One in Four

by Lucinda Berry

It’d been so easy. Who knew it was that easy to kill another person while still keeping them alive? It’s the worst death.

How many people are walking around in the world with their lights turned off? The switch inside them faded to black? People just like her. Still wearing huge smiles on their faces. Filling rooms with their infectious laughs and bubbly personalities. Still pretty. Still sparkling. Still saying all the same lines. But gone.

She just wanted to feel something again. That’s what happens when you disassociate from your body. You’re cut off—not just from the bad and the pain. All the emotions, and she missed them like they were actual people. Really missed feeling. She wanted to feel again. To come back inside the body. Her empty-balloon body. Filled with no air. She wanted to be back inside. Alive.

Women had to be put together if they wanted to be taken seriously. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. But it was the patriarchy we lived in.

I used to be one of them, and nobody knows how hard it is to get sober than someone who’s had to do it themselves. Or the trauma that’s there to meet you when you do. Becoming conscious is so painful.

Addicts stop when they’re ready and not a moment sooner. It doesn’t matter how much you love them. Or equally hate them. Punish them. Reward them. Yell at them. Coddle them. There’s nothing you can do to keep an addicted person from using. It’s why I didn’t try. And sometimes they don’t stop. Ever. Sometimes they die. But sometimes they don’t.

Carl said all the things she knew to be true. She listened in class when they taught them about violence against women. She was a good student. So, all he did was confirm what she already knew—one in four girls experience a form of sexual assault by the time they’re twenty-four. Her worst fear was that nobody would believe her. Never in her wildest dreams did she imagine they’d believe her and simply not care.

She wished she could talk to the loved ones of people who hanged themselves. She wanted them to know their loved one might not have meant to die. Maybe they just missed the mark. Maybe they just didn’t let go of the belt quick enough. That happens a lot. More than you would think. Belts tied around your neck can easily go wrong. It’s just that maybe by doing it, you find out you actually like it. That your body responds to it. Wakes up. Feels alive. Lifeblood coursing through your veins. You never feel more alive than in the seconds after you’ve almost died. Ask anyone that’s had the experience. She didn’t put the belt around her neck because she wanted to die. She did it because she wanted to feel alive. Has anyone ever thought about it like that? That’s what she’d explain to people’s loved ones if she could. Tell them they weren’t trying to die. They were just trying to feel alive.

Truth was, hurting herself made her feel alive, if only for a split second. It also helped her heal. Not from him, but from their words.

As a female, would you rather be alone in the forest with a man or a bear? Half the cis white men revolted when the majority of women chose bear. But as a girl, keeping yourself safe was drilled into your head from practically the moment you were born—that there’s a world of bad men just waiting to take advantage of you.

He violated her body, but they raped her soul. Her friends. Other women. Ones she was supposed to trust.

I didn’t draw attention to it because self-injury behavior can be so contagious among adolescents.

Sexual assault of women on college campuses was highest during fall semester—orientation and pledge week. Fifty percent of all sexual assaults on women during college happen then. The Red Zone.

That’s the thing about trauma. You never get to go back to who you were before it happened. It doesn’t matter how badly you might want to or how hard you try. That person is gone. Along with that life. It’s a marker that forever changes you. And if it doesn’t? Well, then it wasn’t real trauma. Because real trauma? You’re altered forever. Anything else is just a hard time.

Death felt warm. Totally safe. There was nothing scary about it. We spend all our time being so terrified of death. Paralyzed with fear about the afterlife.

It didn’t hurt. I wanted to send a message to all the mamas in the universe who’d ever lost one of their babies: “It doesn’t hurt!” It was like taking off a tight dress that you’d been wearing all night. Like someone unzipped the back, and you finally got to step out of it. You could breathe. You could just be.

It was true what they said—in the end, all that mattered was love. And I immediately wanted a do-over, because I hadn’t done the best job at love.

The universe was enveloping me. I could feel it. All encompassing. I was returning. It really was like a going home. Like they said. Returning to your center. And the other part of me, the one that chose to come here in the first place, knew I’d be back. As many times as I wanted to.