Tag Archives: postaday

No, not again …

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11

You start to feel heavy, floaty, glued to the couch, and you fight this heaviness for at least a couple of hours. Around midnight you make a serious attempt to go your bedroom, but it’s like you are magnetically attached, and you finally just give in and drift off to sleep. You have that familiar fuzzy floaty feeling that means the dissociative universe is upon you. The alarm on your phone goes off at 7:00, 7:13, 7:30, and 7:45. You regularly set multiple alarms, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. You turn off all of them in your sleep, at least you assume so, because you have no memory of them going off at all.

Mercifully, you wake with a start at 8:15. Shit! You have a meeting across town at 9:00, and it takes you at least 30 minutes to get to work. You look down, and realize that you are wearing the same dress from yesterday. In fact, you slept in everything from yesterday. You take off yesterday’s clothes, put on new clothes, try to fake that your hair is clean by pulling it back, brush your teeth, fall into some ballet flats, and run out the door.

As you’re trip walking down the staircase in your apartment building you start begging God to get you out of this dissociative trip because you have an important meeting, dammit! It’s bad enough to run out the door with unwashed hair, but it’s a whole other situation to be floaty in a situation where, oh wait a minute, yes, you’re LEADING a meeting. Shit! Wake up! Now is not the time be dissociative.

Somehow you pull into the parking lot at 8:55. You run in and take the stairs all the way to the fifth floor because it’s faster than waiting for the elevator. Thankfully, the run up the stairs starts to jolt you out of the dissociation. You get to your office cube, grab your laptop and run into the conference room right at 9:02.

Days later, the pain continues …

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I was once asked by a yoga teacher what freedom would look like for me. It was an easy answer. Sleep, restful, nonscary sleep would be such sweet freedom.

And, in this moment, I would also choose to stop shaking. I’ve been shaking off and on all day today. I talked about the Freddy Bear post today in therapy. I still cry when I read it. Out of all of my posts, it’s the only one that makes me cry again and again and again. I had no idea that I even had any pain or loss around Freddy. Up until I wrote about him, if you had asked me about him I would have described him as my youngest brother with whom I am not very close. Period. I would not have thought about it any further than that.

I would like to write further, but this is too hard for me right now, so I’ll sign off for now.

Pull those weeds!

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Garden Weeds

The floatiness came upon me when I woke up this morning, and it would not leave. It stayed like an unwanted guest. All day I felt like I was walking in swaths of cotton. I texted my friend Jack, and he had an idea, or at least I thought he had an idea:

Jack: Come over and weed my garden. It’s therapeutic 🙂

Me: Ok. I’ll come over after dinner around 7.

Jack: Seriously? I was kidding, but you’re welcome to weed if you like.

I had not weeded a garden for decades. My grandmother’s garden was the last garden I ever worked in, and “worked in” is putting it loosely. I puttered in there, and she worked.

As soon as I arrived, I dove right into pulling those damn weeds. The earth in my fingernails felt real and grounding. I pulled those weeds, and after a while, I was pulling my mother’s hate, her wrath, self-loathing, and rage. I pulled as if I was pulling those demons out. I would still be out there pulling, but night fell, mosquitoes came, and my body hurt. I think I have dirt in my teeth, but the floatiness is gone.

(Photo credit: Auntie P)