TRIGGER WARNING – Body memory , denial , acceptance
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. In a nut shell……Told my psychotherapist about a specific ‘body memory’ that came up last year , although I didn’t call it that. This is one of I don’t know how many , but I just told her this one. I expected her to treat this how I treat it , to tell me that I’m crazy , delusional , just an attention seeker fabricating things in order to play the victim , to tell me that this is false memory syndrome (even though I know that fms is bullsh**). I expected her not to ‘hear’ a word of what I was saying and turn me away without further help. I was not prepared for her response. She said , in a very gentle tone ‘The body remembers’. As in -The Body Keeps The Score,the book she knows I’ve read . That she must of read . And her saying that has been playing on a loop in my head since I woke up and I’m realising that I was the one struggling to ‘hear’ her , and what she was saying. She said that my body remembers, she did not say that my body is a liar. I don’t know what to do with this tbh , any advice on how I sit with this because I have a few month break from mental health team until I have a review for one on one and I’m panicking (safe though , just super distressed)

Dreams of loss

Now I stopped sedating myself, stopped shoving things into my body and mind in an attempt to stuff things back down, stopped telling her that I can’t cope with her, stuff is starting to come up again. And because I am not using any substances or medication, I can no longer pretend that this stuff is a side effect, in my head.

I slept badly last night . Waking up in 30 min-2 hourly intervals. At first I panicked, why did I wake ? Did something wake me? A noise? Has that man come back to do to me what my waking up prevented him from doing? I am too afraid and cold to get out of my bed and check outside. I remind myself that all the windows are closed and locked, that they now have alarms on them. I remind myself of the reason I am so drawn to sedatives- sleep frightens me , I do not want to be any closer to my unconscious mind than I have to be, I do not want to dream ; regularly or lucidly, I do not want to wake after a solid eight hour sleep with jaw and body aching with bloody sore fingers from picking/biting in my sleep feeling more tired than I felt before I slept. I remind myself that I would have woken before he even got through my window had I not drank and smoked myself into oblivion that night.That before I started medicating myself, I woke up every single time J walked into my room naked, ‘checking to see if I was asleep so he could turn the tv off’. I remind myself that I am now sleeping sober again, which means never being fully relaxed, always being alert , on edge, waiting, protecting.

I reassure myself that ‘I’ can sleep, because there is a part of me that will not sleep , and she will wake me if she needs to. Its ok. Sleep.

I am in a shop, on the top of one of the display units are two puppies. German shepherds X Siberian husky. One white with bright blue eyes. One black with bright yellow eyes like my cat , Lou. The shopkeeper tells me that they are £25 each ( its seems significant as I write this that £25 is the cost of an eighth of an ounce of weed). The one that looks like my Lou makes eye contact with me, and I know that he is already ‘mine’. That he belonged to me before I had even seen him, there is no question. Of course I will take him with me, where else would he go? ( This is something I said to M recently when she asked me to be her birthing partner, ‘Of course! Where else would I be?’). He is so fluffy and innocent , and I feel whole because I have found him . I did not know that I had not been whole until I felt that. Now I cannot imagine going back to what it felt like before. I take him home to my room , in Mums house.Everything inside it is white.  I need to sleep so I get Lou , put her and the other new part of us (the puppy) down , lock my bedroom door and fall into sleep easily , without effort. I feel safe. At peace. I can finally rest.

I jump awake terrified……Is that the right word? Dismembered , as if I am waking because someone just removed one of my legs. Something has been wrenched from inside of me. I know without looking that I left the window open before falling asleep (this is how that guy got into my flat recently), the puppy has escaped. My puppy has gone. I tear out of the window, hysterical , absent and yet so unbearably present all at once. This feeling is so big that I cannot possibly encompass it, cannot hold it fully, that is the absence. But it is so big that there is no amount of distance that can make it disappear either, it is not possible for me to zoom out that far, that is the presence.

Things get blurry in the dream, I am running , never fast enough , my body cannot do/be what I need it to do/be . I need to be everywhere at once so I can find him , not moving from one place to the next at a ridiculously slow human speed when he could be too far away already . I ask strangers to help me , Mum to help, anyone.

There is a small ,wet and forlorn black puppy in my arms. I am holding him like a baby. His nose in nuzzled in my elbow. He is cold. I don’t know how he got there. I feel ……tentative. He is not breathing. I place his tiny muzzle and nose in my mouth , I close my lips around it, air tight. I breathe hard, 3 times. I begin to shake and tears fall out of my eyes. He breathes. His mouth opens. His eyes open. He looks like my puppy, I understand now why they thought he was. But it is not him. I shatter.

I begin to become lucid, realise that I am dreaming. I could steer the dream now if I wished to. I do not wish to. I cannot bear being in this place inside of myself. No. Wake. Now.

I wake . At least my body does. I open my eyes and I am in the dark in my flat , in my bed . I turn on my LED candle light, hoping it can bring me back, bring my mind back here, away from the face of the puppy that is not mine, from the grief that overwhelms me . From the knowledge that he is lost forever, gone, and now I will never find him . I let him leave me , and now he will not come back and I will never find him. I fear I will drown in this feeling forever.

Flashback??

Having an argument with K (therapist) in my head whilst shopping . Feeling the cold trolley against my skin, holding it so tight , as if i’ll float away if i don’t , feeling each step, pushing from my core through my legs , pushing againstv the ground, knowing its safe here , there are cameras , its light out, your 25….nope 26. You can handle this. I feel like she doesnt beleive what happened happened.
I feel like she doesn’t beleive what I say when I say it. Becauase she asks me a question, I answer it as honestly as I can , and then she corrects me . ‘ No thats not a flashback J. Thats a strong emotion’. And she looks at me , pity, for I clearly don’t know the difference.

Thanks K, cos I don’t know what a strong emotion is right? Because I haven’t sat in that building overwhelmed by a flood of tears hundreeds of times already? What about now, that wasn’t even a flashback because I’ve never had that argument with K, I’ve never had any argument with her. I feel like what I say isn’t heard, no matter how I try to say it. And the more I try and still dont get heard , the more I panic , the more alone I feel. At least if I don’t say anything I can tell myself that I would be heard, if only I could speak. What if I speak and I’m not heard ? What does that say ?

That I’ll never be heard. That I’ll always be alone with this. That even a professional can’t ‘be’ with this. The questions , ‘will i be tolerated?’ ‘will i be accepted?’ ‘ will I be understood?’ She answered no to all of them. No your experience can’t be tolerated J. No I can’t accept what you just said J. No I can’t understand you J. Because if I could tolerate it, accept it, understand it i would not be sat here correcting you , patronizing you , as if you decided these things were true yesterday.

If I understood , I would ask how long you had been alone with this for. I would wonder how heavy this must of got for it to outweigh the fear of rejection, of silence, of losing yourself, of losing help.

If i’m silent, no one can hear me. If I scream then they aren’t allowed to hear me , because then the next time I need to be heard I’ll scream. If I cry they don’t hear me . If try and articulate it in a reasonable honest  way they can’t hear me. Will I ever be heard? Will she ever exist? Did she exist? Do I exist?

What about last night? Arousal , trying to make sure that no part of my vagina is touching anything , including itself is impossible, but i try, because the shame is setting me on fire, it is burning me alive because i’m tied to a stake in the center of it, and I know i can’t outrun it , I can’t put it out , I can’t go around it , I can only go through it it. By sitting in it , by sitting with it. I have to stand still and let the fire consume me and somehow try to tell myself I’m not really burning.

At the same time I’m drowning, I know that I’m mostly air and if I relax and just trust the water, my body, physics, then I’ll float to the top unharmed, where I can breath. But trying to be still when you can’t breath feels impossible.

22/01/17

I think these feelings about K are a flashback .

 

‘I’m really angry at you for telling me that my experience wasn’t a flashback. I think that you saying that has triggered another flashback. You asked me what I experienced , what did I mean by flashback? I told you about this particular one as best I could, but there aren’t really words. I was simultaneously feeling how she felt in that photo or at that time , and my own sadness , horror and disbelief  at what she had felt/was feeling. And confusion and absence at the fact that those WERE my own feelings, not some random little girls . Because they do not feel like mine. She does not feel like me, she never has. And I don’t feel like her either. No I did not feel little,  because ‘I’ do not know what it feels like to be little.  I have been aware of these types of things within myself (in a way that I could be introspective with to some degree) for at least 3 years, and I have never been able to really share them , I occasionally touch on them , but thats it. The hard stuff doesn’t usually come with me to that room. But recent events changed that. Because the night that guy locked himself inside my flat with me while i was sleeping, I had been drinking the way I had because I desperately needed to say something , because this thing had been haunting me for months, intrusive thoughts , feelings in my body that have no context or explanation , and then finally -actual pain and bleeding from my bum for months  , which was the final straw for me, because my bum would be in so much pain , but the next minute numb (edit-not quite accurate, exaggeration , it only went numb a few times, and more recently) , like my hands and toes recently. I have a friend who has dissociative experiences and knows J so I went there and got drunk , really drunk, and told him that i think my body and some part of me is screaming at me that j raped me anally whilst I was passed out on the sleepers that he encouraged me to get prescribed. Came with me to get prescribed. Supplied me with himself at times. Because I would wake up when he came in my room before the amitryptiline regardless of how much i had drank or smoked. Because him coming in my room brought up feelings and thoughts (not as simple as I just worded it) about sex between me and my cousin when i was younger that im not sure even happened. I hadn’t been able to deal with any of this as i had an exam coming up and i had already deferred the module and retaken it before because of the hen night and the weddding. But because i wasnt able to bring any of this ….well , anywhere really, let alone to therapy…..I went to D’s and got blackout drunk so that i could say it out loud and be heard. And i was. But then i couldnt cope with that , i think i wanted to be told i was wrong, crazy. But thats not what happened. I started feeling really sick ( i had drank ALOT) , i started to ‘realise’ (another flashback I’m just realising)that  i wasnt safe alone with D while blackout drunk, i knew i should call a cab , but i didnt feel safe in a cab alone with a man , so i walked home. Then this happened . This happened because i couldn’t bring this stuff here. So I brought it here. Not all of it, but alot more than usual. And you told me I was wrong. You did not hear me. ‘

The cycle of the system

I have this deep-rooted sadness and sense of injustice about my great Uncles recent death. Not grief, because I did not know him to miss him or grieve him. Sadness . Sadness for my great Aunt and the children and grandchildren he left behind. But I’m sad for him also .

I know a few things about my Great Uncle . My Great Aunt  believes he had an affair with my Nan. My Mum believes that my Great Aunt believes that , and feels its the reason that my Great Aunt was emotionally and physically abusive towards her when she was a teenager. My Nan told my Mum that it wasn’t true, and Mum believes that.

My second cousin recently told me at a wedding that she is struggling to break the cycle of our family. That her Dad, my Great Uncle, used to beat up her Mum and was an alcoholic (the alcoholic part was a given). That she used to feel like her protector, like the adult. She swore she would break the cycle, but inadvertently she had reproduced it. As she is currently in an abusive relationship, and her little boy  feels like her protector.

I also know that my great Uncle  helped my Uncle (Mums brother) in some way , a big way. Maybe its what helped get my Uncle get ‘out’.

I know that there is an unspoken sense of relief , for both him and others, that he is now laid to rest.

I’m so sad that a reality like this exists . That an environment exists in which this happens. Not just once, to one person, in one location. But to whole families of people , generation after generation, all over the world. Even though the new generation watches this happen to the old one. Watches them grow old and bitter and cold and decrepid and hard. Watch the years of burying themselves and their humanity and their freedom catch up on them in the form of mental and physical injuries. It is illogical that this model for living is willingly handed down to thier children , encouraged, when they know where it leads. What drives this madness? This insanity?

Fear. And a lack of its counterpart, courage. Because people have no hope. Hope is to courage what hopelessness is to fear.

They have no hope , because we are made to believe there is none. When I had given up, I had no hope left. I felt resigned to the ‘fact’ that I would inevitably be enslaved in the cycle forever. I was trapped, and there was no way out. Or there was but it either meant the street way or the academic way. I didn’t feel I had it in me to pursue either, and that meant I just wasn’t cut out for life. I could either resign myself to the cycle. Enforce the cycle , the ghetto mentality. Or enter a different one

I feeling alot of anger at M recently. I guess that I’m slowly starting to see her as a whole person , rather than this helpless , vulnerable little girl that I need to take care of , and feel responsible for. As I’ve progressed through psychotherapy, I’ve learnt to put boundaries in place with my Mum, to be able to distance myself from her , although I live her. She doesn’t have nearly as much control over me as she once did. And most of the time I’m able to accept and ride out the guilt and panic I feel at not caving into her manipulations. Its become easier to do that because I can now see all that she did to us girls as kids, and what she did to us by just not being there. I can see how severely I was almost brainwashed by her, emotionally manipulated and abused by her, forced into being her caretaker. This makes me fucking angry, understandably. And this anger allows me to see that shes harmful to me, even now ; even when shes not actually harming me , that is only because I can now choose whether or not to let her, not through her lack of trying to! This feeling, and trusting this feeling means I automatically place boundaries between me and her, so she can’t harm me further.

Mum and M can be very much alike in the way they interact with people , and their view of the world, I used to be similar, and I guess in ways I probably always will be. The difference between how me and M dealt with things was that she dealt with it externally, through tantrums, violence, guilt trips , help seeking behaviour, and trying to be super like-able to get what she needed. When she was/is angry , she expresses it externally ( not to mum, neither of us express it to her). I dealt with it internally, obsessively reading scifi/fantasy books, dissociation, night terrors , sleep-walking , night time hallucinations that soothed me ,I directed my anger internally through self harm and perfectionism . She blames everyone but Mum, I blamed no-one but me.

I can understand why she is the way she is , why we dealt in different ways , and I know the pain and anguish that made her how she is , because its mine too. I also feel very maternal towards her, for all intensive purposes, I’m the closest to a mum shes ever had. Not only do I know her pain, deep down I blame myself for it. Logically I see that this is ridiculous, I was a child for gods sake. But emotionally its a totally different story .

Paranoia / Hypervigilance

Zoomed in it looks like paranoia, zoomed out it is hypervigilance. People told me I was paranoid about things when I was a kid as a way to discredit what I was saying, what I was seeing. But I was right , the vast majority of the time. It wasn’t until I was an adult I could really see how right I was. I was constantly hypervigilant , because I had to be but also because it gave me a sense of control of my enviroment. I knew when  mum and dad were on drugs , which pretty much all the time despite their protests. As an adult , I understand how heroin addiction works, once your hooked your either on it or off it, there is no inbetween like she tried to make out. I knew before getting out of bed whether or not we were going have to go to school that day. I knew what would happen if any of us protested or tried to be heard, or tried to connect with Mum. I knew what would happen if we were ‘ found out’ . This feedback sysytem I had with my enviroment made mostly correct predictions back then, the problem is that it is still making the same predictions now, but now is a different enviroment. So the predictions are off, they are based then , not now. This is because I can’t have a feedback sysytem with my immediate enviroment if I’m not really here and present. While parts of me are still stuck there, this will keep happening. This is why grounding and yoga and mindful exercise and feeling the breath and seafront walks and tj and snuggling with lou and sunsets and just about anything that pulls me back to the here and now helps. I need a new feedback system.

Talking about feedback systems, I wonder what that enviroment would do to a developing brain , a brain and conciousness that develops in direct response to its enviroment. What would it do to a person’s senses, which translate the external to the internal. It makes me think about that NSPCC advert, with a little boy (toddler) in a cot, they say ‘Miles is a quiet baby. Miles has learnt that nobody comes whether he cries or not’. I was a quiet baby, Mum prides herself on that fact , as if its a trophy for her parenting skills that shes waving in your face.

If a babies brain and mind develop in response to their environment, if they learn to relate to themselves through their relationship with their caregiver, then what happens to Miles?

 

‘As within, so without’ I know this to be true as an adult, but it seems to be the inverse as a child.

A child cries to signal a need that requires addressing. When a person repsonds to that need in a good enough way, consistently, over time, then the child learns to address their needs in the same manner.

Miles cries and cries , but this huge internal force that he needs help with remains unchanged, maybe it even grows. Because nobody responded to Miles’ cries, he stops crying. His brain learns that crying serves no purpose, it does not get needs met or have the power to change anything.  Over time he will lose the crying reflex , if crying doesn’t change the internal chaos then it will become disconnected from it , and stop being an automatic response. Miles will not cry when he feels sad.

I believe that that is what happened with me .

I found out recently that my Mum was taking amphetamines whilst pregnant with me . Even when I was that fragile she …..well, she was Mum.

She has spoken to me a lot over the years about her postnatal depression. She had a traumatic labour, a process that she didn’t understand very well beforehand. She felt no connection to me when I was born . The midwives/nurses wanted me to have skin-to-skin contact with her, but she didn’t want that, so they gave me to my Dad instead. I stopped crying when he was holding me. My Dad remembers this as a beautiful, touching moment. Where he ‘knew’ he was my Dad, biological or not.  For my Mum , this was a rejection, an abandonment, she believed I didn’t like her, that I knew there was something wrong with her like she already believed. ( As I now believe about myself). This pattern of me crying and my Dad responding to me , and me responding to him continued. My mum says this hurt her, that she couldn’t sooth me, that I wouldn’t respond to her. I’m not sure that it actually happened that way in reality, but it is my Mums reality that is relevant here. She will talk of me as a toddler as her mini-me. It seems that my imitation of her flattered her, ,made her proud , made her feel loved and connected to me. She only has stories like this about me .Stories in which I am the secondary character, only relevant to provide evidence of my love for her, of my admiration and to corroborate this idolized self-image she needs constant help with maintaining. No stories about projectile vomit or diarrhea, or funny accidents that happen with kids , nothing that feels real. The stories I’ve heard, I’ve heard repeatedly, they get recycled anytime I enquire about the period of my life I now understand that I don’t remember.

MUM CAN’T TAKE CARE OF ANYONE ELSE AND I CAN’T LET ANYONE TAKE CARE OF ME.

I always had this awareness of Mums experience of all that, empathy and sadness for how that must have felt. .

But what about me?

What does having amphetamines rushing around your body while your in the womb do to you?

Mum told me before that when I was 18 days old I had to go into hospital because I had bronchitis . That I had all these tubes, and she had to get her Mum to come in with me to have bloodtests because she couldn’t cope and oh how powerless she felt boohoo. Her best friend told me when I was 14 that what actually what happened is that I was in hospital until I was 18 days old because she was taking drugs whilst pregnant with me , that was the main reason although there was more than one reason. My Dads sister recently told me that she knows for definite that my Mum took amphetamines whilst pregnant with me ( I think she’s leaving out the fact that she was taking them with her). So I came out all drugged up / withdrawing like ‘wtf  is going on here then’ . Then get given to my Dad , who I don’t really know at this point, and who is  completely different to the person who has been my home for the previous 40 weeks of my current existence. Then that tiny little baby , at some point , is in hospital because of illness caused by either drug taking or passive smoking depending on who’s version of reality happened. That poor defenceless little child  recognises its home, its mother, the place from which it came. The mother who doesn’t see , hear or touch it. The mother who cannot feel , who is not ever really there. Other people think Mother is there, but the baby knows she is not. The baby feels a connection to its mother, its former home. But the mother does not mirror back the babies version of reality.

‘We recognise the Mother, but she does not recognise us’ ‘Is the Mother real then , but we are not?’ ‘ Am we less real than the Mother?’

The mother displays no reflex of maternal instincts towards the baby. She is indifferent or angry when she cries. In the beginning, Daddy comes. But as time passes he comes less. Because to come to us , means leaving Mummy.

‘Mother is more real than me. ‘ ‘ When Mother cries we come, when I cry no one comes’.

The mother does not feel real, and she is not really here, so the child does not feel real to her. Surely if she did she could not treat her this way? Surely if she did she would have to hold her? Because the child does not feel real to her Mother, she does not feel real to herself, and so she is stuck, unable to become real.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time

Time is a funny thing. When I say to myself ‘ This too shall pass’ , I mean the tidal wave of emotion will pass, not time. But that wave only passes because it is traveling in a forward direction through time . Unless I refuse to let it . Waves of energy interact like a particle , but move as a wave. If I stop the waves movement, the energy interacts with my body , like particles of this mysterious emotional energy. If I let it though, the wave will pass , literally, leaving me unharmed.

Heres the problem though. All of the traumas are like drops of water above a pond. There are so many that if they all fell at once , all the water in the pond would be displaced, and the pond would be no more. There would just be a muddy hole where the pond once was. So I somehow froze all of the drops, and now I’m starting to let them fall into the pond, one drop at a time.

If all the traumas were drops of water above a pond, and I froze each individual drop  to prevent them from falling all at once and displacing all the water, each drop of frozen water would require me to exert a force equal in magnitude , but in the opposite direction , in order for it to remain at rest. This is because an object is at rest , or remains at a constant acceleration unless acted on by an unbalanced force. Each trauma is trying to fall , and I’m using energy to stop it. Every time a drop is able to fall and become a part of the pond , the amount of energy I am exerting on the drops decreases.

Its funny how physics helps me understand psychology better than psychology does sometimes!

I found her in the flames

Checked in with myself this morning , which I don’t do recently-ish, okay for quite a while.

After days of feeling floaty , empty and weightless. Just plain weird, off. More off than is usual anyway.

‘Gently turnt the spotlight’ on my morning emotional state and panic, no meds, no coffee, no phone.

There were thoughts about how I’ve always been that way, afraid of myself upon waking and at bed time, as if I’m afraid of my unconscious mind being let loose. How I’ve always been afraid to sleep, and I’ve never been someone who lays in bed just chilling in the morning, I’ve always had to do something (unless I’m severely depressed) , otherwise the anxiety /panic kicks in.

Having memories of mum and JRFK having sex in the room next door to me at shoebury, loudly, porn like, I know now. Me feeling so sick and disgusted and that they need to stop NOW because what they are doing is wrong, yet its making me aroused and making me want to touch myself , which makes me feel more disgusted and ashamed cos I know that doing that will somehow make it more wrong. I screamed at them to stop, banged on the wall, and mum told me to shut up and carried on. So I put my fingers over my ears and repeatedly did this thing like pressing a button over and over really quickly, except pressing my ear, which kind of changed the sound a little. Its how I felt at Js when I could hear him masturbating a few feet from me. And the ‘memory’ of R. We’re having sex , and I’m on top, but I’m not in my body , or directly behind myself or next to myself like other memories. I’m floating on the ceiling , in the corner of the ceiling the furthest away from myself . And the me that’s having sex turns and does a thumbs up and smiles at me in the corner while she carries on. The R memory I think is the ‘wrong’ feeling I have , the weird sensory memory that always haunted me at night ,of friction, too much friction, something not fitting but being forced anyway.

That memory is why I found mum/JRFK/ J so distressing. Although they were obviously distressing for very different reasons . Those acts were bringing up sexual feelings in me , which brought up the only memory/experience of sex I had , which ‘I’ hadn’t actually experienced, that other part of me did though, but it was kept separate from me. I think the actual image came up once at when we lived in B ,and a few times at Js, but at Js I could drink it away. So I just felt horrible, knew something was wrong, froze in the arousal , ‘knowing ‘ my sexuality was being manipulated , also ‘knowing’ that because of this memory my sexuality was/is separate from me , so no matter how much it gets triggered or aroused, no matter how much distress anguish and confusion it caused me, no matter how hard J tried to tug at my heart strings, and make me feel like I owed him, no matter what games he played to try and groom me , it couldn’t work, because that part of me and this part of me don’t exist simultaneously .

I don’t have third person memories really as an adult. The dissociation definitely feels different now. The fact that I’m ‘close enough’ to myself to know that its happening nowadays must count for something.

The thing I need to remember is that my mind isn’t trying to hurt me here , or sabotage me. For so many reasons, my mind just couldn’t integrate those experiences at the time they happened. I read recently that children dissociate all the time, anything new really , good or bad, and they play with it imaginatively in their head until it clicks into place somehow , and edits their perspective on the world.

So if children can’t even integrate some good things straight away , its not surprising mine couldn’t integrate certain things.

Like the baby memory. I had this memory that always felt dissociative in nature, but I thought that was just because it was so sad and indicative of what life was like for me. In the memory, I’m in a depressing room, with navy-ish blue and white  vertical striped wallpaper going halfway up the walls, maybe all the way. The floor was concrete , but the old school carpet grips were around the edges , the wooden ones with nails sticking out that have orange/ red writing on them . And I thought I was with M, because theres a baby in a nappy in the memory. And all I knew about it was that either M or me caught our big toe on one of the nails , so I was following her around , steering her  away from the grips .

Then recently , I learned some information that made it click, the baby wasn’t M. She hadn’t even come to live with us yet. The baby was me. And the fact that M hadn’t come to live with us yet means that I was under the age of two and a half. The reason the memory felt dissociative , is that it was. ‘I’ (baby me) hurt myself, and even at that age, I understood on some level that no one would come, that I was alone and had to keep myself safe. So ‘mummy’ me came and supervised ‘baby ‘ me.

This is what I mean , my head is not trying to fuck me over here. If my head had integrated that memory, surely I’d have killed myself already. A two year old can’t know that they’re alone in life and still continue to develop, and seek a relationship with their care giver. The knowledge from that memory totally conflicts with a toddlers developmental needs at that stage. I couldn’t ‘know’ that part of me, that memory, that knowledge, then. I can now.

The fact that these memories are coming up in the way that they are , is because they can. Regardless of what my panic says, the panic is just a life-long defence mechanism that kept me distant from the memories, until there was a time I could access them without them destroying me in the process. My mind isn’t trying to terrorise me, it’s just trying to fill me in on why I am how I am. Its trying to tell me I was right in cutting Mum out. I’m right for going celibate rather than putting myself in sexual situations I’m not even sure I can consent to (not externally, most of my previous partners always had consent from me verbally or physically. But internally, surely not being able to say no isn’t the same thing as saying yes?). Its telling me that I am now safe and strong enough to know what my life has been like , how it affected me , how it felt to me , how bad things have to be for your mind to splinter in that way. I always knew the timeline of things that happened, but most things were external, like I could list them off as if they happened to a fictional character, I couldn’t remember them. Now I’m getting the inside info. What I experienced internally in response to these external things.

Fuck. I can do this. I can do this. I CAN do this.

Can’t stop listening to this song currently….

I was a…
Afraid to make a single sound
Afraid I will never find a way o-o-out
Afraid I’d never be found
I don’t wanna go another round
An angry man’s power will shut you up
Trip wires fill this house with tip-toed love
Run out of excuses for everyone
So here I am and I will not run
Guts over fear (the time is near)
Guts over fear (I shed a tear)
For all the times I let you push me around
And let you keep me down
Now I got, guts over fear, guts over fear

Some things are forever

There are moments.

When the radiating sunshine

And the sing-song of childrens laughter

And the gentle warm caress of skin gliding on skin,

Are still not enough.

 

Moments
when the gaping void is the only thing I can be sure is real,

The only thing that can anchor me,

Here,

In this moment.

The only thing I can hold onto

Is the unarguable certainty of my isolation.

This loneliness,

Is the one truth that my mind cannot deny.

And in a familiar twisted way,

It’s beautiful,

Comforting,

To know that not everything is temporary,

Some things are forever.