Recovery Reflections: Going in Circle and Change

It’s been more often than not, in the past, that I take my recovery as some sort of a disease that I have to heal.

That sort of sense, the one that I am not full, not complete, not a regular human being unless I get rid of my past, it never quite goes away. It never will, I suppose, until I change how I look at it. It eases off at times when my life is going great, and then rears it’s ugly head the moment something goes wrong. I’m tough on myself, tougher than anyone else. If anyone else treated me that way, they would no longer be in my life. I try to change that, but at times of higher stress it appears again.

Lately, I go back and forth.

Yes, life has ups and downs, but we manage.

Lately however, I feel like a leaf being carried in different directions. I go up, I go down. I try to improve my life, I make leaps forward…then I fall into deeper fits of stress and depression then before. I improve, I regress. I have moments of high success and moments where I’m really close to destroying all progress. They come and go, really close together. Sometimes I think that’s just a more convoluted way of progress, of ultimately going in positive direction. Sometimes I wonder if that’s progress at all.

I realize lately, that I can’t be sure.

I can’t be sure that all the PTSD effect in my life will ever be fully gone. Or my anxiety. But perhaps, it can be managed in a way that I can be okay with. That I can have what I want to have in my life, even as I am managing this.

It’s a new thought, and it might be another step towards healing.

Maybe, it’s not about beating this. Or leaving it behind. It happened, and it affects me, period. I’m only human. People wallow over breakups and daily things, is it really that much of a surprise that I’m still affected by this? Perhaps the truly human, healing thing to do, would be for me to accept myself, as I am. Right now. With my past, with the aftermath, with all the invisible ways it intertwines with my life.

Of Gods and Ghosts pt. 2

“I’m not God. I’m not all powerful. I can’t win in every situation.

But I’m a HUMAN, and I do have a choice.”

I’ve spent the good part of the last 2 years, trying to redeem myself and gather the pieces of what was once my life. The first time when I wrote post with that name, it was close to 2 years ago, one of the first posts I had on here. And now it’s 2 years later. So much has changed. So much hasn’t. The base of that first post was feeling like a ghost- feeling like I had opportunities, I had a choice, yet I couldn’t live the life I wanted. I was watching from the sides, broken, terrified that fighting for the life I want, I will lose the dream, I will lose my last hope, and that will be the end. When you barely have the will to get out of bed, life force, energy, hope, it’s one of the most important things. It’s not much of a life I’m living, hiding in bed while people actually experience things- but it’s all I have left. After having poured all energy, money and everything else I had into a project, just to end up not only losing the money, but having to gather myself and survive all sorts of bad situations, I don’t have it in me to make a single step towards my dream.

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(2 years ago)

I’m a Ghost.

I don’t live, I exist, and I even do that at the bare minimum. For a while anyway.

My dreams have shrunk too. I don’t have it in me to dream big anymore. I just want a way out of the nightmare I somehow got myself into. I can’t make a step forward, because it will kill me, that I’m certain of. I don’t have it in me to get through disappointment anymore. I don’t have it in me to fight. I’m helpless, immobile, soulless. I feel like I’ve lost everything that constitutes me being human, but I hold on. I hold on for no other reason, than the fact I’ve done it for a long time. I’m weaker, more tired.

I can’t take a step forward. I can’t take half a step. Even a quarter.

So I break down what I do into the most ridiculous tiny pieces just so that I keep going. Even getting through those pieces takes forever. I take 2 hours to get ready for my day at my internship, and cry in my lunch break. I eat junk, watch endless TV, and stop giving a damn about everything. I don’t eat, or overeat. Getting out of bed is an issue. My last project for university is done over the span of 5 months, even though I could have been done in 1 month. Sometimes working on it for 15 min, takes me 2 days of torturing myself to get started. My past is filling my nights with nightmares, and it’s entirely too unsettling. I’ve spend a good amount of years avoiding dealing with things, being “content” with being miserable a lot of the time. My solution to bad things is to run. To just go somewhere else and reinvent myself, into someone I like. I perfect that and it works, for a while. But the ghosts in your closet always catch up with you. I am who I am. Putting a lifetime of change in between of being a helpless kid, and me today, it doesn’t make it go away. Strip away the changes, the people, and all the regular parts of my life, and it’s still there, underneath. It took for my life to break apart for me to see that.

Getting through the Storm

“Right now, you aren’t making difference between fantasy and reality.” I look at the counselor, not so convinced.

The reality of what happened, it’s engraved in my memory, in every scar on my skin, in every night I wake from nightmares. What does she know?

*

That was 2 years ago, when I went to a counselor, to get help so that I wouldn’t want to drink all the time anymore. It helped, even though I never told her that the main reason that I want to drink is the broken memories I had of my rape, and trying to move on as if it never happened.

*

People are learned constantly that we need roots. Familiar things. That in a hard situation you have to try to contain your life in normal routine. When we get into a situation which is hard but we have no control over, we hold onto what we know, until the storm passes.

But no one tells you what do you do if the storm doesn’t pass.

*

Let’s rewind a bit.

That summer. 

Why trauma cheats you out of your own recovery?

So as I have been getting better, I’ve finally, mostly regained my ability to work 8 hours and even enjoy it (okay, that one depends on the day). So I have been leaving very little time for blogging, which wasn’t such a good idea. Suddenly, I feel overwhelmed and sad. I feel again constantly tired and busy, I get irritable. I often break and eat chips or sweet things- way too much of them. ..and then recently, I suddenly find out why. Or one of the reasons anyway.

Recovery Updates: New Year’s Push and Pull

Yes, I know.

I haven’t been around lately. Well, for me, that has been quite a vacation. I would guess for most people the celebrations at the end of the year are one of 2 things-a chance to rest and have proper vacation or a stressful week where they have to worry about meeting family they aren’t close to or be completely alone knowing that everyone else is out celebrating in some form.

For me, it was neither. It was a strange resting point in the middle of the turmoil of that past half year.