Fuck if I know the cheating ever stopped. What do I believe anymore? Honestly. I’m never going to be able to keep Mandi and John apart. He was friends with her for two years, he said. “That’s a long time.” Okay. We’ve been together for ten and married for seven. Guess hanging onto this meant less. What, since I caught you again this August, I’ve got nothing to worry about? Did I have anything to worry about 18 months ago when you were texting her while I was shelling out hundreds of dollars for your birthday? Or on any given day since? What part of “never again” was confusing? When I caught you after nearly a year of cheating just before we got married, were you confuse on the parameters of my staying or leaving? When I caught you talking to her on facebook? Why would you think this was okay?

I feel like time has put too much distance between you and your actions and I’m fucking sick of the deception going on that makes me sound like the asshole here.

Don’t you remember? THIS is why. THIS is why we have problems. THIS is why it’s not okay. THIS is why I don’t trust you and why every concurrent breach of the trust that I was building again doesn’t just destroy that trust or the possibility of future trust, it brews my hate. There’s part of me that really fucking hates you. That part of me that knows I was not the one. The part of me that hears you telling me you loved her but married me. Glad to know I was better than spending the gas money to get there. But nothing more.

You love me madly? Fuck you. You have never loved me. Fucking nobody has ever loved me. And that is never gonna be different.

Have you never read this blog? This blog is about how constantly disappointing I’ve ever been to you, how worthless. Can’t you see that? Or do you need to call Mandi and ask her opinion? After all, she told me that you told her I abuse you. *I* abuse *you*. What a fucking laugh. You cheated on me for a year while telling me and everyone else that I was insecure and crazy, that I needed help for even thinking it. And when I catch you and think you’ve learned enough to just admit it, you lie to me. And then you lie about how long. And when do I start thinking I’m getting the truth from you? When am I supposed to believe you? HOW? And just when I miss you, just when I miss the companionship or the contact, just when I’m feeling sorry for you, just when I think I can’t do this, just when I’m not sure if I have the fortitude in myself to keep going on this path, when I just want to give up and be the pathetic piece of shit you fuck while trying not to say her name, something happens and I see you don’t want or care to change. Not for me.

Yeah, I have some confusing feelings and I’ve been honest about them. And they wouldn’t exist honestly if room hadn’t been made in our lives for me to feel this empty and hopeless and perfectly aware that you are always going to need her more than you’re willing to make our marriage work. My feelings are stupid and unrequited and honestly foolish anyway. I know that. It’s not like they’re gonna change a damn thing.

I’m lonely. And nothing in my life is panning out. Nothing is or has ever gone the way I wanted, or hoped, or worked for. Everything always turns to shit, because you know what they say, you get what you deserve.

You are a liar. You are cunning. You are weak. You are pathetic. You are disgusting. You break promises you never even intended to keep. You cheated on your ex wife and lied about it. You’re still married to your ex wife and lied about it. You are not my Father. You claim to want to stay in my life, but don’t you see that I can’t have a deceitfulous cunt in my life? For any reason? Why are you deserving of anything? To even shit on you would be a waste of my exertion. You are a minuscule, shrivelled little fuckass. You are nothing but a pathetic little fuckboy in man clothes playing a role you don’t deserve.

I let you lie to me and break my dying Mother’s heart. I hate you. I hope you get hit by a truck and die on fire burning in a coating of gasoline.

Fuck yourself and your Georgian horse riding whore, Sam Wolfe (aka Cunttana). Lose my number. Fuckface.

I was beginning to feel a bit okay again. I was getting back to finding myself somewhere in the mess of doctors appointments, assessments and work. I was trying to make time for small passions like making more music and reading books again, putting on music instead of deadening my thoughts with talk radio. I was succeeding in small steps at learning how to smile meaningfully. And then it happened. I think somewhere inside I always know it will no matter how other people tell me not to be a pessimist. Everybody fucking leaves and even when I know they will somehow, I’m never prepared. I always feel like the car that gets t-boned in an accident. It always feels like it came out of nowhere and I’m left with the painful aftermath of the whiplash and sudden death of it all.

I gave you a part of myself I haven’t given anyone in a long time, and I trusted you with it implicitly. I also gave you a new part of myself I have never had before to give to anyone and above all else in this life, that part I did not give lightly. You betrayed that trust, in the most significant, cruel, deceitful way you could devise. At the end you could not even muster the fortitude to be honest. You are a coward. I can see there is no room to share personal problems, only one person in the world gets to be broken. What I always saw as acceptance was seen by you as exclusion. What a joke. If I ever tried to include you, I was seen as being insensitive and lacking compassion. What you’ve left is abundant with questions, anger and sadness. You took something from me in promise that you never deserved to be offered, let alone believe it was your right to accept, if this is something you were capable of doing with it. I hope someday you are taught a betrayal as deep as your own. And like me, I hope it shakes you down to the bare bones foundation of your being.

This event pushed me over the edge. I completely fell off of whatever recovery I was in. I’ve spent the last month in a haze of prescription medication to level out my moods and alleviate the pain of a really poorly timed physical injury. I am in sessions every week, tweaking my medication and struggling to stay awake or even live consciously. The medication is hard to wade through and it has been only through the recent decision to scale back that I’ve found my way through the fog at all. My life has until today been completely unmanageable.

I am tired. I am tired of everyone. I don’t want to be; I am tired of expectations I cannot meet no matter how I try, and words that intentions that are forced on me to wear that I did not create. My heart was a home once. And it has been completely burned from the inside out, and yet people keep trying to force residence inside it. You cannot tear a person down this way and expect them to stay standing. My heart was a home, not a prison.

I don’t know what purpose it serves to hollow someone out and then expect them to be full.
It isn’t just the same ballet. It’s the same performance. I don’t dance. I echo.

K.

But this time I’ve tried a new tack. “Look forward. look forward, look forward, look forward.” I cannot be blindsided if I have my eyes open. I don’t have the time to waste always looking back at something that cannot ever be different. All I can do is change how I feel about what doesn’t change and can I do that always looking behind me at what was, who I was? Or do I look forward? I got three days into the month and the nightmares started. This year, they’re different. At first, I thought good.

I had a lucid moment in the first dream. There was a reconciliation. A new beginning. There was happiness in an unexpected change in events (I don’t have time to waste always looking back at something that cannot ever be different). I realized somewhere in the back of my head that the circumstances under which this at-first-dream-then-nightmare were wrong. I dreamed it through a younger view of myself. It felt freeing at the moment it was happening in my head, like, “If I can dream this, feel this, think this, if my feelings can change enough for this, maybe I can let it go now.” I remember thinking it and feeling this relief unlike I have known ever. But almost as soon as I had it, it began to slip away. Those feelings of relief quickly became poisoned with this feeling of being trapped and powerless and unable to do or say the right thing to stop anything or save anything.

Control is an illusion. At least it has been for me. Everyone around me thinks they have it, and sometimes even I think they do, but the truth is I know that power is tenuous and it’s only as strong as your belief in it. I just want to let go. Let go. Look forward.

So, at the beginning of the summer, I spoke to my doctor, who essentially told me she did not believe in mental health disorders, and that ultimately they’re personality flaws. I was told to get over myself and read a self-help book. I left the doctor that day feeling unstable and scared, full of self-hate that it did not feel like she was right but she had to be, and also a deep anger because ultimately I knew she was wrong, and once again I was met by an indifferent medical professional who was using me to make a quick buck without actually having to do her job. I googled my Doctor and found hundreds of complaints about her treatment of her patients. Her origin was in physiotherapy and sports medicine, before she took an upgrade to a family practice.

After the last time I ended up in the hospital, VIHA stepped in after I essentially made a complaint and have hugely taken over my care. Within a month I was starting to receive updates from people about accessing programs that would find me a new doctor, properly refer me to my endocrinologist directly, get me an insulin pump, advocate for my disability, and help me find and utilize a therapist. Finally I am starting to feel like people are listening to me. At the same time that acknowledgement is new ground and I am nervous. I’m trying to convince myself it’s nervousness, not fear, but I think it’s both. I’m trying not to let that fear hold me back from getting what I need.

The hardest part of this, despite feeling kind-of vindicated, is hearing people who deal directly with trauma on a daily basis tell you that they’re overwhelmed hearing everything you’re dealing with. It’s hard because you know that the reason people are ignoring you and have shut you out all this time is because it was easier than trying to understand what even you can’t. It’s hard when people on the outside are angry at you for your feelings and/or decisions, it can all seem so black and white from the outside but completely muddied on the inside. Everything feels so deeply entangled.

I’m right at the beginning of the battle. But for the first time someone is there, willing to help me fight it. That is a humongous relief- just knowing your life has the capacity to change and be better. I’m tired of being this lone being bopping around a medical system helplessly that expects me to recover without ever having to give me the resources or time to do so. Here’s hoping.

Anyhow, on with “Waking the Tiger“.
The immobility response is one I can relate to in terms of the early traumas of my life. In words and arguments I sound like a fighter, a flighter. I sound like someone who will bite, kick, scratch, punch and scream my way out of the kinds of abuse I endured; but I didn’t. I froze. I held my arms close to my body and closed my eyes and waited. I mentally tried to normalize what was happening and believed that there was nothing I could do, and that if I tried, the consequences would be exponentially worse than staying silent. I had opened my mouth and asked for help once, at great personal cost. I hid the abuses that followed after with a deafening silence and an act so elaborate, it was Oscar-worthy. “[The immobility response] is a state very similar to death.” According to Peter Levine it is a gift to us from the wild to be able to do this in order to avoid the effects of trauma. But what do you do when the actual danger is gone and everything you didn’t feel then over years of abuse comes to surface all at once, like the pain is new?

As he outlines in this chapter, the first step to trying to recover was being able to speak about it at all, and then I couldn’t not speak about it. Then came being able to talk about it without crying. But truth be told, I do relive it. I remember it when I talk about it- you have to. You are forever tied between the facts of events and the feelings you experienced- especially when, like me, they were the first time you felt those feelings at all. You always remember your firsts of things- developmentally it is how we learn to do things, to behave and navigate. I realize those were not the appropriate ways of doing things. I know I didn’t permit what happened to me and that it was wrong. But when will I learn to accept that it doesn’t have to happen again and it doesn’t have to dictate the rest of my life? Is that what I fear? A neverending cycle of abuse? I suspect it might be.

A counselor (not even a therapist, because getting one of those is pretty well impossible here) suggested this book, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma by Peter Lavine. My parents (who are the closest thing to a legitimate support system I have but are too far away to be a regular, active, or integral part of it) purchased it for me, hoping it could help. As part of my journey, and my concerted effort to actually bother reading this thing and hoping it makes a difference, I’ve decided to record thoughts on each chapter- not as a review but more so how I relate to the material and what I garnered from it. Here goes.

Emotion always has its roots in the unconscious and manifests itself in the body. -Irene Claremont de Castillejo

I wish I could say that I don’t know why this is happening to me. The tragic reality is that for the most part, I do, and that changes nothing. To those around me, no matter how concisely I try to explain how I am doing or why, they do not see the rationality in it. Even when I do not believe myself crazy, those around me still do. I am always on the defense trying to explain that what I am going through is acceptably normal- just more overwhelming than I know how to cope with. I live in this strange alternative reality where those I live with don’t understand at all the body/mind connection- don’t try to empathize at all what this is all doing to me because they are not experiencing it. Here, emotions are as mythological as Unicorns, or as shunned as disease. I am primarily a sensing and feeling person. Imagine where that leaves me.

As a person with needs, I feel that I am often viewed in a disassembled manner, where each aspect of me is split apart from the other, and they do not intricately intertwine or share relationships of any kind, where each purpose they serve must do so separately and with implicit obligation, and without effect on each other at all. I relate very much to the notion that trauma begets trauma, and I have tried very hard all my life to sever its generational connections in my family. I don’t want to bring this on my children.

According to this book, I suffer from a virtual library of traumas: PTSD, GAD, Developmental Trauma, Shock Trauma. Yes, there are many misconceptions about trauma. I do feel self-conscious, and unfairly judged, and treated poorly as a result of it. I’ve tried in adulthood not to hide it out of shame, to feel comfortable asking for support or help, to try to come to terms with it. Instead, what that has brought down on me is a silence so deafening that I feel smashed in the power of it. Many people approach their understanding of it with personal experience (i.e. “That’s not how I reacted/felt with similar experiences so tough shit.”, “When I was young we didn’t have the luxury of feelings.”)

The book says that body sensation, more than even intense emotion, is the key to healing trauma. It asks that I be aware of emotions swelling up inside and how my body responds to them. It says that if my feelings are too intense (i.e. “Rage, terror, profound helplessness”) that I ought very much to seek a therapist. They are all of those things and more at any given time, and I have reached out for help. I can’t even get an ounce of compassion, let alone help.

I’m trying despite that all, to put myself on a road to life beyond trauma. I sincerely hope this book helps me.

2am; where do I begin? Crying off my face again.
The silent sound of loneliness wants to follow me to bed.
I’m a ghost of a girl that I want to be most.
I’m the shell of a girl that I used to know well.

I am always going to be the villain in this story. People never tire of making me the villain. Those around me say, write and do things as if I am too daft to piece together what is going on. I think they’re all full of shit. It has been all I can do for the last few days not to say that things are inexorably similar to a grievous day that changed my life. I am sick so often that now nobody thinks twice about the effect it has on me if I end up in the Hospital, or that maybe the stress I am under is why. The worse things are for me, the less anyone seems to care. I feel like a ghost. And I feel like I should have wisely known that “better life” is a lie, and an illusion. I am dying very slowly. And by the time anyone notices I was even alive I will be gone.

I am so untrusting of everyone and everything now. And yet, if for some reason I lost my ability to go on and do this for even one more day, I’m sure it would shock everyone. Nobody believes a word I say until it is too late. I am becoming a bitter, angry, resentful person for this fact. I don’t matter. Why should those who don’t think I matter, matter to me?

I have asked for help with what I am going through from family and friends and doctors and they all just stare at me wide-eyed and hesitant, and the minute eye contact is broken it’s like my plea never left my lips at all.

Now I am stuck in something I can’t change and can’t fix and can’t walk away from. I am so tired of being a problem that I’d like to just remove the problem all together. Nobody will ever care enough to help me, or listen to me. Every open door and available ear comes with a price and I am not just a walking body- a physical commodity. I should not have to pay a price with my skin to get what should come automatically, but does not come at all, payment or none.

I just want to pack and disappear. It’s a warning sign and it’s tugging at every muscle and bone in my body with a relentless gravitational pull that is taking Herculean strength to ignore. I’ve been the fighter. I’ve been the bodyguard. I’ve been the lover and the weekend warrior and the hero. And I’m tired. I’m tired of the thankless battling and the being invisible and the not having even a measure of help. I’m tired. And I told people I was getting tired, burning out, unable to continue at this pace this way without changing some things.

Yet here we are.

But I’m done. There is a consequence to a time where head clearing is possible. Sometimes distance has consequences. Sometimes it has the exact opposite effect we intend it to. Sometimes those you’ve fought for, who should fight for you just don’t, and they’ve made no secret that you’re not worth fighting for, and you never were. I go looking for answers, encouragement, reach out for someone. All I come up with are fistfuls of years of established evidence that I am not her. I am not her and I was not her and I will not be her and that makes me woefully inadequate. I will always be woefully inadequate. Sometimes it is one fine detail that has changed from something we planned rather vaguely that is the destroyer of trust. Everyone has to take the inch of blossoming trust and shove it through a mile long wood chipper.

I feel cheated. I feel lied to. I feel abandoned. I feel angry. And I don’t even want to fix it anymore.

I just want to remove the problem.

Who was I before all of this? I wish that’s a question I could answer. If you had asked me then, I am sure I’d have known. I remember being sure of myself- probably for the first time in my whole life. I remember being proud of myself, fond of my body. I remember owning a confidence I’d spent my whole life searching for. Now I feel like that confidence was built on a house of cards. I was sure of myself and of nothing else.

As much as it hurt me, somewhere inside I wanted it to mean something. I wanted it to be worth it. Was it worth it? Because 7 years have passed and do you know what’s different? I’m 29, I’m unsure of myself, and I doubt everything every second. I died in 2007. My heart stopped. Quiet honestly I don’t even know for how long but there were several days after- some in a coma, some awake- that I was expected to die permanently. I spent those days waiting for it to come. Ever since I feel like I’m still waiting. I feel like a ghost.

I’ve been hanging on to consciousness, one second to the next, just holding on for dear life. When do I get to feel like the master of my universe again? I’m unsure of everything I do, everyone I know. I doubt every decision I’ve ever made. They’ve all been like tripping and instinctively putting my foot down to keep from falling on my face, over and over again. All of my movements and decisions are reactive. When do I put my foot down on purpose, where I want it to be? When do I stop making every decision I make based on my survival, and start making them based on my happiness?

I still feel lost. I still feel diminished. I still feel damaged. When do I start feeling like myself again? Will I be sure? Will I be confident? Will I like myself? My happinesses are small. Most of the time I settle for distraction in enjoyments. I’m not sure those are the same thing.

Who am I now, since all of this? I wish that is a question I could answer.