Who We Are

The next few days are a blur and I lean fully on the support from friends and family as I navigate a PTSD response I had no idea I would experience. Nightmares, leg spasms and a constant nausea are just a few of the symptoms that bombard me. The fifth day, after my television interview, I finally have a breakdown and my Husband takes the kids with him to go stay with his Dad. My dear friend Marti comes to stay with me and forces me to leave the house for the first time in almost a week. We drive to a local lake and she takes me to the dam where we stand and she tells me to breathe and let go. I watch the water pumping fiercely through the dam and I feel a release deep in my core. A strong feeling of warmth overwhelms me, and a small voice reminds me, I must press on.        I sleep better that night but still wake up in the middle of the night in a panic. I feel like I’m suffocating and have to rush out the door of my bedroom onto my pati...

I am so brave as I sit in front of the camera crew; about to describe a sexual assault that happened to me, at the hands of Grant Pankratz, almost twenty years ago.  Leaning on my years of dance and theater training I feel no shyness as the cameraman adjusts my microphone and when the journalist asks me how I feel, I can honestly answer that I feel just fine. How bizarre it is to finally be speaking about something that is still so visceral. I can take my mind back, easily, to the exact moment it happened and replay it like a favorite television show and yet is so secret I have never even told my husband. I get through the interview easily with little emotion and do not feel at all overwhelmed; even after everyone at the filming tells me I absolutely must file a police report, before the story airs the next evening on the ten o’ clock news.                      As I drive away from the filming location I realize what ...