"Increasingly ill, homesick, and exhausted, Lane pushed on over the next few months as far east as Baghdad. There, she turned on her heel and set a new course for home. She was out of money, borrowing from a colleague, and the "nerve strain,” as she described it, had finally reached “just about the limit that I could stand.” Lane returned to Missouri just in time to celebrate Christmas with her parents at Rocky Ridge in 1923. Wilder met her daughter on the platform of the Mansfield train station; the women had not seen each other in almost four years.
Lane would spend the next two years recuperating at her parents’ home. “I feel a mainspring somehow [has] broken,” she wrote in her journal, just days after her return. She suffered classic symptoms of posttraumatic stress syndrome: tears, sleeplessness, hopelessness, lethargy, shame, depression, and intense “fight or flight” reactions. By New Year’s Day, she had plotted her return to Albania—the only place she seemed to feel at peace. Although she recognized the same signs in Guy Moyston, who had been traumatized by guerilla warfare in Ireland, she could do little for either of them except advocate rest, quiet, and self-care. When she sailed home on the U.S.S. Leviathan, she confided to Moyston, walking just one lap around the deck overwhelmed her and left her trembling. There was little recognition, much less treatment, for posttraumatic shock after World War I. “Battle fatigue” or “shell-shock” was generally viewed as a form of malingering or personal weakness. Lane’s doctors diagnosed her as a “manic-depressive type” or as a woman suffering from “minus metabolism,” something that supposedly “wrecked the physical structure of nerves.” She dated the onset of her “nerve strain” to her arrival in postwar Europe. She cried so hard, for so long, that she required eyelid surgery in 1934."
Sallie Ketcham
"'It Was in Armenia That I Learned Fear'
Rose Wilder Lane and the Armenian Genocide"
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