Radio Shangri-La_ What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth - Lisa Napoli [95]
And when I read that, I knew she must be pregnant.
I KNEW WHAT it was like to have a whirlwind courtship that led to marriage after a life-altering experience. Mine had happened exactly twenty years earlier, back when I was Ngawang’s age, in fact. My husband-to-be and I had met when he came to work at the television station in North Carolina. Not long after, I’d had that epiphany on the way to the grocery store. This liberation from my fear of the dark, I assumed, meant I was now healed and ready to join with this wonderful man. United from a point of strength, not weakness. Running off and getting married in a fit of passion, after just several months, felt like my way of declaring to the world, “That rapist didn’t ruin me. See?” It was the first impetuous act of my short life thus far.
And then, my new husband lost his job at the station in a management shakeup. He got an even better one—in, of all places, Atlanta. The scene of the crime was the last place I ever would have chosen to move, but in the media business, you went where the work took you. I rationalized: It wasn’t Atlanta’s fault that I was attacked; it could have happened anywhere. If I could survive returning there, I believed, I’d be demonstrating my capacity to adapt to anything, to show how unflappable I was. It would be an illustration of my boundless ability to forgive—to transcend geography. People who refused to leave a certain location or go to another were histrionic, inflexible, oversensitive. I was not going to be one of those people who let history get in the way of progress.
Even the best intentions can be fraught with delusion. I had greatly underestimated how hard it would be to settle into the place where this horrible thing had happened, perhaps even more than I’d underestimated how complicated it was to be married. Within a year, another job offer rescued us, and back we went to North Carolina. I found myself felled by a mysterious lethargy that I first attributed to moving. In the course of trying to determine what was wrong, the doctor I visited offered a prescription: counseling.
Everything is fine, I insisted. That’s all in the past. Still, I obeyed and found a therapist. I was tired of being tired all the time. As we talked, a diagnosis emerged. It wasn’t fatigue; it was depression. I was consumed with doubt and anger. Here I was, barely a quarter of a century old, connected to this man, moving around for his work, depending on him for financial and personal security. How did I get here? This wasn’t how I imagined my life to be. I believed I loved him, but what did love mean, exactly? My problem was this sinking feeling that I was ill-equipped and unprepared to be a wife.
Almost as if to prove that I wasn’t really an adult, I found myself stymied in how to confess my misgivings to my poor, sweet husband. To say “I’ve made a mistake, there is something wrong, I don’t quite understand, please forgive me. Would you mind, please, if I exile myself to a room, and let some time pass, so that when I emerge I’ll be healed, recalibrated—and then we could just skip happily forward into the future?” If I had had the courage to ask, he would likely have said yes.
But instead of speaking my doubts, I shared my deepest fears with a notebook. I wrote down every bit of it. How I felt trapped, how much I doubted it all, how I hated everything, including my poor husband, how I wished we both were dead. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t know what I meant, how I felt. I put my confessional notebook in a drawer in my desk and left town for a few days for work. And when I’d returned, my husband was waiting for me at the door, his face washed with devastation. In his search for clues to my distress, he’d read what I had written.