Now all I need to do is borrow something and find something blue and I’ll be ready for the wedding. Oh wait. I don’t do that any more.  Nevermind. Read the rest of this entry »

Emotional pothole alarm!  It went off. Lights flashing. Sirens screaming in a dozen disharmonic tones.  A few deep breaths, ground myself, and the lights vanish. The sirens silence. And it’s just a minor nuisance. Time to go on with the rest of my day.

But boy, when people misunderstand me, it stands on all my emotional landmines and potholes.  I forget that’s the case until I get my emotional potholes inadvertently walked in. Yes, I now know why.  And yes, I can talk myself out of the potholes and explosions so much easier than I used to be able to. I should like to disarm some of them, but I’ll take quick-n-eezy defusing for now. Heck, forever if I can’t disarm them.

A few minutes of freaking is a vast improvement over tumbling down into freakville for days, weeks or months. Yay!

“Life is messy.”  Thus saith my therapist. Later followed by, “Your life does seem to be exceptionally messy.”

This week… (and it’s not quite Friday by my clock)

• came down with a cold and bronchitis
•  had to reschedule my knee surgery for March, because of surgery reschedule will not be able to drive until mid-March
• mother is still sick with the cold she gave me, and is cranky and hard to deal with
• had to get car inspected and it failed because the idiots at the insurance company mechanic who “fixed” it did not rewire the driver’s side headlight
• had to spend 4 hours, while sick, arguing with insurance company over them having to find a way to fix it without me having to drive since i still can’t drive because of the car accident where their insurred ran into me
• father’s CHF and Marfan’s are starting to kick up again, he discovered yesterday and told me today
• today my buddy and workmate had to be rushed to the hospital with a crapped out gall bladder, which should be removed in the next 24 hours
• i have to get buddy’s daughters to ship out orders, which is fine except that i have to instruct them by phone and i can’t understand them well by phone because my ears are stopped up

That’s just 6 days of stuff. Is it any wonder I’m a tad stressed?  Ok, a ton stressed.  No, it’s not. It’s a wonder I haven’t come completely unglued. But there’s time yet.

You know, I think that while the downside of C-PTSD is the ongoing symptoms, the upside is having had to learn to survive in the face of the ridiculously “messy” life that got me the C-PTSD.  I survived so much crap (childhood sexual abuse, emotional abuse, stalking ex, rape, mugging, etc etc) that by now I’m very, very good at surviving. I may act wonky at times, but I always get through it.

Right now that’s nice to know.

Take all of your wasted honor
Every little past frustration
Take all of your so-called problems,
Better put ‘em in quotations

Say what you need to say [x8]

Walking like a one man army
Fighting with the shadows in your head
Living out the same old moment
Knowing you’d be better off instead,
If you could only . . .

Say what you need to say [x8]

Have no fear for giving in
Have no fear for giving over
You’d better know that in the end
Its better to say too much
Then never say what you need to say again

Even if your hands are shaking
And your faith is broken
Even as the eyes are closing
Do it with a heart wide open

Say what you need to say [x24]

In spite of the awful weekend, in the end, I got brave. I talked to my mother about the stuff I wrote in this post. Major brave move for me. It went well.  I waited until late afternoon yesterday when I was sure I was awake, though. I even mentioned that I really should just not speak to anyone until I’m awake because it doesn’t work well for anyone.

I just wish I didn’t have these C-PTSD  potholes in my psyche for people to step in.  I wish I was a billionaire too. Doubt I’ll get either wish, but I can wish anyway.

At least I can keep working on the potholes in my psyche. They’re not such big gaping ditches as they used to be.  Too bad it feels just as awful when someone falls into a small pothole as a big ditch.

I’m proud of me for being brave, though. I don’t know if it’ll do any objective good, but it makes me feel better for having expressed my feelings calmly.

You know, it’s positively normal to not want to talk to people when your life has taught you that it doesn’t work well.  Damn that’s hard to get past.

I realized I was overreacting yesterday. Duh. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out. And I sorted some of it in my head. So when my mother finally got home (1.5 hours later than she’d said she would LOL!) I’d had time to think about it and calm down some. I told her I realized I wasn’t accurate about something I said because it wasn’t the case for the last 5 years at least, and I didn’t know if I even saw it right from before that, and that I was reacting told old feelings. I said I felt bad about that and I apologized.  In return I got a lecture about how I should tell her how I feel. WTF?  

In every sense of WTF.

Well DOH. Wouldn’t it be nice if I just didn’t feel threatened by a) the overwhelming feelings, and b) communicating them and c) the way people react especially when I do it badly but even when I do it well?  I’d LOVE to live in a world like that.  I’d love to FEEL like that. Unfortunately for me, I don’t and I don’t.

No, the feelings won’t kill me. They may incapacitate me so I can’t work for hours or days or weeks, though, and that in itself is bad enough to screw up my life right well. No, communicating them won’t kill me, but first I have to deal with them in my own head, so see the previous sentence. And the way people react — well monkey fuck, in recent memory I’ve been threatened with hospitalization for crying over having been abused, told to tell my feelings when I’ve done just that, etc etc.  That’s not much of a recommendation for doing any of it when I can hardly handle the feelings in the first place.

You know what, I’m working that direction. In spite of the leftover crap in my psyche from severe child abuse. In spite of the pain of even trying to work that direction. In spite of flashbacks and crippling anxiety and depression and fear. In spite of the bipolar and the ton of crap life keeps flinging at me like car accidents, medications that screw with my head, yadda yadda. I keep going and working to heal. There’s no particular point in pushing myself too hard, though. It’s not worth it to go two steps forward and fourteen steps back.

Well, it’s still here. But I no longer feel I can say much on it. Can’t say much about the accident for legal reasons. Don’t want to say much about feeling hurt when I’m trying to grind through it because the people involved can find it. And so on. Read the rest of this entry »