Therapy Revelations for Zombies.

I need to start writing again, even if it’s privately, to keep track of things. Work through things, if you will. I know this blog served me well in the art of inflection and self sabotage so many times in the past and for that reason I really have withdrawn from faux-anonymous transparency and honestly I’m sure I’ve lost whatever edge I ever had when it comes to writing as a form of self expression.

As with most of the things I consider art-for-survival at this point, it really did get washed away.

I’m the zombie.

I’ve been married for almost 7 years now to yet another sociopath. This one deviant in his own way, one far different from the one before, and just as invisible until he wasn’t and scarier because he was. I’m working through why this has happened again and genuinely have come to some pretty serious revelations about what cPTSD looks like and how it masquerades in plain sight. I’m kind of shattering my OWN stigma about domestic violence and what even I have lazily dubbed patterned behavior in victims who seem to “keep picking the bad ones” or “keep attracting the wrong people.”

I will not delve into the particulars for reasons that are both personally humiliating and legally detrimental as very much of this involves an open criminal case, but I will say this… it will never happen again. Under any guise, on any planet, in any emotional state. Ever.

I’m once again in therapy, but under a much different set of boundaries than before. A conversation was had up front about the ways in which I was utilized by my psychiatrist and how damaging the break down of that doctor patient confidentiality was to whatever shred of me that longed to heal back then. Assurances were made, and with those and my own understanding that trusting those assurances and being confident that once again this could never happen is foolish on my part, I return to the scene of the crime both jaded and guarded but still needing to do this despite it. So, just as I made this mistake before and destroyed my own sanity and any trust whatsoever I had in psychiatry, I will again blog my way through this because I feel like it may help someone else someday.

{In fact, if my CURRENT therapist(s) is reading this, I honestly hope that the things that I forget to say during our sessions still find their way into your studies. For science. I’ll never be an oblivious guinea pig again regardless.}

I am looking at this from an angle that is no longer about “understanding” and picking apart the significance of everything that I could deem the cause for ending up where I am in this moment, or for my children ending up here along side me, and instead focusing on something larger and more ambitious than surviving and moving on with life donning an armor of self-awareness that is somehow supposed to break a mythical cycle. Sure, the repetition of abusive relationships and trauma are not being dismissed… but they are also not a part of some unavoidable cycle that can only be hindered by grinding down to rubble and figuring out why it’s all my fault.

What the heck am I even talking about? I’m talking about the fact that I am NOT ignoring red flags, or attracted to toxic people because “they feel right” or “it feels normal” and likely if you were dropped into this sticky room by the talons of a #triggerword and you’re one who is caught in a similar holding pattern that you’ve dubbed a vicious cycle… you aren’t doing it either.

We can do hard things, boys and girls. Inflection is exacting. Open wounds are agonizing. Sewing those up while continuously poking raw guts back through the seams is like battling a hydra made of sinew. Bearing those scars and fighting the need to explain them to anyone that you ever get close to is taxing. Hiding them feels like betrayal to self and is of the loneliest places. These are all “hard” things. These are all the things that we think we must do to survive.

But what if… what if we don’t have to survive?

What if the person who all of that burning hurt belonged to actually succumbed?

What if by dedicating whatever of ourselves that we are able to bring to this futile fight, we are allocating that dwindling flame to light a room devoid of oxygen?

As good at it as I know I’d be, I’m not writing a song to suit the chord of melancholy… I’m saying what if we really ARE just dummies about this whole thing?

I am not a doctor, I am not a scientist -however mad- and I am just throwing this out there as hard as I can for my own notetaking.

WHAT IF THE WEIGHT WE FELT SO UNBEARABLE, THE HURT SO UNSURVIVABLE THAT WE THOUGHT ALL WAS LOST AND WE’D NEVER BE OK AGAIN… KILLED US?

By “us” I mean who we were… not our bodies. Visibly scarred or not, are we actually trying to resurrect corpses and calling this surviving?

This isn’t some boastful little rant about being further along in my journey to heal than anyone. I’m not any better off than I was when I was sitting in a chair being triggered and prodded into remembering repressed horrendous things about being sexually abused as a child, or raped, or the epiphanies that would burst forth from the aptly named by my former self’s “fuck-shaped-boxes” when I learned what gaslighting was. It’s not me popping out of a DeLorean in a wizard hat and spurs with the freaking recipe for moonshine and the secret to complete and total spiritual well-being. I’m completely without a lamp to light this path… but I think I might know where some matches are stashed.

All of the aforementioned parts of what we have convinced ourselves is what most of us are taught comes next after trauma. Surviving it and healing as best we can and being as “normal” as we can while we try to never end up back in that hell are “hard.” As much as I have always wanted to believe it, they aren’t just that way because of they effort and energy they demand; they are that way because they are actually IMPOSSIBLE things to accomplish. It’s like picking up limbs from a minefield and zapping a monster composed of the blown apart pieces because it’s supposed to be able to raise kids and hold a job without being a burden or making anyone else uncomfortable. Anyone who’s been through severe trauma of any kind knows that they’ve been blown to proverbial pieces. We may not be able to pin it down yet, or ever, but we know we aren’t who we were before. Neither is the monster. Everything’s there, but it’s no longer the vessel of who it was before it tripped, tippy toed, or titty slapped that detonator.

So why, then, have I always felt like I was SUPPOSED to resurrect the corpse of the girl who existed before it all only to have her walk through the rest of her life a zombie? Eating and functioning to a degree but surviving on instinct alone. Not LIVING.

That’s what I’ve come to feel like maybe cPTSD really is. It’s the sum of parts that are pointlessly being held together just so they can keep moving around as they are supposed to, but being perpetually reminded that they aren’t. They are constantly afraid that it’s obvious to everyone else and completely certain that they aren’t whole anymore. Metaphorically, we can’t do the hardest thing of all if we can’t look down at what we’ve reassembled and know it is dead. Step out of it. Let it fall to the ground and rot as it should. We can’t do that because we don’t feel like we deserve an actual do-over. We don’t deserve a brand new life and we can never have one because we are broken now.

Guys. Let’s just get really dumb, since we are zombies or whatever, and take all of that imagination that we dedicate daily to the LITERAL BULLSHIT that we can’t have or don’t deserve something because we’ve got so many scars and just re-allocate the huge amount of bandwidth used maintaining a totally fictional set of rules fueled by self deprecation and imagine a reality where we are actual phoenixes and not just people who use metaphors when we feel tough or are trying to convince others that we SURVIVED.

YOU AREN’T THE PERSON THAT YOU WERE BEFORE TRAUMA.

YOU ALSO AREN’T THE PERSON YOU WERE AFTER WHO’S SURVIVED AND IS NOW FIGURING OUT HOW TO LIVE AS NORMALLY AS YOU CAN.

“YOU” DIED. The you that all of that happened to, they died too. Stop walking around in their bodies. Do the hardest thing at all and love yourself enough to be a mad scientist that isn’t trying over and over to breath life into a cadaver. That’s the real cycle. There’s the real insanity, by definition. Instead be the doctor who’s literally fixing your own injured brain so that it’s no longer convinced that it lives in that body. Then look in the damn mirror and see the brand new person who exists as of that exact moment and be who that person would be if they never met the other one and if anyone in THIS person’s life wants to keep calling them by the dead one’s name you tell them once, then never let them make you feel the need to tell them again.

YOU ARE REINCARNATED.

INCARNATE OR WHATEVER.

LIVE.

If Mother Nature had PTSD

Having a brain that is forever scarred by experiences is like dead wood carved into by the world around it with no roots to nourish it as it regenerates it’s bark.

A mind covered in little ditches that pick up every drop of water, every reminder, every little vapor in the air around it all of the time becomes a bountiful tributary because water always finds it’s way to places it’s already been. Once a place floods it floods every time there’s a hard rain, but what if the rivers were physically sucking the water from the air and coursing it downstream constantly? Flash floods would be happening whether it actually rains or not. That’s how this works. It’s not driven by thirst or draught or gravity. It’s not driven by anything other than the inability to stop soaking up the world around it so it never misses a drop, just in case it’s THE drop. We can not protect ourselves if we aren’t always in battle mode. But hoarding stimuli, like never letting a drop of water soak into the earth, causes flash floods and suddenly we know nothing of dry land and can only see and feel the water in which we are now drowning all over again.

Even in the places where the Earth has changed due to natural disaster, the waters still recede and the bark still grows back.

We don’t know how to navigate PTSD because it is so insanely unnatural, not because we are weak.

Hiding under the blankets.

I’ve been apprehensive to say a word. Not even a peep. Still am. But I’m here.

Gods children, oblivious ballerinas.

I wrote this two Octobers ago, I found it in the notes of my phone…

I think that demons are at play in so many ways that we fail to acknowledge, if we are being honest. I believe that ones soul bares scars that are visible to the “in between” and are like lighthouses to those who are particular to the type of torment that has hollowed those places in you. They come along and fit the void like puzzle pieces and feel familiar bc of this. They take root in you and consume you. It is rare that someone is able to truly break this. Completely. It is a supernatural bondage over the human spirit. We give little credit to the divinity of the air. We really fail in respecting those things bc we lack understanding.
I’m certain of this. I’m the lucky or unlucky one, whichever you prefer to think of it, that was born with an understanding of these things. I’d love to legitimately study, to read what has been written, but for now I speak from my own limited interpretation of what is. I just know, from somewhere deep, that the spiritual warfare they scream about in churches is such an intricate faceted thing within which we are all very deliberately spun. Until people acknowledge that they are not only their own, that we are a part of this eternal ballet, and that our souls are the weak currency in a constant ebb and flow of power between darkness and light, we will never ever be enlightened and reach our great potential in the time we are each allotted.
We are doomed to repeat ourselves until we get it right. Hell is not a place. Hell is an absence, a distance from God. I really believe that.

I might add to this that hell is also something that I will never have to worry about seeing. Thank you, Jesus.

Passionate things are just that.

As writers and artists, of every kind, but especially those of us who are without discipline, we run a perpetual risk of judgement for our honesty. By honesty I mean, of course, our selfish need to vent at all costs, and by judgement I do not mean criticism. I mean judgement. I mean that we will, inevitably, tell our own truth as we know it to be and we will absolutely hurt someone else by it. Be it the ego, the absurdity of our perception, or the complete exposure that our diary-esque rooftop rantings beget, blood will surely trickle if not spray from the proverbial throats of those who we take with us out into the open. We dump our panty drawers from skyscrapers and you can only hope that any of your love letters we had stowed in there years ago had long been burned before we ever hit the stairs. To you I apologize. Any and all of you, who ever dared get near us at the risk of becoming our muse. Flattering in theory, the truth is that you will most certainly hate us for being the exact thing that you loved and wanted about us back when you loved and wanted it. So I say this with sincerity. Please do not take offense to passionate creatures doing what we do. We love you. Sometimes we love you threadbare. Sometimes we love you in 1000 volts of fleeting white hot pops. We don’t want to hurt you, but we might. I apologize. To the rare few who know how to love us despite this, who can bare to see parts of themselves in our work as the honor that it sincerely is, you are saints.

I want to say it all just once

It’s not fair that I will go to my grave without having ever said all of the things, calmly, that I want to say to the two men that I loved the most, and who both destroyed me. I can’t help that I have a such recurring fantasy to sit in solitude, somehow safe, across a folding table in metal chairs and just say everything. Everything.

“No-means-yes me, baby!” A love story.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/09/rush-limbaugh-on-consent-for-sex-no-means-yes-if-you-know-how-to-spot-it/
{now I realize that he is not “advocating rape” per say, I just feel like making light of, dancing around, and generally attempting to water down a topic such as consent by blurting lines and tossing around bullshit hot air about romance and seduction being lost arts is a generally pompous stance to take on a subject that has affected so many people. He loves to trigger. I know it’s a slight overreaction, but he loves those, and it just felt like a good time to write a romantic short story on his honor.}
In this one case, can I hope that someone no-means-yeses him right in his pooper? No drinks, no dimming the lights, I want complete coherence, the shake of the head, the bead of sweat down his pasty brow as he, in slow motion, bellows “NOOOOO” like a Bassett Hound and The Gimp gives him a knowing nod while committing a B&E on his back door.

On the nightstand lay a crumpled piece of hotel stationary with “your welcome” scrawled in rudimentary cursive. The Gimp was never one for good grammar or good byes and the blinds cracked back sharp as Rush released a thick sigh, much like the hot air he was notorious for contributing to the atmosphere, but slightly defeated and laced with just a pang of butt-rapey longing. Much like his asshole, his heart was somewhat inside out and he would never again look at the news or sauerkraut in the same way. The sun began to peek over the tops of the china berry trees and the muffled cry of an illegitimate baby found it’s way through the walls as he lit a cigarette and wept gently into his shit-stained hands. Yes… he thought… no means yes.

Domestic Violence, oh how trendy

You’ll never find a snake where a mouse didn’t already dwell. Maybe we should stop pointing out all the snakes and figure out when we allowed ourselves to become the mice that attract them.

Lazy lazy lazy

Dog, ya got a point. I’m with Matilda.
I think it’s safe to say that a reboot is in order.

Block.

I have the worst case of artists block EVER!!!! So much to do. It’s crickets.
Yeah right, I wish it were crickets.
My brain is dead air. I am in a very chemical place. Earth to Ambam. Tomorrow I walk a big job, one that’s not like anything I’ve taken on before and, honestly, I’m beating myself up because I don’t exactly believe in me today. Frustrated and stagnant.