Click! Off-Switch Engaged.
Therapists have often noted that I tell my stories rather robotically, that I report facts and details as though I am explaining what happened to someone else.
It’s possible that I do so because I am slightly autistic. It’s also possible that I do so because I know it helps to talk about it, but it’s too painful to get emotionally involved in the painful parts of my tale.
There’s a mental health issue called dissociative disorder that the Mayo Clinic describes, in a general way, as “a loss of connection between thoughts, memories, feelings, surroundings, behavior and identity…. Dissociative disorders usually arise as a reaction to shocking, distressing or painful events and help push away difficult memories.”
I had never heard of such a thing in 1987. But when I found something to be unacceptable, which was often, I simply chose to turn myself off.
I didn’t know this was a “disorder.” I thought I had a kind of superpower that allowed me to survive anything simply by flicking a switch in my brain. With the button on “off,” I didn’t need to be there mentally, even when I was physically present.
I don’t know when I started using this “off” button in my head.
Maybe it was when Mindy Ford beat me senseless after school in the sixth grade. Maybe it was the time David Parks stabbed me between the legs with a sharpened pencil during what was otherwise an innocent game of Truth or Dare. Maybe it wasn’t until after high school, when I needed an off button to survive distasteful sex with strangers.
I can’t be sure when or how it started. I only know that the longer I drank, the more often I needed to turn myself off.
I would be fully functioning – albeit drunk out of my mind – and sitting at a bar. Then some guy would put his paw on my leg. Click! Off-switch engaged. The smile stayed on my mouth, but it left my eyes. My leg didn’t flinch but my body stiffened imperceptibly. The conversation continued in whatever manner it had been before. But I was gone.
I’d like to say I went somewhere good.
But I imagine it’s more like when a deer is standing happily on a highway and a car is bearing down on it as the car roars closer and closer …. I went wherever that deer goes.
There was no panic, no sense of impending doom, no recognition that I’d even turned myself off. I just randomly chose not to participate in life anymore. Sometimes it lasted until the guy took his paw off my leg. Sometimes it lasted until I left the bar. And sometimes it lasted until the guy took me home in the morning.
It lasted however long I needed it to last.
This was different than a blackout. Blackouts were the merciful result of my brain shutting itself off for more biological reasons.
But my off button was merciful in another way. I wouldn’t have said it was a disorder. I would have said it was an emotional survival technique.
I used this technique for years and years and years.
If need be, even today, I can still turn myself off at any time. Except nowadays, I know what it is.
And now I wonder: does “disorder” mean I have to fix it? After all, it’s been useful for a very long time.