I fill up on booze and weed and pills and pass out horizontal on R's queen-sized bed, snoring, full of Xanax and champagne. But we are lovers for a year, and he is still there when my therapist convinces me that I have to get my experiences out.

"No more Xanax and weed whenever you start to lose it," my therapist says. "Tell R you have to stay alert. You're going to have to begin to stay in that moment until it passes."

R asks me questions, and I share my experiences, like I've been told to, until they lose their power, like they are supposed to, do according to my therapist.

"You're here," R says, when I start to lose it. "Be here."

Motta says I should think of my mind like a filing cabinet. My war-related experiences are filed in the wrong slots. I have to re-open all those cabinets and re-sort my files until they go where they need to. To do it, I have to re-live my experiences until they slide into the correct spaces.

"The way most people conceptualize this is that your entire autonomic system is on hyperdrive. You're sort of always prepared, always ready, always on edge. Sleep tends to get disrupted. You have trouble paying attention, concentrating on things. You have negative interpretations of ambiguous stuff," Renshaw explains to me.

R does eventually hurt me, but by then, my brain is filing correctly. I can tell rape from sex, our normal break up from an abusive experience.

Forgiving myself for the experiences I've had—filing the rape and the pain and the lost time into a space where they stopped being my fault—is the first step. But healing is much more difficult.

Motta explains that whether it was first or the secondary trauma I'm facing, the experience of fighting it out of my life is part of my body's evolutionary fight for survival.

He takes me back to the scared monkeys watching TV. Its evolutionary survival reflex told the monkey that there was danger, and it could affect him.

"It's some kind of interpretation," Motta says. "I don't think it's cognitive, because we're talking about animals watching other animals. I don't think they're doing much thinking. It's just reacting."

My writing process has left me keenly aware that what happened with Jay won't ever kill me. That much I know, now. What it has done, instead, is given me a choice. Rather than operating on autopilot, functioning only as a result of some misplaced sense of evolutionary survival, I can now choose to live my life. I can choose to have a say in my story.

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