Restless night. I got prescribed fluvoxamine for anxiety/depression and hydroxyzine as a, um, backup medication? lol I looked at the care sheet for fluvoxamine and jeezus christ it’s like every side effect in the world including increase in suicidal thoughts. Fun. I just don’t know about this. They had to special order it into my pharmacy. I did get the hydroxyzine first and tried a little before my session last night.
So, I’m pretty sensitive to medications as a whole which is why I’m careful. I took some earlier in the day about 30 min before my sesh and you know what? I felt weirdly calm ..when normally I’m an anxious ball before hand. So I thought hey this isn’t too bad… but that calm feeling disappeared the minute I got hit with adrenaline from being triggered in session. It felt like I hadn’t taken anything at all.
When I got home, I had dinner and then promptly passed out at 8pm. lol (Not normal). I tried to wake up at 10pm to finish up some stuff but I felt like a lead weight. It was actually kinda scary how fucked up I was… I mean it’s not like I haven’t felt that way w/ drugs and alcohol before but I knew when that shit could be expected to end… this was a complete guess? I woke up feeling groggy the next morning.. really restless night of sleep because I had some stuff on my mind that i couldn’t shake…and I couldn’t wake up enough to write either.. so here we go.
***
WORK
The phrase “high-functioning” is a bit of a sore spot for me. Because, I am.. but.. I’m not. I struggle a lot at work. No one sees it… but I definitely do. Most days I can’t sit still and focus on one task for long periods of time when I need to, some days I have so many emotional switches I get almost nothing done. Thank god I work from home so no one notices. Some days I have to do what little I can, send a couple emails, a few messages, just to make it to the evening where I feel more comfortable because no one is online. I can also take or drink something to calm my anxiety down and I can work for as long as I want into the wee hours of the night. And all that’s okay, but I can’t do this all the time. So while I keep up really solid appearances.. inside it’s really really tough for me.
So, the fact that my career looks stable… and in a lot of ways is.. is a survival strategy in its own. It’s AC. Nichole kind of insinuated that I was lucky that it worked out that way… really? Do you think I grew up lucky with every advantage in the world? with my background? Okay sure, maybe there was some… I was born mostly healthy (minus the club feet lol) into the United States, and I had a roof over my head and food on the table, because my parents illegally immigrated here. So sure, some luck. But I think a lot of it was motivated by determination to survive.
You see I knew exactly what it felt like to feel so completely alone in the world. After my suicide attempt in college I didn’t want to live at home because my parents were horrible during that period of my life. I was scared of my dad and he said he wouldn’t help me w/ school because I dropped out, so I just left. I crashed at my ex’s a lot. But he still lived at home so I couldn’t stay there always – his mom hated it. I didn’t have enough income to afford my own place at that time, and many of my friends were out of state still in college so I didn’t really have anywhere to go. I spent many nights in my car parked in the shady parts of town and hid under a blanket in my back seat, so no one could tell I was sleeping there. It was cold at times. I was pretty close to just being homeless at that point in my life because I didn’t feel like anyone was safe and no one wanted me. I’ve never told anyone about how much I slept in my car.
The second time, I moved back to KC w/ David…and gave up my career to do so. I had a job at the time but not a good one. And then when we broke up.. it was awful. I remember my bank balance going into the negatives often because moving out of our house was expensive, admittedly in my pain – getting drunk a lot took its toll too. I had taken a crap job so he could move to KC and take a much better job. Then he abandoned me, just like everyone else.
So you see, in my head, I can’t suffer that again. Every decision I made after realizing no one had my back was based on positioning myself to be financially secure and independent. I worked really hard and I went for a degree program that had a 98% job placement rate, even though I knew it would plummet me 80K in debt and there was a big risk I’d never be able to pay that back. When I graduated I didn’t even go into what I wanted to do.. I took the highest paying job that was a far cry from what I was passionate about (I worked at an oil and gas company but it paid well). I did that so I could pay off my massive student debt and eventually I did.
So my career choices were very much motivated by ensuring that I would be secure on my own. AC knew, building a strong career is a means of independence. Without my career I’m at the mercy of those around me… and therefore unsafe. So AC will always protect my career over everything else. This is why she gets extremely upset if she starts to feel like I’m getting behind, can’t focus, or I show up a few minutes late to a morning meeting like today.. even though it was because I was conked out last night due to new medically prescribed drugs (btw this has never happened w/ weed lol).
And I know some people tie their identity really tightly to their career… and I do have some pride in it.. but it’s not about that at all. It’s about making sure I’m taken care of if something were to happen to R or if I needed to “escape” for any reason or even just to have the resources to take care of others (Wolf’s view). Shit, I don’t know why this is upsetting me… crying, ugh.
It’s just, I guess I wish people understood, luck or not, how hard it was to get here and then to thrive. My career is more than just something I built, or went to school for, it’s very much a means of safety, security, of survival for me, its the only constant in my life that has felt stable. One I very much gave to myself because no one else was going to do that for me.
And one more thing, my job is intense. I’m expected to lead and drive, and I still have to balance the ups and downs that comes along with my fragmented trauma adapted brain. I *wish* so badly that I could take a hiatus while I get my life back together, but I won’t.. I don’t feel safe putting my life in anyone else’s hands to do so and I wish it were different. I wish things were easier for me. FFS I only took a week off when my brother died and got one day off between switching jobs… and that still fucking hurts to think about. Thanksgiving and winter break were my first “vacation days” in about a year and it was filled with hard and painful emotions.
It is what it is, but I guess I just need the people closest to me to recognize how painful this is for me.. and not forget that even though I may look “high-functioning” I’m not… I still feel incredibly broken inside and I struggle every fucking day to keep going. If I had the luxury, if my parts weren’t deathly afraid, if they didn’t consider it a matter of survival, you bet your ass I would be in bed in a ball probably frozen most days. I use all of my will power to drag my ass through some days – it’s really hard.
So, please don’t forget that.. you’re the only ones that have the opportunity to really understand.
***
FAMILY
I disappeared for a while in session yesterday, it was because of something said… about this new version of me being more honest. Building a new house for them to live in. It triggered the littlest (Two) to come out. She was crying…loudly. Screaming her head off and showing me all of her recent flashbacks again – I felt them while I sat there frozen. I had recently built out the plush room in my mind that Little adored, so after sort of panicking because I didn’t know how to help Two, I asked Loved if she would take her to the plush room and luckily that seemed to help calm her enough. Ben suggested I send Wolf too, so she caught up with them later to stand guard and cuddle Two. Everyone else went to the lazy river room to chill. Which did help calm me enough to return to present.
Ben told me about when he was a new parent..and how new parents tend to try and fix things for their kids when they are upset which isn’t the best route. I realized, internally, that’s exactly what I was doing. I panicked when Two was crying and didn’t know how to help – externally I froze. She was just screaming and I couldn’t hear anyone else. Ben continued and told me that sometimes you just need to console them… hold them… that really hurt to hear. But I didn’t exactly know why.
I guess to console her… means to have empathy for her, to acknowledge her feelings. And in this case, to acknowledge that deep down they’re actually my feelings. She hurts that badly, because I was hurt that badly. I write it, but I don’t quite feel it yet. But she’s new to the party so I assume it’ll take some time. The thing is, I don’t know that holding her, singing to her, is enough. I don’t know what’s enough to make that hurt go away. It feels pretty helpless to even try to make something like that better.
The next day in Nichole’s office I started thinking about the first person perspective memories Two shared, about the dream I had recently where I saw two men hurting a baby chimp (my two abusers?), about the fact that I hated sleeping in my bed as a child (I would sleep on the floor or in my closet to feel safe), about the fact that I often feel frozen or small when I’m in my own bed at home these days… somewhere that should feel safe… and about the fact that no where feels safe. I struggled to speak as I put together the clues.
And I couldn’t help but imagine what Ben told me about how he consoled his little ones. How he would hold his kids and sing to them when they were upset and it conjured such a sweet image, but it fucking stung. I thought about how sweet of a memory they will have when they’re older and how I have no idea what that would have felt like as a kid… to view my dad as tender and loving – just no concept at all. I searched the memory banks of my mind for something similar to relate and came up empty handed. Maybe one memory, of my mom sitting by my bed when I was small, I was really sick, sweaty and delirious, there’s one.
Then I thought about how painful it’ll be when Ben isn’t there for his kids one day. Someone they relied on. Like how my brother disappeared… and I didn’t even have the same degree of tender memories to draw from my brother. I don’t know why that’s where my brain went, but that’s just how it works… worst case scenarios and hyper-vigilance.
I guess that’s my brain trying to protect us. If I never show anyone in my system kindness or love it won’t hurt so bad when they are eventually disappointed. When they realize they’re actually all alone, and need to take care of themselves. When they eventually get taken advantage of, or betrayed. Or when I don’t show up, or can’t show up. And…you can’t yearn for what you don’t know. I wish I would have learned the hard truth of how alone we really are as a kid; instead of buying into the illusion that others would care or protect. It just sucks that part of me always yearned for that….and I followed that desire to my detriment, over and over, until I was finally damaged enough that I learned to push everyone away.
It’s a lot to work through, all of this. Im probably not making any sense. But, Thursday night I went home, and I was fading fast due to the hydroxyzine. I started to imagine Ben and his family (no idea what they look like, they were just nondescript extensions of him lol) hanging out w/ Little 1 in the lazy river room. His kids were laughing and playing with Little. She didn’t have a lot of friends as a kid because she moved a lot and was intensely quiet, so it was a nice fantasy for her. Even Darkness was floating around sipping a piña colada. AC opted for sitting on the beach sand in the center island getting a little tan and sunshine. I put in a hot tub recently for Deviant at her request…and armored showed up to rest her wearied muscles and sink in. And you know what? I even saw my brother drift by on a floatie, drinking a beer and listening to a breakdown of the latest Chief’s game over a little red portable radio. He always listened to sports radio, always. It brought me to tears for a moment to see him… that soft side smile… and then I fell into a black sleep.