Toothpaste

2020 was not my year.

Admittedly, it was a hard time for everybody, with the pandemic hitting, lockdowns being placed, lifted and placed back again, and the mirage of a vaccine constantly unreachable.

I was finally getting used to it and its intrinsic rituals — online university lessons, online workout sessions, Zoom calls with friends, daily count of deaths in my home country, police patrolling the streets — when my life got turned upside down all over again.

In June, I discovered I had to undertake brain surgery.

A month after that, I inexplicably lost my hearing from my left ear, leaving me permanently half-deaf.

A few days, or perhaps weeks, after that (my memories of those days are jumbled with terror), I developed a tinnitus in my now-deaf ear.

Finally, a month after that, I had to undertake emergency brain surgery, way earlier than the scheduled date, because my situation worsened all of a sudden.

Meanwhile, I was writing my master’s thesis, studying for my two remaining university exams and doing my best to avoid catching COVID-19.

In the following months and then years, I tried multiple times to talk about that period of my life, but no matter how many words I’d use, I never seemed to convey how devastating it had really been.

At some point, I realised going into too many details only served to render my experience nebulous instead of visceral, so I changed my approach: instead of talking at length about it, I looked for one single word that could capture its essence.

I found it with surprising ease — nightmare. 

Everyone has nightmares. Some people suffer more because of them, but everyone knows what it feels like to be trapped in a terrifying reality, often nonsensical yet unescapable, with its endless sequence of tragedies and monsters.

The first eight months of 2020 were my nightmare.

*

I was freshly out of the hospital when I realised something was off.

After having been discharged from the neurosurgery department a couple days before, I was finally back home, alive and in one piece (minus a small part of my skull).

I was having a nice evening: I prepared a simple but delicious dinner, savoring the small joy of being able to cook for myself again, and I was then going through my nighttime routine, treasuring the fact that I could take my time with it, without having to share my space with strangers anymore.

I don’t remember what was going on in my mind as I brushed my teeth, but I do remember the shockingly deep sense of dread that suddenly seized me, out of the blue.

I found myself bursting in desperate tears, from zero to a hundred in the blink of an eye, crushed under the violence of my own fear, with no idea of what was going on: I wasn’t in pain, either physical or psychological; I had no medical appointments scheduled for the upcoming days (one of my main sources of anxiety); I wasn’t supposed to go back to the hospital for another week or so. 

There was no reason for me to feel like I was about to die, yet there I was, bent over the sink with my face covered in tears, snot, and toothpaste, unable to get a grip on myself.

It scared the hell out of me.

I remember how curious it was — to feel fine and utterly terrified at the same time, experiencing two different realities at once. My body was apparently reacting to the pain my mind was experiencing, which I was clueless to.

I was but a helpless passenger on a journey I had been given zero information about.

As sobs wrecked through me, I forced myself to focus, checking for clues that would help me identify the reason for that outburst, but finding none: there was nothing to be worried about. I was fine.

Eventually, the storm subsided, leaving me dazed, confused and clinging to the sink like a lifeline.

If you have any familiarity with PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, you will have probably recognised what I just described as a flashback. 

Flashbacks are one of the most common “side effects” of trauma; they are our brains’ way of letting us know that the traumatic experiences we thought long healed still have a tangible effect on our mental and physical health: it might feel like we are fine, but our brains and bodies know better — they remember.

Flashbacks never happen just because. There is always a trigger behind them. The tricky part is that literally anything can be a trigger: an object can be a trigger, a word can be a trigger, a phrase can be a trigger, a particular smell, a texture, a colour, a sound, a song, a place, the late afternoon sunlight — everything. 

Once the flashback is triggered, there is no going back. You’re in it and you can’t leave. The rollercoaster won’t stop until the ride comes to its natural end. Buckle up, bestie.

Back then, I was only distantly familiar with flashbacks (thanks to another near-death experience from two years prior, which I had buried away so quickly and efficiently it caused me only a couple of flashbacks; however, after my 2020 nightmare it came back in full force), so it took me some time to understand what was going on. 

When I finally got it, I almost laughed — it was so stupid. 

It was the toothpaste I was using.

To be more accurate, it was the toothpaste’s strong fluoride taste and the way its slightly grainy texture felt against my tongue, paired with the fact that I was unusually using a normal toothbrush instead of my electric one.

That unpredictable series of specific details immediately sent me back to my first night at hospital n.2 (I do indeed have multiple hospitals experiences) where, after endless hours of waiting, I was admitted with my brain on fire, the most excruciating headache ever and an overnight bag of hastily put together nonsense, because no one teaches you what to pack in case your daughter has to be hospitalised as an emergency. There, in my newly awarded hospital room, I brushed my teeth using what my mom had packed me in a panic-clouded haste: a toothbrush that wasn’t mine and her toothpaste.

Back home, my electric toothbrush was obviously out of charge, since no one had remembered to charge it while I was hospitalised. That’s why I went for the toothbrush I’d had with me at the hospital, along with my mom’s toothpaste, as I was used to it by then.

Those two elements, possibly combined with the fact that it was dark outside and that I was on my own, just like I had been on my own in my hospital room that night, immediately triggered a flashback that transported me back to the emotional state I had been in then, which is why I suddenly felt terrified despite being perfectly safe.

Nothing about PTSD is fun, but flashbacks are a real pain in the butt, in my opinion: no matter how hard you try, you can’t win against them. 

As months and then years went by, I’ve come to collect dozens of flashbacks, all unique and with their own trigger, each time different, therefore impossible to anticipate.

I never see them coming, not once.

Trying to anticipate them is not only useless, but frustrating: I would take the long way home to avoid walking in front of a pharmacy that holds bad memories only to then be caught off guard once I’d sit on my blanket, its texture reminding me of the scratchy hospital bed sheets, and there I am again, drowning in a flashback.

Triggers are rational, given that our brains have evidently picked them up somewhere, but it could be said that their rationality is irrational: you would never think that a sip of sugary tea would cause you to panic, yet that’s exactly what happened to me once and once only — another treacherous characteristic of flashbacks: they’re never the same.

Moreover, flashbacks are almost impossible to anticipate. I have tried my hardest to identify my triggers and, if some of them were obvious, others were so unexpected it was almost mocking.

For your understanding and enjoyment, I have compiled an hopefully entertaining but definitely not comprehensive list of some of the triggers I have experienced in the last four years:

• I took all my jewellery off and caught sight of my bare wrists —> FLASHBACK!!!
• I crossed paths with someone in a wheelchair —> FLASHBACK!!!¹
• I had to make a phone call with my own phone —> FLASHBACK!!!
• I wore my golden earrings paired with my purple backpack and green dress —> FLASHBACK!!!
• I flipped through my History of Architecture textbook —> FLASHBACK!!!
• I saw my plushie tucked under the covers of my bed —> FLASHBACK!!!
• I rewatched one of my favourite tv shows’ episodes where the main character is losing his mind because of medical malpractice —> FLASHBACK!!!
• I ate a plum —> FLASHBACK!!!
• I read my favourite book for the third time —> FLASHBACK!!!

The list could go on and on. This is just an example of how creative triggers can be. I mean, would you ever think that eating a plum could be mentally devastating for you? I don’t think so; in fact I ate the damn plum and consequently had a breakdown. It taught me to never underestimate anything.

During the first months of this, I thought I was losing my mind. Mostly, I was furious at myself for not being able to forget, relax and savour the safety I had finally reached after having barely made it through the first part of the year.

I wanted to relax, to breathe. I wanted my old life back, with its empty problems and silly worries that felt like the end of the world, not whatever this was.

I had no idea why I was having those episodes (as I used to call them), which was partly my own fault: I longed to leave the 2020 nightmare behind me as quickly as possible, so I told myself that I was perfectly fine, cured, healed and happy again. 

But if I was fine, cured, healed and happy, why was I haunted by memories everywhere I’d go? Was it ever going to stop? Why couldn’t I just forget about it and be okay, at last? 

The answers to these questions were, respectively:

1. Because trauma runs deeper than you think.
2. No, it won’t. It will actually get worse at first, but it will get better once you’ll learn how to catch your thoughts before they start spiralling in an endless loop. But it will never really stop. You will mourn the person you were before, grieving her innocence; your heart will break thinking about the pit of despair she was unknowingly about to fall into; you will try to help her through your EMDR sessions, telling her that none of what happened is her fault, that she is a victim, that she isn’t responsible for any of it and that, most importantly, one day she will be safe again.
3. Because healing from trauma takes so. much. bloody. time.

Well, damn. What am I supposed to do in the meantime? 

I thought about it for a long time — two years — and I have now finally found an answer: I am going to do what Stephanie Foo has done in her memoir What My Bones Know, what Fern Brady has done in Strong Female Character, what Jeanette Winterson has done in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, and what Hanya Yanagihara has done in her novel A Little Life.

I am going to write about it. 

While reading these women’s accounts of their and others’ trauma, I kept thinking that I had to do it too. If anything, to push all this horrible stuff out of me. Perhaps it could also be beneficial for someone else; perhaps there is another traumatised young woman out there who has no idea that the upsetting experiences she is living are consequences of undiagnosed PTSD and that she is not, in fact, losing her sanity because the texture of her favourite yoghurt suddenly tears a hole of desperation in her chest. 

Perhaps reading my words can help her, like other women’s words have helped me before. 

But I also have to do this for myself — if there is one thing I have learnt from reading A Little Life three times (currently planning a fourth one) from top to bottom in two different languages is that “you have to talk about it.”²

Trauma will eat you from the inside if you keep it hidden away.

In order to get better, you have to vomit it out. It will be painful, messy and horrible, and you’ll wish you’d never started in the first place because you have no way of stopping now that you’re in the midst of it; it will drain you of all energies, forcing you to take time to rest and recover, which is the last thing you’ll want to do, given that staying still makes your thoughts spin; it will feel like you are the only person in the whole world going through it, but the more you will open up about it, the more people you will find who have been there before, and reading their words will be hard and painful, but cathartic and, at times, more helpful than therapy, too.

After all, trauma is a human experience: you are not alone in this. 

And I am not, either.

1.  I want to make it explicit that I have no issue with wheelchair users; that one time, that sight sent me back to when I was the one in a wheelchair, during my hospital stay.  ↩︎
2.  Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life, (London: Picador, 2015), 104-105. ↩︎