Go Forward Already

Sometimes I wonder if even my writing about it all is another way, maybe healthier way, of dissociating from it. No. Because dissociation is a problem when we dissociate from our true selves, not circumstance or the bindings and abuses from others. The abuse, oddly, isn’t what’s been bothering me these past few …months? A year? It’s not my mother (I don’t think, because in spite of it all I love her deeply), it’s not my stepfather, it’s not the memories, its not the flashbacks or hypervigilence or the trauma from the psychosis itself. It’s ME.

I think I’ve come so far and then I wake up to rotten curtains on dirty windows and I want to see the snow coming down, yet it’s hard to get up–out of habit. I’ve let it all become HABIT. Not entirely but lots of it. I am afraid of myself most of the time. When I’m focused and rested and on top of the meds and in motion, then I feel like I’m on top of the world and I have it all, because I lost it all, and was given back something better. That’s so true.

Yet.

When I feel my molecules start to scurry and ping off each other

and I’m in an anxious fever, escalating to what I think will be utter depletion of who I am or who I’m trying to be–I break down for a little while. I’m desperate and I try to hide it, even in the mirror. I don’t want to know this side of me. This part of me. This splinter. I don’t want to address the crying little girl I hear everywhere I go. She’s really there. In my head. I want her to disappear because she is a nobody. I’m getting to the heart of something and it terrifies me yet excites me. I don’t treat my physical body well, but in the arena of mental disorder that seems so trivial. Until they tell you you have a lump on your lung. And even then–you feel less surprised than you should. You take it in stride and quit smoking. Maybe it’s because I’m alone all the time and I can’t see myself reflecting back in someone’s face, so it doesn’t hurt, because it’s not there. That’s the truth of withdrawal–you don’t want to see yourself reflected back, even in the eyes of those that genuinely love you.

I’m meditating, I’m calm, and yet I feel this emerging ache that’s so far away and it has answers for me. I want answers. I want the facts. I want to put myself through the wringer to make this tunnel end. And you know I’m so unfocused on the world sometimes that I don’t realize the tunnel I’m wandering around in. I forget so much, really. It scares me. Time spans and memories of even recent traumas though slight–are foggy and I don’t exist in them. I don’t tell my family/sister that I don’t remember certain things because, well, I guess it’s embarrassing. I don’t want her to know how ill I really can be, or how deep it really goes. It goes to my core–in so many wonderful and so many tragic ways.

And then there’s my daughter. My sweet. I can’t even write about her yet. What is that saying about me and what’s going on? It hurts to damn much and real emotion, real love is exhausting. I have it endless for her and I do my best and I teach her mental wellness, yet I fuck up too, and what does she see when I fuck up? Will she remember when she’s older how I loved her with all my being, or will she remember my absences? Is she angry? Or am I imposing my and my mother’s relationship on it? My old 10-year psychotherapist always told me when I was getting rough to be my mother role, because that’s the one I shine in. I could shine so much more though couldn’t I? Yes I could. I need to step it up a couple notches. I think my new psychologist is fn brilliant–she’s perfect for me. She’s not trying to be this grandiose woman that I should someday feel I could achieve in myself. She’s very real and to the facts and the emotions are relevant without being coddled and she just lets me breathe and she lets me have control over my well-being. I can’t believe I met her. When I left her office the first time I cried on the way home because finally, finally I felt like I could be helped with all the inner unresolved, unknown, scary things in me. And that I see me as divided and I’m trying to join the two as a whole–there’s the me that is ill and symptomatic across the board and abusing drugs (or was…so far) and disappearing and hiding and not counting and useless and weak and fighting; and then there’s me. The real me. Patiently waiting and watching the way the world moves and how people can love so fiercely and that that can save you–not them, but that love. And what of Faith? I studied Hinduism, Buddhism, the Indian texts I so am in love with, Alan Watts (read The Book), The Upanishads, some amazing books on Christianity and Juddaism (I wish I could remember which ones) but the point is what I got from them all is that they’re all the same and the wisdom in them is phenomenal, so eloquent and seemingly simple and obvious and so foreign to our minds. Well, my mind. I’m rambling. Maybe because I’m repressing my nerves because I have a nodule on my lung and I’m thirty. It’s just a nodule. A nod. Nawd. No it could be fine, I’m not all that hyped up about it.

Is this a fucking pity party–like a passive aggressive one? No, I’m just truly calm and feeling in a moment right now. Call it mania, call it hyper-activity, or hit the medium spectrum and call it medicated mood levels for bipolar, or maybe it’s a higher state of comfortable dissociation or derealization. My point is these are just labels. I let them scare me sometimes. Can’t I simple just be in this confusion of a woman?