place in the context of the film in question.

I quickly want to address what they did not, which is whether it was done well. I watched Iron Man 3 only recently, on my MacBook during a flight a month or so ago, and I found the portrayal of someone suffering from post traumatic stress disorder shockingly realistic.

Let me qualify: I have only my own experiences to draw from. Read this to get a better idea of how I know anything about the topic — it doesn’t involve aliens. I do not at all want to assert that my experience of PTSD is universal or even common. It’s just what I know.

All that said, I was amazed at how much I related to Stark in his moments of panic. I recognized my own behavior in his when one of his attacks set in. (For the sake of rhetoric, I’m going to use the word “you” even though I’m really talking about “me.)

Something sets you off — a reference to an event, an association, a physical stimulus, what have you — and an animalistic fight or flight instinct takes hold. But it doesn’t necessarily own you entirely, you don’t turn into some werewolf in a waking nightmare. Your conscious mind is aware of what’s happening. You know you’re having an irrational rush of emotions and that your body is now compelled to act with sudden and overwhelming urgency. Maybe you run, maybe you fight, maybe you hide, maybe you scream, etcetera. All the while, you recognize that something not of your neocortex is in control. You may even be able to make jokes about it while it’s happening.

So I was mightily impressed and very much surprised by the way it was handled in this movie. It would have been easy to overdramatize Tony’s episodes, to make them Hulk-like in their violence and intensity, to make Tony unrecognizable in those moments. Instead, they let them be very much Tony’s episodes. We got to see him become aware of something happening to him, see him comment on it, struggle with it, and even try to mitigate it based on circumstance. And yes, he could even have a sense of humor about it in the moment. What was so true to life for me was that Tony never loses all control in those moments, but you do see his whole body carriage change as though a new force were asserting itself on his body’s operation, as though he was the Iron Man suit, and his amygdala now the driver.

We see a lot of troubled superheroes. Too often, though, their traumas exhibit themselves in brooding or vendetta. It was extremely refreshing to see a trauma manifest clinically in a superhero character, in a way I as a fellow-sufferer recognized. Indeed, Downey’s portrayal of PTSD episodes was so real to me, it mildly triggered my own responses, sitting there at over 10,000 feet, in the dark. My heart raced with his. My amygdala called shotgun in my mind for a little while.

I understand why it might have seemed a touch superfluous to the Incomparable cast. There are a lot of ways to tell the story of Tony growing as a character and knowing what it is to have weaknesses and failings. But this way of telling that story was crystal clear to me. For a big, explode-y Hollywood blockbuster, they told that about as well as I imagine anyone could.

December 4, 2013

anxiety, Assault, attack, culture, film, pop culture
For Mother and Father, In Equal Measure

Patrick Stewart magnificently describes his efforts in combatting (and his childhood experience of witnessing) violence against women. Watch the whole thing, and then read on for some thoughts.

Perhaps most moving to me is his discovery of what had moved his father to be violent toward his mother: PTSD brought on by his time in World War II. It is this revelation that brings him to a new milestone in his own campaign for the cause, wherein he gives his time both to Refuge, a nonprofit that provides safe houses to women, and Combat Stress, a group that works with those suffering from PTSD:

So, I work for Refuge for my mother, and I work for Combat Stress for my father, in equal measure.

As I have written here before, I suffer from PTSD myself, not from combat of course, but from the combination of a violent assault near my home when I lived in Washington, DC, and many years of relentless mockery and bullying from my middle and high school years. Obviously, the scenarios are starkly different, because my experience had almost nothing to do with any expectation that I be the aggressor, as it is for soldiers. But it does cause me to behave in ways that I would not otherwise, taking over my rational brain and my empathy when a threat is detected. It makes me understand how trauma can cause a person to act in such a way that they themselves might not recognize. It does not excuse it by any means, but it helps to explain it, and provides a point of potential repair so that it stops.

And one more note: I found myself watching Stewart’s body language, and it told its own story. Note how early in his answer, he hugs himself, tightly. This is classic defensiveness — as an actor, I’m well aware of the unconscious tendency for folks feeling insecure in front of an audience to brace or hug themselves to provide a bit of armor from imaginary danger. For Patrick Freaking Stewart to do that tells you something about how raw this issue is for him. Later, of course, he opens up very wide, his arms far out, exposing his face and chest, telling me he there finds his ground, finds his purpose, and it carries him to a courageous state. He is no longer defending, he is affirmatively acting. Not theatrically, but acting as in doing something.

(Hat tip to Kylie for the video.)

June 3, 2013

attack, bullying, personal, ptsd, video, violence
Shame

What’s not news is that high school is, for many, hell. But the effects of one’s experiences during adolescence (and for this purpose I’ll use “high school” as shorthand for the general puberty-through-adolescence time period, which can include middle school and junior high) are often minimized, at least in my anecdotal experience. For most of my adulthood, I’ve been keenly aware of how my high school experiences have shaped me, mostly for the worse, but even the most well-meaning and caring people in my life minimize them, saying, “But it was just high school. It was tough for everybody!” The message being, really, get over it.

I know better now. Especially after the tough work of recovering from PTSD brought screaming into prominence by a violent attack a couple of years ago, I’ve come to understand just how formative my experiences between the ages of 10 to 18 really were. I won’t go through everything I’ve learned, but suffice it to say, “get over it” was never an option — one forms an understanding of one’s self and one’s surroundings at a time when the mind is most malleable, and most prone to rely upon the lizard brain, as it were. When painful interactions take place, it’s not just unpleasant, the adolescent brain goes into fight-or-flight mode. For me, being the subject of relentless bullying and mockery and humiliation at the hands of my peers, I learned to be in fight-or-flight mode during almost all of my waking hours. My lizard brain never got a chance to rest.

How could that not shape how I behave today? How I perceive myself, and how I believe myself to be perceived by others?

All this comes to mind as I read an amazing piece in New York Magazine by Jennifer Senior on a growing understanding of high school’s effect on us into adulthood. The gist is that research is showing more and more that a) we are far more affected by, and haunted by, our high school experiences than we’d previously believed, and that b) high school itself is a sociological shitshow, a horrible environment to place hundreds of strangers who are all mushy of brain and lacking in self-knowledge. It was, to say the least, eye-opening.

One thing that was enlightening to me was an explanation of what causes this shitshow to begin with. Senior writes:

Absent established hierarchies and power structures (apart from the privileges that naturally accrue from being an upperclassman), kids create them on their own, and what determines those hierarchies is often the crudest common-denominator stuff—looks, nice clothes, prowess in sports—rather than the subtleties of personality.

So right off the bat, I was in trouble. Small, clumsy, uninterested in sports, quirky. I was predestined to be screwed. Plus, I was new: I entered middle school having just moved to the area, and I had no connections to anyone in school. Like I said, screwed.

At the time they experience the most social fear, they have the least control; at the time they’re most sensitive to the impressions of others, they’re plunked into an environment where it’s treacherously easy to be labeled and stuck on a shelf. “Shame,” says Brené Brown, a researcher at the University of Houston, “is all about unwanted identities and labels. And I would say that for 90 percent of the men and women I’ve interviewed, their unwanted identities and labels started during their tweens and teens.”

Now there was a word with resonance for me. Shame. Shame permeated my every thought and breath during those years, and its essence is still palpable to me today. More on that:

Shame [is a] . . . global, crippling sensation. Those who feel it aren’t energized by it but isolated. They feel unworthy of acceptance and fellowship; they labor under the impression that their awfulness is something to hide. “And this incredibly painful feeling that you’re not lovable or worthy of belonging?” asks Brown. “You’re navigating that feeling every day in high school.”

Most of us, says Brown, opt for one of three strategies to cope with this pain. We move away from it, “by secret-keeping, by hiding”; we move toward it, “by people-pleasing”; or we move against it “by using shame and aggression to fight shame and aggression.” Whichever strategy we choose, she says, the odds are good we’ll use that strategy for life, and those feelings of shame will heave to the surface, unbidden and unannounced, in all sorts of unfortunate settings down the road.

And so I have. I hid as best I could, I tried to blend, to not be noticed. On top of being mired in self-loathing, I was also exhausted from the effort I expended to avoid attack in the first place.

And, as I learned, these patterns did not disappear as I grew up. They manifested themselves even in what should have been the safest, most welcoming, or benign of circumstances, causing me to perceive danger to my sense of self in all situations, causing me to be stunted and paralyzed. I carried with me the shame.

I’m now much more aware of this as a physiological phenomenon than I ever was. Even when I experience this fear, this shame (and I still do a lot), I can at the very least identify it as an artifact of a bygone time. Even if my body and my lizard brain are in fight-or-flight, my higher self can at least understand what’s happening, and perhaps take steps to mitigate. Take the trolling and abuse I’ve been subject to on Twitter and on this blog, for example, because I dared suggest that people in privileged situations should do more listening than arguing. When I’m attacked for this, even by those who are clearly not worthy of my attention, my heart rate rises, my chest tightens, blood flows from my brain to my muscles as though I’m getting ready to run away from a tiger. I’m in fight-or-flight again. I’m in high school again.

But look, there’s no escaping that high school has shaped me, for better or ill, so there’s no point in pretending I’m totally at ease now, or with simply letting it all go — particularly following my assault. Like it or not, I am as I am, which includes the baggage of shame I have been lugging with me since I was 10 years old. The silver lining is that I can identify it for what it is, I can learn from it, I can use it to help my son and daughter manage better than I did, and I can make it serve as fuel for creativity and thought.

That is, when my heart rate goes back to normal.

February 4, 2013

attack, bullying
After the Attack, the Work

I’m not sure if this was a “secret,” if I intentionally haven’t written about this because it was too personal, or what. Well. The thing is, since I was beaten to a bloody pulp by a couple of thugs outside my home Metro stop back in DC over two years ago, I’d been in therapy to deal with the psychological aftermath. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, and I underwent two years of treatment using a therapy known as EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), working to heal some of the damage that was not visible on my face, head, and body.
And today was my last day.

So I’m cured! I am now officially devoid of any psychological problems. I am the very picture of mental health. I have the perfect psyche.

Well, no, but I’ve come a long way, and if I haven’t written about therapy before, I figure a good way to mark the occasion is to talk about it in this public forum. Or maybe it’s not, and this is a bad idea. Maybe I’m looking for something of a back-pat from the interwebs, and maybe I just need to, as it were, say it out loud to make it real.

When I started therapy two years ago, I was a wreck. My wife and I had decided to leave DC rather suddenly after the attack, figuring that we’d be better off in Maine, surrounded by my wife’s family (which is an awesome family), living in an environment far less hostile than DC, and giving our then-infant son a better place to grow up.

But of course, we arrived with little in the way of plans. We lived with relatives for a time, and I scrambled for employment (I had been working for the Secular Coalition for America at the time of the attack, but was already on my way out). It was a long time before I felt together enough to work, or to even look for work, and the pickings were rather slim. My work experience, my advanced degree in political management, none of it mattered much now that I was far away from Washington. I had to take what I could get.

So during my first session with my therapist, the cast had just come off my arm, we were broke, I was unemployed, my wife was still looking for permanent employment, we were living with one of my in-laws, and I was in such a dark, ugly place that I began to see my very existence as a detriment to the well-being of my wife and son. I had nightmares and would sink into reveries of sadness and guilt, or from out of nowhere would experience a sense of panic, feeling a need to physically run away from…toward…I didn’t know. Sad, scared, ashamed, paranoid, embarrassed, weary, resigned, terrified.

Therapy, if you’re doing it right, will get to work on the problem you came in for, yes, but will also address whatever might surround the event in question, other things in my life and mind that gave the attack the meaning that I would come to give it. I think we did it right. The work we did in therapy certainly targeted the assault — heavily — but managed to clean out a lot of other cruft that had built up over the years, over the decades. The attack was an extremely traumatic event, of course, but it had been colored by myriad other events from my past, a sickly array of self-conceptions and assumptions that I had spent a lifetime inculcating myself with, being miseducated about by the world around me. We targeted that stuff, too.

We didn’t fix it all, but we shrunk it. We got me to perceive those things as closer to their actual size, to their actual power. I didn’t lose all my misperceptions about myself or how others see me, but I learned to at least acknowledge that they may not all be true. Guys, I’m telling you, that’s huge.

You know what? I got bored with the memory of the attack. What was once a horror movie I would replay in my head over and over with new feelings of terror and dread with each mental reenactment, eventually became a sad rerun of a show that I was tired of seeing. That, I’m telling you, is huge.

So I’m not “cured.” I don’t think I ever will be, and quite frankly, I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to lose what will now forever be a part of my story, a part of who I am. What the work helped accomplish was making the attack no longer define who I am. And it began the work of not letting all the darkness that came before it define who I am — the years of mockery, bullying, and harassment all through middle and high school, the professional failures and life mistakes made in adulthood, my hangups and neuroses. Not exclusively define me, anyway. They will all always be a part of me, but I learned that they’re not all that I am.

You know what I think was the big tip-off that it was time to wrap things up? When my therapist realized that the things that troubled me, that the things that consumed me, were, well, predictable. Banal. My toddler is behaving badly. Work is stressful. Money is always tight. But that’s stuff everyone deals with. And that’s what was consuming me. Not self-doubt. Not a tar pit of guilt and shame. Not terror and fear. Just, you know, the life of a grownup with kids. It’s, well, normal.

I never thought I could ever describe anything about myself that way. I’ll take it.

* * *

(For previous writings on this topic, you can read posts under this tag.)

December 10, 2012

attack, bullying, ptsd
The Attack, Ctd?

Last year, the anniversary of my assault carried great weight with me. I dreaded the coming of the date October 27, and worried that I would relapse into a spiral of terror and despair all over again. (I didn’t.)

This year, I completely forgot about it. The day came and went, and I didn’t notice.

It’s taken an enormous amount of work and suffering and rebuilding to get to a point where that’s even possible. I’m still wrestling with that night’s repercussions to this day, and likely will for a long time, but even I’m a little astounded that the second anniversary came and went, and I was just too busy to realize it. Hmph.

November 2, 2012

attack, personal
Alexander Aan and Me
Considering the maniacal focus I’ve had on the case of Alexander Aan at work, it’d be remiss of me not to deal with it on my own blog. So a quick recap.

Alexander Aan, a civil servant in West Sumatra, Indonesia, posted on Facebook his lack of belief in God and some satirical cartoons about Islam. As a result, he was beat by an angry mob, arrested for atheism, and charged with disseminating information that might incite religious hatred. He facts over two years in jail and a fine that equals about $10,600.

Here’s me, you see. Not only do I get to sit here and blog about atheism and criticize the great scam that is religion, and at worst I could be ostracized by certain segments of our culture. Those may be some pretty big and important segments! But I’m not in any immediate danger because of it.

Oh wait. I actually get paid to be an unbeliever! I work for an organization, one of the prime purposes of which is to advocate on behalf of atheism, secularism, and humanism, all the while trying to lessen the influence of religion on public life. It’s my job.

I won’t be charged with a crime for it. I likely won’t be attacked physically for it. But that’s what happened to Alexander.

Now, I’ve been beaten up before. As some readers know, I was attacked by two thugs on the street near my apartment in DC in 2010, and it was by several orders of magnitude the worst thing ever to happen to me. It was terrifying, painful, and it sent me on a spiral of fear, guilt, self-loathing, anger, and anxiety that I still work every day to recover from.

But I didn’t get attacked by an angry mob. Alexander did. I didn’t get attacked because of who I am, or what I believe, but Alexander did. When I was attacked, the perpetrators were arrested and put in jail.

But Alexander was the one arrested and put in jail. His attackers are doing just fine.

I really don’t know anything about Alexander. I wrote about the letter he sent to supporters in a kind of charming broken English, so he seems like a gentle guy. But who knows. But I put myself in his place, and I can only imagine what he’s going through. I can approach it in my own mind, but I know that the terror and anger and fear must be multiplied from my own.

So I really want you to do this small thing: sign my organization’s petition to get the White House’s attention, and please, please, please share it with as many people as possible. Nonbelievers and theists alike. It has to get to 25,000 signatures to guarantee a response. If you’re reading this, you’re almost certainly progressive-minded with a social conscience, and know how to share a link and send an email. Please do that. It’s literally the least you can all do.

With that, here’s a roundup of information.
- The petition in question.
- CFI’s call to sign the petition.
- Washington Post/RNS coverage of the cause.
- My posts at Friendly Atheist on the petition, Alexander’s letter and why I think his case is important.
- A Point of Inquiry video with Michael De Dora (who has been a champion in working this case) and Chris Mooney about Alexander’s plight.
July 20, 2012

alexander aan, atheism, attack, personal
On Violence: Accepting What I Could (and Couldn’t) Have Done

As the tens of readers of this blog are no doubt sick of being reminded, I was the victim of a violent assault about a year ago in Washington, DC. It’s impossible for me to give you any meaningful explanation of the psychological aftermath of such an event in any brief form. But one particular mental scar that I presume is common among victims of violence is the nagging question of what I could have done differently. Could I have avoided it? Did I bring it upon myself?

Perhaps most resonating and sensitive to me as a male is whether I could have fought back.

Somewhere down this way, the scene of the crime.

It’s an absurd question, really, because I know that I could not have. I was snuck up on from behind and hit extremely hard on the back of my head, which knocked me straight to the ground, after which I was pummeled mercilessly by two assailants whose faces I never saw. My neocortex knows there was nothing to be done but survive. My lizard brain, and a small handful of males in my life who I presume are well-meaning, tell me otherwise.

Hero-of-the-blog Sam Harris recently wrote an incredible essay on our responses to and preparations for violence, and as he does in all other subjects which he tackles, he offers stark, clear warnings and advice. The theme? “True self-defense is based not on techniques but on principles.”

Harris mainly focuses on preventable violence, or situations in which there are options (whether to follow the instructions to get in one’s car from a parking lot mugger, for example). But in a paragraph relevant to my own story, he reminds me to shut out the voices of macho egotism espoused by my self-critical R-complex and some “traditional” males in my life, some of whom have suggested that had I only been trained in martial arts, I could have neutralized the attack (with my own emphasis):

Herein lies a crucial distinction between traditional martial arts and realistic self-defense: Most martial artists train for a “fight.” Opponents assume ready stances, just out of each other’s range, and then practice various techniques or spar (engage in controlled fighting). This does not simulate real violence. It doesn’t prepare you to respond effectively to a sudden attack, in which you have been hit before you even knew you were threatened, and it doesn’t teach you to strike preemptively,without telegraphing your moves, once you have determined that an attack is imminent.

No one has spelled this out for me so clearly as Harris has, and I must say, it gives me some comfort, though I imagine many men would dismiss this in a huff.

I was also glad to read some of what Harris had to say about not allowing yourself to be placed in a vulnerable position in the first place:

You are under no obligation, for instance, to give a stranger who has rung your doorbell, or decided to stand unusually close to you on the street, the benefit of the doubt. If a man who makes you uncomfortable steps onto an elevator with you, step off. If a man approaches you while you are sitting in your car and something about him doesn’t seem right, you don’t need to roll down your window and have a conversation. Victims of crime often sense that something is wrong in the first moments of encountering their attackers but feel too socially inhibited to create the necessary distance and escape.

At my current retail workplace, I have begun to practice this with less and less feeling of apology. When a person enters the store and immediately approaches me too closely, I make a broad step back to create distance and frankly also to communicate that this degree of physical nearness is unnecessary (we can talk about what they need without being close enough to hug) and simply not going to be an option. In other words, in case their intentions are not benign, I’m not going to give them the advantage of proximity.

I may be behaving in a paranoid manner, and I accept that. But after what I’ve gone through, I just don’t see a reason to give everyone, as Harris says, the benefit if the doubt. I’m not a dick about it (I hope), but I’m not willing any longer to be a patsy either.

November 25, 2011

attack, personal, sam harris, violence
It’s Not Meningitis!

So, I thought that getting through the anniversary of my violent encounter on the streets of DC would be something of a relief, a release of some psychological pressure that’d been building up for some weeks. As I noted, the event itself passed almost unnoticed by me when it actually came, so there was some feeling that the “curse” of the date in question was without any potency. And of course I don’t believe in that stuff anyway.
And then last Sunday night, going into Monday morning, I got slammed with what seemed like a flu: a tremendous headache and unbearable body aches and a high fever that floored me for the day. Nothing abnormal about that, really. I can’t get the flu vaccine because of a presumed allergy to what it’s cultured in, so it’s no shock that I’d, you know, get the flu. Life was marching on as this inconvenient virus did battle with my white blood cells, and so as I started to feel a bit better the next day, Tuesday, I skipped out on resting and wrangled my energetic, touchy, and destructive toddler for the day — my usual day off from work and time to spend with His Grouchiness.

But it was rough — rougher than I expected, even. I’d be easily winded, and I’d lurch back and forth to feeling absurdly cold to a sweat-drenchingly overheated. Just getting over the flu, I supposed. Though I never had the cold-like symptoms that often come with a flu, but whatever, it must have been the flu.

Back to work on Wednesday and Thursday. Both days were very rough, though, and I knew I wasn’t fully recovered. I was tired, a little hazy, and not capable of concentrating on a meaningful level. Oh, I was also extremely unpleasant, short-tempered, and overly dramatic about my slightest emotional sensations. So I was a lot of fun for everyone around me. I’d never had so many people ask me “are you okay?” and not already be hospitalized. But stay tuned!!!

Thursday’s work day was the worst, as my headache reasserted itself. But it wasn’t just a regular oh-I’m-sick headache. It was the Headache to End All Headaches. A headache that will live in infamy. A noun and a verb and this headache. More precisely, it felt as though two mean-looking guys were squeezing my eyeballs with rusty pliers.

So I called out of work for the next day. I just can’t power through this, I thought, I need another day to rest. Jess was concerned enough to call our doctor to be on the safe side, and they thought it prudent to bring me in for a look-see. Great! Nothing I’d like more than to drive into Portland to be asked a bunch of questions about my headache so they can tell me what I already know. Great!

But I go. And it’s unbearable. The sunlight, the office lights, moving my eyes, all of it is excruciating and increasingly so. I find myself apologizing to nurses and staff every few sentences or so because I know I’m sounding brusque and foul-tempered.

They discover I’m still sporting a fever, which concerns them, and then I see the available general practitioner in the office (my usual guy wasn’t there that day). I get what feels like an interrogation at a CIA rendition site as she pummels me with questions about my liquid intake and exactly how much does your head hurt, Mr. Fidalgo, if that is your real name?!?!?

At one point, she asks me what seems like a throwaway question about neck stiffness. Meh, I say, everything is stiff, I have the god damn flu, so sure. Neck stiffness.

Bad move.

After “consulting with her colleagues” (quick check at WebMD is my guess) I am told that my wife must leave work to pick me up and get me to the emergency room. Yes, Paul, you may be the lucky winner of a brand…new…lumbar puncture!!!!

Listen. I’m not good with anything-punctures. When I have blood drawn, I pass out, but not until after having convulsions and writhing in agony. Yes, I’m that way with needles and things. Now this woman is telling me she “would not be a good doc” unless she sent me over the hospital to have my spine stabbed and sucked of fluid to see if I have meningitis. GREAT.

Not bacterial, she notes, “the bad one.” Much more likely that it’s viral, which means, essentially, that I’d just have to suck it up and get over it. So in case you’re wondering, whether or not the stabbing of my spine yielded a positive result for meningitis, the treatment would be exactly the same.

Anyway, back to my reaction when she said I’d need the puncture:

“No. No. No.”

Didn’t seem to land with her. So Jess left work, picked me up, and brought my wrenched-with-both-pain-and-fear self to the hospital.

And then things get really absurd. First, I wait an abysmally long time — in an uncomfortable chair — to be seen. Then a nurse interviews me, asks me about my symptoms, and takes my vitals. In this room, I wait an abysmally long time in an uncomfortable chair. (Remember, I’m still in agony and gripped with paralyzing fear.) I am still cycling through feeling ultra-cold and ultra-hot. Finally, I’m brought to an actual exam room. After waiting an abysmally long time in an uncomfortable chair, cycling through extreme body temperatures and gripped by pain and fear (and a wife getting plum sick of it all, thank you very much) another nurse comes in and — can you guess? — interviews me about my symptoms, as though this was all brand new and I had had no contact with anyone else in the hospital, and takes my vitals.

I take to the stretcher in the room, because I can’t bear being seated anymore in the uncomfortable chair. What feels like hours later, all the while my headache and fear are worsening, yet another nurse asks me about my symptoms and takes my vitals. Finally I’m given an IV of fluids and painkillers to deal with what’s ailing me (dehydration is one of the concerns). Remember what I said about needles? It applies to IVs too. When the needle was inserted, I writhed and wriggled and cursed and whined like a puppy being tortured with surgical tools. Even after the actual puncturing was over, I was still aching and complaining of the pain in my arm.

Oh, and the medicine wasn’t working. My headache was not being mitigated one iota. But one drug they decided to inject me with was having an effect: Benadryl.

Now let me tell you something about Benadryl. I’m a pretty allergic guy, so I know my antihistamines. Benadryl, as opposed to say Claritin or Zyrtec, is a last resort drug. If nothing else is remedying an allergy or cold symptom, one resorts to Benadryl. Why last resort? Because it may as well be the off switch for my consciousness. I would say it turns me into a zombie, but even zombies have the wherewithal to go after brains. On Benadryl, I am a corpse.

But they injected me with Benadryl for reasons never explained. But while on this Benadryl, I get a new parade of people coming once every (what feels like) few hours to — bonus if you can guess again — ask me what my symptoms are and check my vitals. No fewer than three more nurse visits plus three separate doctors come in to pepper me with nuanced questions about my status, all while I can barely — barely — even make out what they’re saying to me, let alone answer coherently (and definitely not politely).

Three doctors!!!

And the headache is still not improving. I would have contemplated suicide if I’d had the energy to think so creatively.

Finally, they dose me with some morphine which begins to take the edge off the headache, only very slightly. In the midst of my interviews, the three doctors all seem pretty confident that I mean it when I say that my neck is not the center of my agony. If my neck had been seizing up when I moved my limbs, that’d have been a cause for concern, but being that it was, as it were, all in my head, meningitis no longer seemed to be a viable diagnosis.

(In the midst of all this interrogation, no fewer than three medical professionals prodded with their thumbs in the very spot my orbital bone was fractured in my assault last year, because god forbid any of them first look at any medical records that say, “Try not to poke Paul in the right cheek, since a couple of thugs turned it into gravel a year ago.”)

So no lumbar puncture. If there is a silver lining to this misadventure, it is that, but it is tempered by the fact that had my general practitioner not overhyped my throwaway answer to what sounded like a merely incidental question about my neck, I’d never had to go through any of this. Everyone was well-meaning, many even downright sweet (one particular nurse was downright plucky in her attempts to both do her job and keep me from flying off the handle), but the confluence of circumstances made this something out of a satire.

My wife remains my hero, and she deserves the longest and most peaceful of vacations.

The next day I mainly slept and drank water, and only today am I able to keep my eyes open long enough, and hold my attention anywhere long enough, to type out this anecdote. I hope I hope I hope I’m through the worst of it, though today I still feel pretty awful. Either way, I managed to get through the anniversary of my attack without a psychological crisis. But my body and a few absurdities in our health care system made sure I didn’t get off without a physical crisis.

I can’t wait to see what happens next year.

November 6, 2011

attack, health care, personal
The Attack, Ctd.

This past Wednesday marked one year since I was assaulted by two thugs outside a DC Metro station, and everything changed. What’s odd is that I had been kind of bracing for the first anniversary of the event, as though there was a sort of rent in the universe where it happened in time, and when the Earth passed through that space once more, as it will with every year’s revolution around the Sun, I would somehow feel it; almost as though it would happen all over again.

Of course it didn’t, but even more surprising to me is that on the actual day, it barely registered. Life got in the way. Work, parenthood, new projects, etc. All of these demanded my attention, leaving no room for re-experiencing the attack.

Don’t misunderstand me. I live with it every day. The fear, the guilt, the worry — it’s all still there, and I keep feeling it in new and unexpected ways. In fact, in my ongoing therapy sessions, part of the treatment is to experience the assault over and over again in my own mind, until it almost becomes boring.

I also live with the physical damage to this day. Where my orbital bone was fractured, just below my right eye, the nerve damage has yet to heal at all — my teeth just below the fracture are still numb, and sinuses on the entire right side of my head continue to feel as though they are clogged with rusty lug nuts. My wrists will probably never get any better either — already problematic before the attack with pain and weakness, they took several impacts from my being knocked to the ground several times, and they continue to hurt, they continue to bear weight poorly, and the old problems once-unrelated to the attack have come back with a vengeance, and seem to be worsening.

In the broader picture, the attack spurred enormous changes in my family’s lives. We decided to move from DC to Maine, we got new jobs, and we struggle with finances and with questions about where we belong.

But I guess the most important thing is that we’re okay. Toby thrives (though he likes TV way too much), Jess’s job is a good one, if not the epitome of creative fulfillment, and I’m just starting to find my feet at work and with other potential projects — but just barely. All in all, though, “just barely” is not so bad, particularly considering the state of the economy.

There are a lot of challenges we still need to meet as a result of all these changes. We are extremely fortunate in the family support network we have here in Maine and elsewhere; we know that none of them would ever let us fall on our faces. I’m continuing to work very hard in therapy to address all that the attack caused and all that it dredged up. I’ve learned that so much of that damage is bigger than the attack itself, so the work is more overwhelming than I ever could have guessed.

But had this not all happened, I may not have started that work. We wouldn’t have come to this wonderful place. I don’t at all mean to imply that it was “good” that the attack happened. It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. But at the very least, it’s spurred a series of events that, in the end, may prove to be a net positive.

November 1, 2011

attack, personal
Fumes

There’s been a lot of upheaval in Fidalgo Land since my violent encounter in October of last year. As my tens of regular readers already know, not only have we left behind a city, I’ve left behind not just a job, but perhaps a career. My master’s degree is specifically for professional politics, and while I did not anticipate abandoning that particular industry permanently before October — I only meant to put it aside for a while as I focused on my kid — events and my own attitude is making it all feel very, very distant.
Pre-DC, I had put something else aside: theatre, and along with it but less intentionally, music. So over the course of about five years, I’ve managed to skirt away from at least three professional outlets for my passions and creativity: acting, songwriting, and politics. Now as my family and I struggle to resettle ourselves in an entirely new environment, a new outlet proves elusive.

As I’d recently written here, I intellectually understand that meaning can be found well outside of one’s day job. The challenge, I wrote, is first to recognize this fact — that one is responsible for eking out that time and effort between all the necessaries of grownup life — and second, to accept that regardless of whether one is employed in one’s creative field or whether one’s job takes one light years away from that field, either way, at best we can expect to find fulfillment in a tiny percentage of that time and work. Pulling a number out of my ass, I estimated that percentage at 10%.

Well, that 10% is looking pretty unachievable these days. I have a good job now, but it’s not what one would call creative in the sense of being of the humanities. But even as I know that the onus is on me to find the time and inspiration to use what free time I have to make something of some abstract, creative value, I seem to lack the energy and the will. The desire is there, but once the day job is done, once my family has been cared for, once my sundry other obligations have been met, what dregs of psychological fuel I have remaining are usually mere fumes.

I have had designs on writing a book of essays, and had even begun the work of building an outline, assembling notes, and even writing 2000 or so words of content. But the last time I touched this project was weeks ago. Last night, I mustered the will to experiment with some sounds in Garageband in the hopes of laying foundations for new songs. But I know those foundations, as promising as they are, will sit untended-to, for who knows how long.

My fear is that creativity itself is seeping out of me. My job no longer requires the exercise of what I once thought of as my strongest creative muscles, and I am taxed by day to day life. I write less often. I am apathetic about causes about which I once felt downright evangelical. I don’t even read very much anymore — something I was already hung up about — and instead have begun to default to Netflix viewing every evening, something to which I would have been haughtily dismissive only a few short months ago.

Am I becoming a drone? Am I now only capable of getting through the business of the day, and nothing else? Am I now a mere passive consumer of creative content, rather than an active producer?

I hope not, but I think I might be too worn out, or too lazy, to explore the question.

March 9, 2011

attack, personal
Yesterday

Yesterday was kind of an important day for me.
As many of you know, I was brutally attacked by two thugs on the street outside my Metro stop in DC a few months ago. I was transitioning to a new part-time retail gig in order to reclaim some sanity in my life, and to be able to care for my boy during the weekdays.

So: As I came home from my second day of training at my then-new part-time retail job in DC on October 26, 2010, I was attacked and everything changed.

Yesterday, I finished my second day of training at my new new part-time retail job here in Maine on February 1, 2011. I came home, saw my family, and all was well.

I know it seems silly. I’m about the least superstitious guy you’ll ever meet, but the symbolism of the fact that I made it home safely this time was very meaningful.

February 3, 2011

attack, personal
The Attack

On the evening of October 26, I was returning home from my second day of training at my new part-time job. I was in the midst of a transition; in my last week at my desk job as a communications manager at a nonprofit and moving to working weekends and some nights so I could be a stay-at-home daddy. On this day, a Tuesday, I had worked a normal day at my old job, and gone straight to train at my new job.

I traveled home by Metro to the Stadium-Armory stop, arriving around 11:00 PM. As I ascended the escalator from the station, I could hear a lot of activity at the bus stop at the top of the stairs. A lot of people were being loud and rowdy, a lot of laughing and shouting. It made me nervous, not so much because I was afraid of being harmed, but I had a kind of flashback-to-middle-school feeling, that a group of rowdy young people would choose me as a target for mockery. It’s an old instinct that I’ve never been able to shake.

I moved briskly past the group and began the walk to my home. I felt more and more vulnerable, so I quickened my pace. I had my backpack on my back and hung my hooded sweatshirt by the hood on my head, not wearing it but simply letting it dangle off my head.

Only a handful of paces from the Metro stop, I heard a pair of very fast footfalls behind me, and before I even had a chance to wonder why someone would be running, before I had a chance to be frightened by it, I had been struck a powerful and painful blow to my head. I was being attacked.

Two people had snuck up behind me, run at me, and began beating me, severely, brutally, mostly about my head and face. They shouted things at me, peppered with curses of various kinds, but I couldn’t make out specific sentences or commands because of the blows to my head. I began to make out something about giving them my items (I had my iPhone and wallet on me), and tried to aquiesce. But even as I attempted to speak, just to shout “okay” in order to let them know they could have my items, they kept hitting me.

At one point, I managed to stagger to a standing position, I presumed to give them my wallet and phone. But no, the moment I stood, they continued to hit me. As I was knocked down a second time, and fell upon the palms of my hands, my wallet, phone, and keys simply fell out of my pockets and on to the ground. I was given a few more blows, and my attackers grabbed my items and ran off. I never saw their faces. I presume that was intentional.

I was seized with desperation to get home. I was in pain, yes, but my head was ringing, and I felt wetness all over me. I tried to stand, and could not even make it to a crouch, and fell again to my palms. I tried again, got a little closer to standing, but my legs were not ready, and I fell again. On my third attempt, I managed to stand and “walk,” but it wasn’t much of a walk. I blundered a few steps, and careened into a fence off to my left, collapsing again. Finally, I stood and managed to begin walking home, slow but determined, moaning, dizzy, and wet. All I knew was that my nose was bleeding.

It was late. After laboring up the steps to the front of our house, I pathetically slapped the door and called out for my wife, in a voice that sounded more like a ghostly version of myself, a half-moan, half-sob. My hand smeared blood on the white door as I struck it.

Luckily, Jessica awoke fairly quickly and opened the door. Of course, she was terrified by what she saw. She would later tell me that I resembled something out of a horror movie; I was covered in blood, my face mashed and distorted. I think I groaned something akin to “I was mugged.” I stumbled into the living room and sat on the floor, moaning as the pain began to make itself known, and the reality of what had happened began to sink in. Fear was taking hold.

My baby boy Toby was still blessedly asleep in his room upstairs.

Jessica wasted no time and called 911, then rushed to our neighbor’s door. She awakened them (and their collection of big, loud dogs) and asked one of them to come to our house to tend to Toby once the ambulance arrived to cart us away. Jessica at some point after that contacted our friends Ryan and Brooke, who we knew far better than our most excellent neighbors, and had cared for Toby before, and asked them to come and relieve our neighbors and take over Toby-sitting duties. They did not let us down.

Paramedics arrived, as did police but I never saw them. I was put on a stretcher, and put on the ambulance, but Jess was not. I started asking after Toby, not knowing what had been arranged, and one paramedic filled me in. They removed my wedding ring, they scissored my pants and shirt looking for wounds — I later learned that they thought I might have been stabbed (I was not). I asked if I was going to be okay, and, oddly, they would not tell me. I think that’s because they didn’t know.

The ambulance began to pull away with Jess still outside. This was because she was taking care of other important business; flagging down police, Ryan and Brooke, and somewhat miraculously, identifying the attackers.

It seems that police were close enough to the scene when Jess called 911 that they were able to pick out two people who seemed “not right.” As soon as the police’s lights were put on them, they dropped a phone, wallet, and keys and ran — though to no avail, as the police caught them. Jess was brought over to the scene of the attack — secretly — to confirm that the items they dropped were indeed mine. So, yes, folks, if you can believe it, they caught the attackers and I got my stuff back that night. (Just a couple of days ago, I found out that my attackers plead guilty to felony assault with significant injury and felony robbery, and will be sentenced in February.)

Meanwhile, at the hospital, I was being treated. It was chaos from my perspective; I rarely had any good idea of what was being done to me, though a few things I do recall; x-rays, a CT scan, and most painful of all, stitches in my head. At my more lucid moments, I tried to make jokes, and then I would panic or confess to being terrified of what was happening to me. The hospital staff, on the whole, was wonderful and kind.

Jess got to the hospital and spent hours waiting to be able to see me, contacting friends and relatives, and talking with detectives.

Eventually, Jess was allowed to see me. It was the first time she’d seen me since I had been carted away hours before. As she entered the trauma unit where I lay, I said to her, “I have an idea: why don’t we move?”

I’ve recounted in previous posts some of the physical damage I took, but to be specific, my head and face were quite mashed up. I had a fracture in my right orbital bone (the bone just below my eye, the top of my cheek), a gash in my scalp, and the right side of my face was swollen to an absurd degree. My right eye was mostly closed and the eyeball was half-covered in red. I could not close my jaw or open it very wide (and still can’t), and a facial nerve was damaged in the attack, causing some of my upper teeth to go numb (and they still are). In general, my entire head and face, but particularly my scalp and mask area (eyes and nose) were covered in painful bruises.

From the several falls, my hands and wrists were damaged. The muscles in my hands and fingers were shocked and hurt for weeks with sharp pain. Two bones in both my wrists impacted into cartilage as well; for some reason my left wrist got the worst of that, and is in a cast today. The right wrist is also damaged, though not as badly, though I had already been undergoing weeks of physical therapy for tendonitis and carpal tunnel related problems in that wrist before the attack, so all of that work was thrown out the window.

For weeks, I could not chew, I could not lift a glass of water. I could not really be hugged. I could not hold my boy, or
let him near my head (as he likes to show affection by smacking me in the face). When I finally allowed myself to look at myself in the mirror, two days after the attack, I was shocked — I looked far worse than I had expected. I was, in general, something of a wreck, as you might imagine. But every day I have gotten a little better.

Obviously, I am psychologically affected. Suffice it to say, I am more afraid, more skittish, less trusting. I feel more vulnerable, and I feel that my family is more vulnerable, then ever in my life. I still relive the attack, the walk home, several times a day. Sometimes it’s clinical, or just a distant narrative. Other times it feels like it’s happening all over again. I find myself locked in morbid fantasies of further similar attacks — what if my boy is with me when I’m attacked? What if I can’t get in touch with anyone? What if they go for my wife? Earlier on the same day of my attack, a rock had been thrown at our door, breaking its glass, while our nanny was with our son. I’m told this is a way of “casing” a house for alarms or dogs. That only adds to my fear.

I have never had a high opinion of my species, and the attack served to exemplify its worst and best aspects. The two who attacked me made me feel worse about my fellow humans than I ever had before — not to mention the large group of people at the bus stop who watched all of it take place and did nothing to stop it — but the people who came to my aid, both professionally and friends in the moment, reminded me of the heights of goodness of which we’re capable. Both stay with me, the low and the high.

I have been blessed with support. People have helped us with babysitting, with expenses, with meals, you name it. Our family, friends, neighbors, and even people we’ve never met came out swinging the second they were needed, and there are too many to name. I am so grateful for these people.

I don’t feel “lucky” as many have said I should. It usually goes something like “You’re lucky you survived” or “You’re lucky they didn’t have a knife” or something like that. I understand the sentiment, but no, I’m not lucky. If I’m “lucky they didn’t have a knife,” that assumes a world in which the zero-point, the point of normalcy, is to be severely beaten by two anonymous thugs and then stabbed. Only then are you “lucky” not to be stabbed. Though I suppose it’s a good thing that my attackers were caught and convicted, I don’t feel triumphant. I know they will likely only come out of prison worse than when they went in. There is little vindication in this.

But I am glad. I am so deeply glad to be alive. I am so glad I did survive. Yesterday I celebrated my 33rd birthday, alive, intact, mobile, able to slowly gnaw through a pizza, hug my wife, and cuddle my baby boy. We’re moving out of DC this month to live a more peaceful, more fulfilling life in Maine.

I’m optimistic. I’m getting better. I have a long, long way to go, and many more wounds to heal. But I’m so glad to still be around.

December 3, 2010

attack, violence
Jail

That’s where the two thugs who attacked me are going, I found out today. I don’t know for how long yet. I hope to be able to tell you more in the coming weeks. But that much I do know. I guess it’s something.
But I can just imagine them, indignant pouts on their faces. Angry, cursing me, cursing the police, the attorneys. Not changed at all, not feeling sorry for anything they’ve done, just feeling embarassed for having been caught, feeling wronged for being punished by an authority they don’t recognize. Nothing is really different. If anything, they’ll probably only come out worse. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

November 18, 2010

attack, personal