Celria

I’m pretty sure last night I probably had a bunch of nightmares that I don’t remember. I’ve been massively exhausted all day. I went through a weird period of taking the wrong meds and am now taking the right meds but going through a med change, so, things are a bit rough. I’m also processing some shitty information that isn’t new to me but I’ve never really dealt with, and thats also rough. Not willing to talk about the information, but, processing is weird and hard. Putting things away to deal with them when you’re better able to cope is all well and good, but sometimes when you unpack it all you’ve got is ‘Well. Thats really awful.’ Like. I don’t know what to do with it. In relation to my general ‘having a bad time’, this morning I moved my pillow and blanket into the computer room because I was feeling a bit rough on waking up, and sleeping in a more public space can help me so I moved where I was sleeping and tried again.  At some point Minna was walking in the hallways and I was very sleepy, and I just believed I was at home again. When I was a kid, at home, you passively listened for footsteps all the time. You listened for where mum was, where she was going, and the ‘tone’ of the footsteps. Its just a thing that you always did. We’d do it to try and predict her mood, predict where she was, predict if she was coming to see us so we could modify our behavior and presentation. The way you’d deal with her if the footsteps sounded angry was to be submissive. Letting fear show was usually a good sign, because showing that we were afraid would put her in a better mood. Minnas footsteps were just normal sounding footsteps, and not angry sounding ones, but they were headed in my direction.  The re-experiencing I was feeling, it was just like being a kid and being at home. So there was low level fear, but the fear was only just, low level. Just monitoring footsteps. Because thats what you do. Just the kind of low level fear that was ever-present, but, not much in the scheme of things. I woke up enough to realize what had happened, and that I’m not a child, and that Mum wasn’t there, and that I didn’t need to listen for footsteps. I was still very sleepy but verbalized it, confused. Like, Alex and Matt were in the room and I said something like ‘I heard Minnas footsteps and I thought that Mum was here, and obviously thats not true.’ I would have just said it really sleepily and confused.  Alex laughed and he was like ‘Its okay buddy, your mum isn’t here, I promise.’ and I got back to napping.  I’ve been unnaturally tired in a way that makes me think I was probably having nightmares that I don’t remember. But while I’ve been awake every now and then I think about that re-experiencing. Its so weird. Its so weird. I really did feel like a kid at home, and its so weird to describe that feeling. Its not the big kind of fear you’d expect to feel if you’d maybe heard the stories, and didn’t know much about living with abuse.  Its a small fear, small but seemingly ever present. You can’t live day to day with feelings of terror. While we certainly experienced terror, a lot more of the day to day experience of it is monitoring the situation. Reading if you ‘need’ to feel terror. Its so weird.  We were -tortured- regularly. The kind of shit that is -super illegal to do to war criminals.- Sometimes it was big explosive angry violence, and sometimes it was smaller, slower sadistic psychological shit. There was a thing that would happen every so often. I don’t have a read on actually how often because my memory is a fucking blur. But sometimes we’d have to stand in this specific pose, with our arms behind our back, one hand in the other. We were specifically instructed that this was because having our arms in front of us would create a barrier between our mother and ourselves, and this was a symbol of defiance, and she was looking for symbols of submission. She actually said that to us, that thats why we had to pose that way. To show submission. And we would have to stand there like that for -hours- unmoving, in exactly that pose, and if we moved, if she noticed us fidgeting we would get walloped. In those hours she would berate us about how we were useless, worthless, stupid and dirty. We didn’t have to -do anything- for one of those sessions to happen. She’ just get angry on a whim, and then that would happen. Thats just one of the kinds of things that would happen to us, kind of regularly. Terrifying violence would happen as well. But it was still home, and family, and how we lived and ‘normal’ I don’t know if I’ll ever have the space away from it to process it because I’m not sure how you’re supposed to process that. It was shit. It was very bad. There’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t make it not have happened. My brain wants me to process it though. To deal with it. Thats basically a lot of what PTSD is, its the brains native way of trying to get you to process the trauma by re-experiencing it when you’re in a safer environment, so you can process what happened in safety. But I don’t know what to do with this. I don’t know how to ‘process’ it. Thats kind of what PTSD is as well though sometimes, reconciling the irreconcilable. Its too much. I’m actually more disturbed by my reactions to the re-experiencing than I was to re-experiencing it. Like when I ws re-experiencing it, I just, felt like a kid again, and that was life. Thats just what I felt like, on a day to day level, in situations that weren’t as traumatic as all that. Just this sense of keeping track of the footsteps. Thats fine, thats normal. My adult reaction to remembering that being normal though, weirdly feels more disturbing than the actual re-experiencing did. I feel weird, and bad, and scared. Today its a mum thing, but sometimes its a Cav thing, sometimes its an Owen thing. Very occasionally these days its a Matt thing. Sometimes its just, other things. Triggers go away. I used to be triggered by the sound of cars coming into driveways (because that used to signal our parents coming home) I used to be able to hear the car pulling into the driveway reliably before our dogs could, and for years that sound brought out fear, because mum could be at her worst when she’d just come home from somewhere else. Now I’m not triggered by cars pulling into driveways at all. I mean, thats fucking handy, since its an every day fucking noise. That time a 30 year old dude stalked me when I was 17. Like. Nothing about that situation is basically ever a trigger at all these days? Triggers go away, but sometimes weird things bubble up. I remember a period of waking up feeling like I had headlice, because when we were young we had terrible untreated headlice, and it seemed like such a weird, weird thing to come up. Like, it hadn’t come up for years, and, having headlice is far and away less traumatic than some of the other shit we went through, but yet, I would wake up feeling those feelings. Tactile hallucinations.  They came out of nowhere and went again.  Its so weird.  This is going to be my whole life. I’ll get better, but, this is all just here. My PTSD is a chronic condition, there’s treatment and there’s recovery. Thre are better times and worse times, but its with me for life and thats just super hard for me to reconcile/deal with. Anyway its 3:53 now, and valium takes about an hour to kick in, so I’m going to see if I can sleep again.  Maybe committing this all to words like this will help me, instead of just aimlessly tossing and turning full of thoughts. Hopefully this is helpful processing.  I’m going to try naps again.