Tag Archives: personal

Just for today

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The PTSD brain can be hard to trust when it gets jacked up. It just takes off down the road like a scared chihuahua. Too many things become anxiety producing and stressful. You become hyper-vigilant, and immediately jump to the worst possible conclusion in too many scenarios. In the far reaches of your mind you know that every situation in your life cannot possibly be this dire. But when your brain is amped up on PTSD fear it can be increasingly difficult to conjure up the objective and reasonable side of your brain. And with a certain amount of this hyper-vigilance, it does not take long before the dark veil of despair becomes a fixture over your head. 

It works like this: First comes hypervigilance, then indefinite despair that is difficult to kick. You want to just shoo it away, but like an incessant weed, it comes back. 

There are intermittent moments of hope, such as those fleeting moments with friends at breakfast, or the renewed energy from that breakfast that makes you think you can do some baking today. You head to the grocery store to get items to attempt a straight-forward recipe for gluten free donuts. But after trips to Bed, Bath and Beyond and the grocery store you find yourself seemingly glued to the seat of your car. You feel too heavy to move, and you know the floaty feeling is settling in. You make a phone call in order to reach out for help, but there is no answer. So, you turn up the air conditioning to try to jump start yourself out of being stuck. But you just get cold, you’re still stuck. You read your Facebook feed, and then your emails on your phone. Finally, you resolve to get out of the car. You have to plan it out in your mind: all the moves that will get you out of the car, and into the apartment. Your skills as a stage manager in college come in handy for this exercise. 

Finally, you come inside the apartment and throw a leftover quiche in the oven for dinner. The gluten free donut recipe now seems like a far-fetched fantasy. 

Somewhere in the back of your mind you know there are good reasons to keep going, keep trying. You decide that just for today you have to trust that those reasons are real and worthwhile. Otherwise, there is nothing else. 

a hiatus of sorts

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I did not intend to go on hiatus. It just happened.

This is me trying to come back to the blog. Hell, this is me trying to come back in many respects.

And, as usual, anytime I’ve been gone from the blog for a good bit, it is very hard to come back. Or rather, the writing of a blog post is what’s hard. 

With an anonymous mental health blog, many of us inevitably share it with people close to us. I still share it with very few people. But the fact is, I’ve had people figure out that this is my blog. My Freshly Pressed post from this past March cause some people to connect the dots, and that’s how more people know who I am. 

As a result, one particular person who I know is reading this blog has not been a good person to have in my life. Wish I could elaborate, but they are reading this blog. And this person still thinks they have power over me. I will say this:

To the person who thought they could call the shots:

You underestimated my strength, and my intelligence. I have a mental illness, but that does not mean I am stupid. I am in the middle of one of the biggest challenges of my life. Separately from this challenge, I am going though integration. and it is incredibly bewildering at times. The strangeness of it too often causes me to say, “Who the fuck am I?”

You are the largest disappointment in all of this. I thought more of you, but I was wrong. Someday the world around you will learn the real you. You can’t keep up the charade forever. 

I miss the person I thought you were. I now know I was blind to the real you. Funny … I miss that blindness. 

You no longer scare me. 

No matter what happens, I will be okay. 

P.S.

Stop reading my blog. 

An ending

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Today I gathered all of my tea cups, tea tins, tea filters and other miscellanea that make an office space a home, and packed up my office cube. I will no longer switch on the overhead light every morning first thing when I get in for the day. I switch on the overhead lamp, start up the computer, and immediately take the tea bag out of my tea cup because the walk to the lobby and elevator ride is plenty of time for the green tea to complete the brewing cycle. I will miss the Zen and Now green tea from the coffee shop four doors down from our office. Though I won’t miss that they consistently use water that is far too hot for green tea, but I still supported them because I liked starting my day in that ramshackle, yet friendly shop with the door handle that does not work well and requires you to bump the door open with your hip as you push down on the door handle.

I will no longer have morning chit-chats with our secretary who is also my dear friend. Every morning I would say to her, “Good morning, chica!” For my last day today she bought me my Zen and Now green tea, and left me a beautiful fuchsia vase of flowers on my desk.

My colleague and I will no longer go to the pizza dive for lunch where we typically clean them out of all the remaining slices of buffalo chicken pizza they have on hand. I will no longer confuse my colleague with my mangled silly Spanglish utterances such as my famous “Como que what?!” He has since started using my Spanglish with his family on occasion. There could be worse legacies.

My colleague and I made a trip out to my car with my stuff, and when I opened the trunk of my car I realized that I still had tea cups and other assorted stuff from the last time I switched jobs. I looked at the old stuff, and realized that boxes of stuff from a departed job are hard for me to contend with. These boxes are big ol’ Boxes of Goodbye for me. I came home, looked around, and realized that I have such boxes squirreled away all over the place: other boxes from past departed jobs, boxes from ex-boyfriends and ex-partners – all of which are unopened and discarded on the road of constant change in life.

I have to trust that this ending is a right and good decision. This ending brings a new beginning, a beginning that I sought out and earned, and now that I have it in my hands it takes my breath away and scares me a little.

This is what I want. I want this beginning. 

Eyes wide open, heart wide open, I move forward to a new beginning. But this time, today’s Box of Goodbye is tomorrow’s Box of Beginning.