When I was a kid, I remember my mom swinging around my baby sibling. Sibling was an infant and had gone to sleep, and Mom thought it was hilarious that nothing would wake them up. Looking back, I recognize that this is normal for babies, and it was also developmentally normal that I couldn’t sleep that soundly. However, at the time, I didn’t know that. I just knew that my sibling’s ability to fall dead-to-the-world asleep anywhere and at any time, was one more reason why Mom could love them and couldn’t love me. I used to get children’s books on characters who were either asleep really deeply and for a really long time, or who were desperately sick. When I had a high enough fever and was just totally shut down was the only time my parents would comment on how “good” I was. I learned on a core level that the ticket to being “good” was to be completely shut down and inable to interact with the world. Being “good” meant being safe, as in being less likely to be randomly assaulted. As an adult, this is probably one of the reasons I run into dissociative episodes where I’m shut down and can’t do anything, which is kind of what happened this weekend, when I was asleep for the better part of 48 hours. The episode this weekend turned out not to be life-altering, but I’m always plagued by the massive dissociative episode I had in 2021, because I have no idea whether it’s something that could potentially happen again.
Trauma Sucks
This is how trauma affects me every day. For the past few weeks, I’ve been transitioning between jobs and I think that might be why I just feel super-severely scattered. I keep hoping that I’ll be able to solve the problem by writing everything down, but I just end up rambling and still don’t know how to tie everything together. For example, about a week ago I wrote this email:
The recipient of the email actually was amazing and came over, but there’s never enough time to cover everything. I was able to talk about HBM and how it changed my social style, but that’s probably beating on a dead horse at this point. In an ideal world, I would have had time to also talk about being massively let down by another person, but I didn’t get to touch on that. Which, the person had hurt me, and just kept resorting to, “I can’t go back and change the past” and “I’m not perfect.” Which, both of those things were true and good, but honestly what I wanted was just an apology and recognition that I had been hurt, followed by discussion of how we could avoid the same thing coming up in the future. I told the person that, and they just went totally silent, refusing to say anything. I waited for an unreasonably long time for them to reply, and when they did, they just wanted to know if I had anything else to say before we hung up. So it’s like, I didn’t want the person to feel bad, I literally was trying to repair the rupture in the relationship, and this person was acting like I was completely entitled. Literally all I wanted was more direct communication moving forward because I didn’t understand vaguely-worded emails. This never needed to escalate like this. And what ended up happening was I lost the ability to trust someone who had previously been extremely important to me.
Anyway, in a really ideal world, I would have had time to talk about this stuff in therapy, but that’s one of those things where I don’t even necessarily get an appointment every week, and I don’t know if I’m going to get an appointment the next week until we finish the session, and even if I do get an appointment, we’ve got 45 minutes and that’s barely enough time to scratch the surface. So therapy is better than no therapy, but it’s not the be all and end all. Plus, if my life experience tells me anything, it’s that therapists drop you usually unpredictably and in the most destructive possible way, so I’m trying not to get too attached.
In other news, usually my memories of trauma are fragmented, but lately they’ve been coming together as stories. And god, are they horrible stories. Just trauma after trauma after trauma for years on end. And I try to redirect, but I don’t really have happy memories to redirect to. TBH the happiest memories I have are of the mental hospital, which is a sad state of affairs. I’m pretty sure I won’t get to have therapy again until after the holidays so I’m on Reddit like:
Anyway, it’s been tough. I usually get a few weeks in the early fall when everything seems like it’s going to be okay, and that ends around Halloween so now I’m here with Seasonal Affective Disorder like everybody else. Orientation for my new job starts tomorrow and I’m scared, because I have an extensive history of jobs not working out. My greatest fear is always that I won’t wake up on time. At a previous job, I used to stay up all night at least one night a week because the thought was that if I just didn’t go to bed, I wouldn’t oversleep. I don’t know what’s wrong with my body that absolutely no amount of terror will make it able to actually fucking turn on in the morning. I think a lot of it is that I’m so afraid of being late that I end up in a freeze response and that goes badly for obvious reasons.
To-Do Lists
In the meantime, I’m here with unrealistically lengthy to-do lists. It’s not as bad as it was in 2021, but nonetheless I’m constantly paralyzed because I feel like if I’m doing X, then I’m not doing Y, and that makes me a terrible, lazy person. I did make this YouTube video trying to work through everything I have to do:
God bless you if you had time to watch that. I feel like it probably describes what’s going on for me every day better than anything else in this entry.
Anyway, Dr X once told me this:
My #1 goal in life is to have kids, and my #2 goal in life is to write a memoir. I also have this nifty app:
So…
For goal #1, I’m still too scared to talk to Dr V and everything else can wait, so right now I just need money. Because money = rank in the global human cult. The amount of money one has translates to how much we can expect other people to do for us, versus how much we have to do for them. Achieving my goals will require Ranking Points, aka dollars. So, new job (with health insurance!) starts tomorrow. As for goal #2, I did manage to pull off a small miracle and get myself signed up for EMDR starting next month. If I can convert more trauma to index cards before going in, I might be able to present the person with my collection and she’ll have a heads-up as to what we’re working with.
Asides
As a fun aside, my parents’ favorite parenting book was this one, and I definitely remember these strategies being used, including their pausing for several seconds before beating the shit out of me in order to induce “psychological terror.”
But yeah, I was definitely the bad one because when they beat me up, I tried not to scream too loud but Mom said I was too loud and the social workers would come take me away. Like gosh it’s one thing to have loud kids, but can you really blame us when you’re actively physically attacking us?
Obviously, this Christmas-trees into a zillion other traumatic memories, which all Christmas-tree into their own zillion other traumatic memories, but I tell myself that they’re probably already written down somewhere in my massive compilation of index cards.
As another aside, since the HBM trauma changed a lot of things including my social style, I was trying to figure out whether it had also changed my core values. Which, I think it hasn’t. At the very least, one trusted person says I’m still a good person. So I was looking up groups that I formerly disagreed with, and I am happy to say that I still disagree with those groups. My concern was that having spent two weeks confined in a small space with no escape, while an immigrant from Kenya aggressively tried to kill me, had made me a racist. In good news, after exhaustively exploring myself and the issue, I am still not a racist. I do have a trauma reaction to certain populations that I would definitely prefer not to have a trauma reaction to. But there’s a difference between panicking and running for my life, and ideologically supporting these guys:
So, the one individual might have tortured me for two weeks and induced a massive increase in PTSD symptoms, but she did not succeed in making me a bad person, nor did she succeed in killing me.
Back to the Point
Anyway. I notice most of the items on my massive to-do list are essentially cleaning my apartment. Which is great, but when I look at my values, the main things I need to do are overcome trauma and procure money. Interestingly, while my apartment is in a huge mess, I am actively working to overcome trauma. I’m also about to start my new job, which should lead to my procurement of money. So, although everything feels like a huge scattered disaster and I have no idea what’s going on or what to do next, maybe I’m not failing as much as I’d feared.
