A Well-Deserved Thank You

…to the rescue workers who helped us in the aftermath of the ice storm.  Six months later, some of you are still here and still helping us rebuild.  I spoke this morning with a man from Mississippi who was helping to repair a length of rail track here, and he made me smile.  It’s amazing how selfless people can be in dark times.

I get sad, sometimes, walking about and seeing the evidence of the storm.  There are still trees down and still broken fences along some of the farms.  My guess is people in the rural areas can’t afford the repairs.  Damaged monuments in several local cemeteries are being demolished and cleared away now that the ground is dry.  I can’t imagine how family members must feel knowing that their loved ones’ headstones were destroyed, many during the storm itself.  So many trees fell at one local walking park that the trail had to be closed, and every stone bench along the walking trail aside our local hospital was destroyed.  Driving through the town and into the rural areas, I see how deeply our area was affected, and it frightens me to look back on what caused all the damage.  People lost houses, cars, family pets, and loved ones.  Our town lost some of its major landmarks, and the individual property damage was unbelievable.

Still, signs of hope are everywhere as well.  I still see neighbours helping neighbours with repairs to houses and outbuildings.  This area is *incredibly* economically-depressed, and many people have just saved enough money to complete repair work.  One of the strangest sights I see are branches of trees that are blooming, even though they are barely attached to tree trunks.  Not far from the patch of rail track where I saw the rescue worker today, some volunteers were putting up a newly-painted sign at a small city garden that they had just replanted.  We may be working on rebuilding for quite some time, and our towns will never look exactly as they did before, but our communities and those who helped us have shown tremendous strength and spirit.  To those of you who wrote this off as ‘that little storm’ come visit our communities, see the damage, and watch our rebuilding efforts.  I think you’ll be surprised both at the scope of the storm and the effort we’ve put in to recovery.

So thank you to the rescue workers and utility crews from Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia (and any others I didn’t know of).  Thank you to the members of the National Guard who went door-to-door to check on people trapped in their homes.  Thanks to the people who operated the shelters, sometimes filled with hundreds of displaced families and stocked with almost no supplies, and to the amateur radio operators who provided communication when all other sources were down.  Many thanks, as well, to the charities who stepped in to help– the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR), the Salvation Army, Red Cross, Catholic Charities, Dare to Care Food Bank, Christian Appalachian Project Disaster Response, Metro Louisville United Way, Kentucky Voluntary Agencies Active in Disaster, and the Tri-State County Animal Response Team, among others.  We were fortunate to have so many caring individuals and organisations working with us that I can’t write an exhaustive list!  Words are inadequate, but as someone who went through the storm, I wanted to take time to offer my sincere appreciation for helping us during the storm and continuing on as we move forward with our recovery work.

Nostalgia

Here, on the other side of my night of panic, I’m feeling a bit nostalgic.  Nostalgia can be a powerful thing.  It can wrap you up in the past so badly that you forget to live the present.  But, it can also motivate you.  It can help you see the patterns in your life that you’re repeating, good or bad, and it can help you remember where you wanted your life to go.

I wanted to have a stable career and a life free from the cult by the time I reached my current age.  I’m a bit far from both of those goals, but I still have faith in them, and I still have faith (sometimes) in my ability to make them happen.  Positive steps.

One has to be careful following down the road of the past and focusing on the changes time has caused.  Time is merely a loop, and we choose the part of the loop we follow at any given moment.  Everything grows older and time keeps passing, but it never really gets away.  We just have to wait, sometimes, for the part we’re missing to come back ’round again.

There’s a line from Del Amitri’s song ‘When You Were Young’ that says it best–  ‘And down nostalgia’s rocky road, you watch your former lovers growing old.’  Click here to see the video on YouTube by universalmusicgroup.  It’s a great song, and very fitting for this lazy sort of homage to the past I’m meandering through at the moment.

Panic

Today is the last day of June.  The end of the first half of the year.  And I am panicked.  Very.  I feel like time is going too fast and we’re headed too quickly towards a fiery end.  I believe in reincarnation, have had some experiences that can only be described as past life memories, and know someone I trust and consider family who can help people through past-life regressions.  But I’m panicked about a silly little calendar page.

I also believe in Wicca and the beauty of the year’s cycle.  This year, I wasn’t even dreading the winter solstice with the absolute passion I typically feel.  Now, though, I’m caught up in that fear again.  I feel like my life is being lived all around me, but not within me.  Actually, because I’m a bit stagnant at the moment, I feel like I’m not living a life at all.  It’s possible to be stuck between lives, I know, but until very recently I didn’t have that feeling.  I need to be involved in something outside of my current surroundings.

And now I’m panicked.  Everything feels scary and spinning, and I’ve been caught in flashbacks for two days.  If anything, I hope this calendar change brings peace.

Self Reflection

I try not to think too deeply, lest I realise how much the present mirrors the past.
I try not to feel too strongly, lest the dam break and everything burst through.
I try not to love completely.
There are few words of love I haven’t heard twisted before.
I try to remember that not everything is fake, that some people really are safe.
I try to believe that it’s OK to let my guard down sometimes, to let someone else carry the weight.
I try to exist, in spite of those who wish to stop that happening.
I try to simply let myself be, to understand that I am my greatest obstacle.
I try to rise above the anger, but sometimes it swallows me anyway.
I try to understand what happened to me, why it was allowed, and what its purpose was
I try to live beyond that, to become who I am.
I try to open myself up slowly, to show the centre of me to those I love.
I try not to let the fear of that force me away.
I try to stay present, to remain a part of my own life.
I try not to collapse inside myself.
Because, even though I can’t always believe, I deserve a chance.

Reconnecting

One of my earliest memories is very traumatic, but it ended with probably the most beautiful experience I’ll ever have.  I remember being in a room next to one where my brother was being beaten.  I had been thrown out of the room and told that my brother would be killed if I came back in.  So I hid there.  Listening to it was worse than going through it would have been.

At some point, though, the screaming stopped and it was perfectly silent.  I felt warmth like I’d never felt before and saw someone’s arms around me.  I did that floating out of my body bit and saw myself cradled in the arms of this Being that was solid gold.  He made me laugh, and I knew that as long as He was around, I would be OK.

Fast forward twenty or so years and I’m still in close contact with this Being and another, for that matter.  They’re my Spirit Guides.  They’re not alters or any part of me at all.  They belong to the Universe as a whole and are Beings of light, to use a cliche.  I can usually contact Them in deep meditations, and I know They’re always close when bad things are going on in my life.  They’ve even given advice to people in my FOC and have helped me many, many times to provide guidance for others.  I’m human, obviously, and to that end They can’t make my life perfect, nor can They give me perfect vision.  What They *can* do, though, is help.

For a while now, I’ve been unable to do deep meditation.  I felt like I’d lost that connection and had nothing to hold on to.  Today, though, one of the Guides reached out to me and I felt that connection again.  I’ve been contemplating a seemingly small decision, prodded by one of my others who knows more about metaphysics than I ever will this go round.  The Guide who communicated with me today showed me how to handle that situation in great detail.  Turns out this ‘unimportant’ decision has been quite some time in the making.  It’s an even bigger, tangible link to that Universal connection I thought I’d lost.

To Journal or Not to Journal…

…that is the modern-day question.

I used to be an avid journal writer.  In fact, it’s been my end of the year tradition for quite some time to purchase the next year’s journal.  I have a collection of them starting with the first I wrote after moving to the US all the way to the current.  They chronicle the major events of my life as well as the day-to-day.  They’re truly like reading an autobiography.

This year’s journal, though, is not even half filled.  Blogging has largely taken the place of journalling for me, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.  On the other hand, journalling has become almost traumatic these days.  Writing in my private journal, I force myself to look deeply into my mind and assess all of those pesky little fears and emotions banging about in there.  Last night I tried to journal.  After about a paragraph, I stopped abruptly and wrote that I was getting triggered.

Blogging has been an amazing experience so far, and I intend to keep pounding away at my laptop.  I just find it curious how blogging seems to have changed my journalling so radically.

Numb

My therapy assignment from this past session was to practice feeling emotions.  I was supposed to find a safe place, attempt to summon an emotion, and really feel it.  The idea was to pay close attention to my physiological responses so that I could use those to recognise emotions in a regular setting.  I don’t know if too much attacked at once or exactly what happened, but last night, things went very, very badly.

It started with anxiety.  I certainly didn’t try to summon the anxiety.  I don’t have the least bit of difficulty recognising that particular feeling.  It snowballed, though, which isn’t unusual for me.  One worry led to another until I was in a mad panic and so scared that I could barely breathe.  Then that *thing* happened– I cut.  Months and months of successfully stopping myself from SI all torn apart in one stupid night.  SI has never been something I’m proud of, but it’s something I’ve dealt with for many years now.  Going back and reading this post, I noticed it also has a somewhat cyclical pattern these days.  I guess that’s a good sign– it used to be what I fell back on during *any* period of strong emotion.

Today I feel numb.  The slight burning from the cuts and break through bleeding from the deeper ones feels comforting somehow, and that frightens me.  It feels embarrassing to write that, but this blog is an honest look at mental illness if nothing else.  I guess the cuts just feel like a blanket– something to soothe those out-of-control emotions.  In the words of Sarah McLachlan ‘I need some distraction.  Oh, a beautiful release.  Memories seep from my veins.’  I fell asleep almost immediately after cutting and woke up this morning feeling numb.  Maladaptive as it may be, self-injury does work for its purpose.  I just wish it didn’t work so well sometimes.

Trauma and Sexual Response

This is a difficult subject, but from what I’ve read and heard among other survivors, it’s important.

Rape is sexual contact.  In my opinion, it isn’t sex.  I count sex as part of a consensual relationship between adults.  Classifying beyond that is not my call.

Victims of sexual abuse and/or rape are not responsible for what happened.  We did *not* want those things to happen, nor did we create the circumstances that led to our abuse.  The mind makes the emotional connection that this feels wrong.  The physical body, however, does not always make that distinction.

Right.  I can see that I’m not going to get through writing this post without starting to bumble on incoherently.

My point is, if you’re a survivor of sexual abuse and/or rape, you are *not* responsible, even if your physical body responded as it would under normal sexual circumstances.  That’s actually not uncommon, and it does not make you anything less than what you are now– someone working towards the difficult transformation from victim to survivor.

Complicated

There are two very distinct times in my recent past that I recall being truly happen, one in December 2002 and the other in the latter months of 2005.

The exact date escapes me, but that day in 2002 has stuck with me in great detail.  I was 21 then, living with my parents, and three years in to my college career.  It was snowing, and I had an Elton John cd playing.  I remember looking out of the window in the back of my room, watching the snow fall, and feeling truly happy.  It was one of those extremely rare times when my parents were getting along well with each other *and* with me.  That in itself is enough to make the day stand out.  I remember that we were all about to go out for pizza, and my mother was laughing.  More than anything, I remember feeling peaceful that day.

I finished my University studies a year from then and took a staff position with the office where I’d worked as a student.  2004 brought the deaths of my parents, a failed attempt at moving a distance away, and the start of my bouncing about from house to house for a bit as I adjusted to the major changes.  Writing all of this out, I can easily see why I look back at the end of ‘02 with fondness.  It was the last time things were simple.  My life in America was solidifying, and although it was far from what I’d thought it would be, my life was headed toward a more definite path.  After 2002, everything got complicated.  Because of my SRA background, I’d never had a great deal of certainty or stability in my life, but I was starting to feel a bit more settled.  Things do change so quickly.

2005 was *not* a good year for finding room-mates.  I’ll skip over that search and go straight to the end of the year, when things went right in the best possible of ways.  Not quite knowing where to go to get away from the crummy living environment I’d stuck myself in, I phoned my best friend and asked his mum if I could stay the week with them.  I left three months later.  Long week. 

Anyway, living with my best friend and his family was *amazing.*  We fell in to a comfortable routine, the three of us, and soon enough it felt like I’d always lived there.  I’ve tried many times, but I can never find words to express what living there was like.  It was safe and felt like family.  I guess that’s the best I can do with describing it.  I slept on the sofa and used three of the drawers built in the wall to hold my stuff.  We made that room into a room for me that transitioned perfectly back to a lounge during the day.  The logistics are mind boggling, but we made it work.    Lily, who we didn’t know at the time, loved being there.  She told my best friend and I that she remembered things from then and giggled loudly when pointing out that she knew us but we didn’t know her.  She’s very shy, our Lily.  Not the least bit outspoken.

I remember those times, especially living with my best friend, and take those feelings of comfort along with me.  My past may be dark and my present uncertain, but I have many times with my FOC here and afar that serve as guides for what life should be like.  I’ll know when I feel as I did then that I’ve found my place in the world.

Atypical Anti-psychotics…

…scare me.  Following my psychiatrist’s recommendation, I took the lowest dose of Zyprexa for the first time on Saturday morning.  It took almost twelve hours before I felt semi-normal again.  The rapid-cycling bit does not make me happy.  It disrupts my life and makes me feel out of control.  As I’ve written before, though, this class of meds does not set well with me.  Abilify gave me a seizure, Geodon sent me to hospital, Seroquel (and the others, actually) dropped my blood pressure to dangerous levels.  Fortunately, Zyprexa hasn’t lowered my blood pressure.  It apparently has resurrection properties as well, because this morning, I feel like a zombie.  I’m definitely not rapid-cycling.  I recognise this nothingness, and it scares me.

My mother took the old anti-psychotics –Haldol and Risperdal– and they turned her into a lack of person.  She quite literally drooled.  Yes, my sometimes violent mother was definitely not violent on those meds, but she was really nothing at all.  She barely spoke.  I don’t want to be like that.   I don’t want to be an out-of-control manic, a suicidal depressive, *or* a zombie.  I want to find a middle ground, and Western medicine might not be able to provide that.  I’ll try the Zyprexa for two weeks as promised, but my goal for this week is to work out the meditation techniques I’ve largely stopped using.  Meditation is extremely powerful, and I need to start using that again as another tool towards helping myself physically and mentally.