I am disappointed with how spaced out these blog posts are. I am disgusted with myself for how much I am struggling to write anything more than a grocery list (and even those are hard because I stress out over what foods I can eat due to my diabetes). I feel like everything I have worked for is slipping through my fingers because I get so anxious and second guess everything I do. I just don't know what to do about it.
I love fiction. It has been a major stabilizing force in the chaos that regularly erupts in my life. I write it because it gets the worlds in my head out onto paper and makes it easier for me to breathe. I write it because it gives me a neutral playing field where I can examine, assess, and process the traumas that I have experienced in my life. I have been doing a good deal of non-fiction writing in my journals about those traumas.
It hurts. It hurts to open those wounds up and take the verbal curette to them so I can clean out the infected thought forms in my head. (By the way, infected thought forms is my new industrial band name.) It hurts to constantly hold myself back because I am afraid that I'm going to open my mouth and a thousand horrors are going to come out because I can't keep them inside anymore.
It's been several decade since some of these things happened but I remember them more clearly than what I ate for breakfast. (That makes keeping a food log really challenging, to be honest. What did I eat for breakfast? I know it wasn't Mom throwing cast iron pots and pans across the house. And I know it wasn't N- sexually assaulting me for the umpteenth time in a hidden room at his grandparent's house. The questions abound.)
I feel sometimes like my head is a surrealist hellscape that I'm trying to navigate. It is like my memories are a mash up of Dali's and Bosch's respective visions of hell with a bit of light and beauty thrown in that I have to excavate from the nightmare. I am told that this is all normal for someone with ptsd. That the chronic nightmares are just normal and they'll fade in time. It's been a real long time and they haven't stopped. I've been told that after a year of hard work and therapy, I'd be back to my self before the bipolar diagnosis, that didn't happen. I was in therapy for seven years and it didn't do much. I've been out of therapy for around three years and trying to do this on my own. It's not going so great.
I want my happy memories back. I want my energy and vivaciousness back. Yeah, I'm 40 and I'm not getting any younger. I'm not saying that I want to be twenty. I'm saying I want to be able to write and not feel afraid that someone is going to smite me for it. I want to be able to write and not be afraid that someone is going to take my work and use it to destroy my life. I'm saying I want to be able to listen to the sound of small children laughing and be able to smile, maybe even remember when my children were that age. But I can't smile, I get all cold inside and the world gets a little fuzzy as I have emotional flashbacks to being treated like I was a criminal all because I asked for help when I was struggling with postpartum depression.
As my children reach the age of puberty, I find myself pained because my memories of their earlier years are scrambled so hard that I can't tell them what they were like as infants. They ask me these questions and I can't remember to give them answers. Just like trauma and anxiety stole away my memories of my wedding day, trauma and anxiety stole away my memories of my children's early years.
I started scrapbooks for them. I can't update them because I literally don't remember what happened during those years where I was unable to function properly between medication changes on a monthly basis and my bipolar and ptsd not being treated. The therapist I had at the time asked me how I had gotten past the trauma of what happened when I had my breakdown. I told her I hadn't. She then just stared at me. No words of wisdom, no suggestions, no questions. That was when I stopped seeing her. I haven't been able to find a therapist since because no one will take my health insurance. So, what the fuck am I supposed to do? I guess suffer and write it out.
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