A Bright Red Scream by Marilee Strong

Author:Marilee Strong [Strong, Marilee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101655788
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 1999-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

INSIDE THE RABBIT CAGE

Chloe is a promising young filmmaker and screenwriter. Her first film won numerous festival awards and she was invited to meetings with nearly every studio in town. Then her life came to a screeching, screaming halt.

For as long as Chloe can remember, her head has been full of noise. On a good day, the sounds inside her head are like a radio turned down low, muffled and nondescript. On a bad day, loud and distinct voices emerge. They have conversations, often critical of Chloe. In her mind’s eye, the voices also have colors. Yellow is the harshest critic. “He was the taskmaster and was constantly telling me what to do, and how I was doing everything wrong,” she explains. “He was the loudest, and would make things unbearable.” She grew up convinced that she was crazy, terrified of what others would think if they knew what was going on inside her.

Chloe also dissociated. She remembers when that began: at summer camp, when she was seven or eight. She doesn’t remember much about the incident but recalls an adult locking her inside a small cage, like a rabbit cage, and leaving her there for some period of time. She was terrified, and in her child’s mind she figured out right then and there how to dissociate, to “go away.” She can’t remember if the voices began after this incident or if they were already there before. It seems possible that being trapped, frozen, overwhelmed inside this tiny cage may have forced her to create this other new psychic dimension. When she got home she didn’t tell her parents anything about what had happened.

“I guess I thought it was my fault,” says the twenty-five-year-old. “I always did anything I could to be the good kid in my family. I pretty much wasn’t supposed to cry when I was growing up. My older sister was constantly making giant, screaming, crying scenes and I was told ‘You’ll never be like that.’ And then we’d joke about my sister behind her back, which was awful. So I learned how to cool down from things really fast, to stop feeling certain ways.”

Chloe cut her arms with a kitchen knife when she was nine. “I remember feeling immensely overwhelmed and unhappy and lost,” she recalls. “I was probably trying to punish myself for something.” She didn’t cut again until she was fifteen. She was away at boarding school and she got caught. She had to talk to the school counselor for a week and tell her parents. So after that she started cutting more secretly.

By the next year, the voices had grown so loud she was having trouble getting out of bed and functioning. She was hospitalized. The doctors were unable to diagnose her, and when a doctor on her ward started coming on to her, she quickly learned how to pretend she was okay so she could get out of there.

But things weren’t all right—far from it. She was dissociating now, both voluntarily and involuntarily.

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