Fight club

Part two

What happened next, several sets of people confirmed, independently and in isolation.

Everybody said they expected me to slam into the pavement, at the feet of the man who threw me. Instead, to their surprise, I cleared it, hurting towards by standers on the grass, who shrieked as they scattered to avoid being hit by me. Crashing onto the grass was obviously better for me, as smashing against concrete would have inflicted serious injuries on my body, even more so at the speed I was travelling. I was travelling so fast, after landing, I began to roll. Yet, before gravity had a chance to slow me, never mind stop me, I sprung to my feet and without pausing and charged in the direction of the bouncers, screaming incoherently.

Though I have no memory of the event between being launched into the air, and staggering forward with purpose, I recall what followed with complete clarity, meaning, I know what I was shouting. I was repeating two sentences on a loop. “You threw me. He threw me.”

I doubt many people, very few of whom are women, have ever seen a man of his size gawp down at them with an expression of such extreme disbelief, horror, and fear, especially one who has just tossed them into the air like a rag doll, as I did that night.

It wasn’t only him staring at me with that expression. His two colleagues were too.

They stood their ground uncertainly for a couple of seconds, as men from the crowd grabbed me in a pathetic attempt to hold me back. When I shook those men off as though they weighed nothing, the panicking bouncers retreated inside, hurrying to close the large metal double doors.

But, I reached them before they could.

Clamping my curled frozen fingers around the edge of the door to my right, I managed to keep it open.

Immediately one of the male bouncers rammed his meaty hand into my face, pushing my head so far back my neck ached, and it was difficult to breath. The other jammed his fist into my stomach twisting and shoving it simultaneously. Despite this I fought over the door with the female bouncer never once making physical contact with any of them. The thought never crossed my mind, because I wasn’t trying to fight them, I was trying to get passed them into the building, in search of help I desperately needed and a person who both could and would help me.

It was raining sleet or lightly snowing, so the grass was soaking, which meant I was drenched. As I rolled, I tore the skin on my arms and legs, so I was bleeding. My blouse was ripped in several places and had lost its middle buttons. To me, I was fighting to survive, injured and more vulnerable to the elements than I had previously been.

Quickly, I began to win our tug of war. That’s when the two male bouncers decided to stop physically assaulting me in order to assist their colleague in her efforts.

Their decision did not work in their favour, quite the opposite, as it was much easier for me to drag open the door while I wasn’t being beaten by two massive men, and I got the gap wide enough to fit the left side of my body through.

Backing up, the bouncer who threw me, hid behind his female colleague. Using her as a human shield, he yelled at the students behind the desk to call the police and accused me of wanting to kill him.

I wish I could say that with hindsight, if he was genuinely afraid of me, it is hilarious. He, a maybe forty year old man, twice my size, who had made the choice to abuse me verbally and physically instead of helping me, believed that I a five foot, seven stone, twenty year old woman, soaking wet, frozen to the point my fingers were blue, with my barely there clothes destroyed and hanging off me, covered in my own blood, because I was injured, after literally being beaten by him and his male friend together, was capable of murdering him.

However, it is not. Today it is as upsetting and insulting as it was the moment he had the cheek to suggest it.

“Call the police,” I agreed with conviction. “These three assaulted me.”

But, none of the students behind the table moved. They all just stared at me with the same horrified expressions.

“Call the police!” I screamed.

But again, nobody moved.

Changing my tactic, I instead demanded to speak to whoever was in charge. That is how young, stupid, and naive I was, just a few months out of my teens. It never occurred to me that setting that fire alarm off on purpose, and not following the correct evacuation plan, therefore putting us all in danger, might qualify as a crime, or was at least serious enough, to get the person in charge, who must have given the plan the green light, but who realistically probably actually thought of the plan and gave the staff orders to do it, in real legal trouble. Therefore, they had more reason not to want the police involved, and more motive to side with the staff, rather than help me.

Of course, it might be that they just never cared about an injured, vulnerable woman, or anybody hurt in the chaos that preceded me being beaten. That seems, to me, to be the most reasonable assumption all things considered.

“I’m in charge,” the female answered.

“You are a door man,” I told her.

“I am security, and I am a supervisor,” I think, she intended to say it with confidence, but it sounded as though her ego was wounded, so she was sulking.

“If I wanted to speak to a supervisor, I’d have asked to speak to your manager. I asked to speak to whoever is in charge,” I insisted.

“That is not going to happen,” she spat each word at me aggressively.

However, whatever authority she though she possessed, was being undermined by her own staff, those two giant men who were so afraid of me apparently that they were cowering behind her.

As me and her glared silently at each other, one of the girls edged cautiously around the table, and dashed into the function hall.

When she returned, what felt like an eternity later, she was accompanied by a tiny, meek looking man, who claimed to be the manager.

To be fair to him, if I had been the girl who brought the situation to his attention, I would have warned him of the condition the girl who was demanding to speak to him was in, as well as what exactly had been done, and said, to her. That table was close enough to the door for those staff members to have not only seen everything they did to me, but also everything they said to me, Laura and Mel.

It wasn’t his lack of shock or horror, even surrounded by people showing those emotions very strongly, that chills me to this day, it was his lack of emotion at all, in either his face or voice.

And although I can’t tell you what it was he said, I can’t even guess, I can tell you with certainty that it was his words that sent me over the edge.

Although I don’t want to go off topic. It is important for me to explain exactly what I mean here. There is a point during my worst episodes that I have talked about before. It is the line between “me” being “in control” (I appreciate these words are not fully accurate, as if I could control my “undesirable” behaviours and was simply choosing not to, I wouldn’t be diagnosed with a mental illness) and the illness fully occupying the driver’s seat.

What I mean when I describe my illness as fully occupying the driver’s seat is a severe borderline episode, meaning an episode cause by my borderline personality disorder, not nearly having an episode. During these episodes, I sometimes watch and listen to my body do and say things I am not consciously giving it the commands to do, which is very scary, as it feels as though something other than me is controlling my body and I am trapped inside it powerless to intervene, being forced to observe. On other occasions I “give up” and fall apart while I am having the episode rather than once the episode is finished and/or I am out of harms way. On these occasions it is like nothing is controlling my body, not even me, and it is an empty shell. It was the latter of these types of episodes that I experienced on this particular night, after going over the edge.

Its important to make people aware that when my illness has any level of control over me, it can only push me to my own extremes of what I am personally capable of, and nothing more.

If I wouldn’t harm another person or animal etc when I am not having an episode, which I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t harm another person or animal etc when I am having an episode. It’s that simple.

Being mentally ill doesn’t change who I am as a person, and it certainly doesn’t make me a bad or evil person, or even a person capable of doing bad or evil things.

Whenever I look back at my worst episodes, it is usually easy for me to identify the part of the event that sent me over the edge. This is due to elements of the inciting incident being missing from my memory, usually this is what somebody said to me, as it was in the case.

Mostly, these elements remain missing to me. Rarely, they return to me at some random point in the future. This is because its not that my brain didn’t save and store these memories, it is because it caught them and locked them away where I can’t access them, in order to “protect me from them”.

Both my perceived lack of control over my actions, and my loss memories, are forms of dissociation.

Only very bad things cause me to dissociate.