I am awake
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contains no spoilers from season 5
He carelessly threw the book he had been reading for days against the mirror standing opposite his bed. Joseph Wolpe, The Systematic Desensitization, a psychologist who had written several books on analysis, on self-discovery… on almost every psychological subject. His father owned all of them, some even as scientific first editions, but Steve knew he had only ever used that profound knowledge for masculinity and self-control, that stupid thinking of men who believed they had to suppress everything in order to appear confident and masculine. Ugh… Steve had been interested in it once, back when he was a teenager, when he had been a fucking bullying asshole, but this time he was looking for something else, something that could actually help.
“Fear is not an enemy. It’s a reflex....and reflexes can be trained.”
He whispered it to himself and took a deep breath.
“If it were all that easy…”
For several days now, Harrington had been experimenting on himself, trying to find something that would make him mentally stronger, something that might save him from the nightmares that haunted all of them at night and sometimes even during the day. He wanted to turn the memories of what he had seen and experienced into something that no longer blocked or paralyzed him, but into something that gave him strength to push through and, in doing so, help the others. It wasn’t really about himself as a person, as Steve… it was about becoming someone who could offer better support, because even though he had seen terrible things, the others were carrying the same weight, maybe even more.
“The body remembers, even when the mind is silent…”
Another sentence he couldn’t get out of his head, so accurate it felt like a physical blow. That was exactly what he was living through right now. He functioned like clockwork during the day, but at night, or when he was alone in this quiet, carefully furnished bedroom that still smelled faintly of expensive aftershave and clean sheets, everything caught up with him at once. The futility, the gnawing doubt, the question of his own worth. What was he next to brave Will, next to Eleven… next to kids who had tried to save the world long before he had any idea what was going on? What was he next to Dustin with his brain that never stopped, next to Robin who fought every day just by being herself… next to Billy Hargrove, torn apart inside and out? Who was he? And who… did he want to be?
Steve deprived himself of sleep for days, then swung in the opposite direction and tried controlled sleep cycles. He exposed himself to stimuli, smells, lights… anything that reminded him of the other world. He tried music, the thing that had helped Max, but it did nothing for him. He tried alcohol, hoping to give his mind a break, but it didn’t bring relief, let alone healing.
“This condition can haunt you for a lifetime… or take years to recover from. Damn… I may not have a whole lifetime left… and I don’t have years. I need a solution now.”
He said it toward the mirror, where the reflection staring back at him looked tired.
There was only one chance left: to bring everything inside him into focus and work with the abilities he had, to sharpen them and use them as tools. That was the hard part… because first he had to admit those abilities to himself, and that didn’t come easily to someone who so often felt like an idiot. He developed a kind of night ritual. He didn’t lie down right away, instead, he sat upright on the bed or the couch, the familiar weight of the baseball bat Jonathan had made resting in his hand. He named things in the room to ground himself, to anchor himself in reality. Windows, furniture.... floor tiles ,tiny cracks in the wall. He was sending a message to his brain:
“I’m alert... I have control.”
He’d read that fear and nightmares struck when the brain slipped into a loss of control. In a way, he was negotiating with his trauma instead of trying to silence it. He was the protector, the guard... the bat was his symbol. He didn’t fully trust his thoughts, but he trusted his body. And at some point he realized that he wasn’t working toward healing… he was working toward functioning. And somehow, that felt more honest, he wasn’t a superhero... but maybe he could become stable.
“Fear means I’m awake, awake means I’m alive... I’m holding the wheel, I don’t sleep to escape... I rest so I can stand again tomorrow. Find another idiot…”
It seemed to be working, not perfectly... he didn’t feel stronger, his confidence wasn’t magically restored, and the nightmares hadn’t vanished. The fear of losing the people he cared about was still there, constant, but he felt… better, more anchored. When panic crept up on him around his friends, he did what he did best. He was Steve, the guy who said the wrong thing, who was impulsive, who got annoyed too fast. The guy who couldn’t always strategize, but also the guy who stayed, who stood behind everyone, no matter what.
And now, maybe, he was finally ready to turn inward again, to look at the emotional mess he’d been shelving for so long. To ask himself why being around Billy felt different, and why, lately, he listened just a little more closely when Robin talked about her red-haired crush.