#felis rambles

I’m laying gingerly in my right side right now and haven’t gotten up yet and I’m almost too nervous to move. If my vertebrae aren’t subluxing, then the muscles aren’t them are spasming so intensely that the pain is equally unbearable. That’s how the saga has been for weeks. Finally thought I got ahead of it on Tuesday after my PT did a lot of work on my muscles. Felt almost normal for two days and now bam.

And then she was absolutely delighted and enchanted by the orchestra performance, which delighted and enchanted me. I was already thrilled to be there because they were performing Barber’s violin concerto and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, two pieces I’ve played before and love dearly. And seeing A love it so much too just really filled my heart. She kept telling me after how much fun she had. 🥹 She’s 9 and growing up so fast…I love that we’re able to do more 1:1 activities together like this.

Anyway had another strong wave of these parts’ influence last night which included a lot of focused sui planning/research. Yuck. It’s scary. I don’t wanna die. I don’t wanna end up in the hospital. I don’t wanna get hurt. I wanna live the beautiful future I have in front of me with my wife and my beloved community. And hopefully my wife’s and my future child.

My treatment team knows all about what’s happening, as does my wife and my bestie mom-friend M. So there’s been a lot of safety planning and eyes on us and in my sane, grounded moments I believe we’ll make it through. Didn’t feel that way last night though. It’s also extremely exhausting swinging back and forth between these very polarized parts.

I think the fact that my wife and are planning to start trying for a kid this fall (her as the carrier) is part of all this too. Triggering the hell out of some of us. All the baby talk. Baby planning. But it’s pushed down deeper, less on the surface. My wife brought it up as a factor last week and I think she’s right though it had not occurred to me before now. There seems to be a feeling that we don’t get to have a life without e and j because it’s “our fault” they’re dead.

I forget that this is often the hardest part to survive. I seem to always think that there will be some relief...that it's behind me now. That maybe things can proceed more normally now. Maybe that comes later? I don't recall. But it doesn't come right away. First, I have to get through the shock. The shock of getting through something brutal and turning around and seeing the carnage behind you. The carnage you didn't have space and time to process as it was occurring. So it just hits you now. It hits like a punch to the gut that takes your breath away. 

Then, the despair. The howling, violent despair. The despair fueled by the unfathomable betrayals that led to you being in this position in the first place. It's shattering. It turns you into broken shards. Your will to live is sapped from you, sapped in the same way they sapped your life-energy out of you during their sadistic torture marathon. The exhaustion is without words. It seeps into your marrow and can't be rooted out, making each bone, each limb, weigh as much as the entire ocean. 

And then, what makes it even harder to survive is that the world keeps going. Everyone keeps moving around you, their daily flow of life unimpeded by your earth shattering devastation. You have been torn apart, ravaged, broken down the seams; your heart was ripped out as they forced you to stomp on it; you lost yourself, you died, you descended into hell, evil consumed you until you wished to be completely extinguished...but to everyone else, it's just a Monday. 

Which then just reignites the cycle of stunned, dazed shock leading to collapse and despair. You're alone. You lived through hell and now you're alone. No one cares, no one sees, no one bats an eye. It's just a Monday. You have to be normal. You can't draw attention. You can't let anyone know. You can't ask for help. You can't rest. You can't heal. You can't cry. Yes, of course it feels unsurvivable. Yes, of course you want to die. The terror of dying that filled Friday night is replaced with a desperate longing for the excruciating nightmare to end. 

I know that those are "old" feelings. Which is why I said at the start that this Monday is part of the traumaversary too. The aftermath is some of the worst trauma, I think. The aloneness is the unsurvivable part. It's supposed to be the part that's different now in the present. I know in many ways it is different. We saw E today. We can talk to our wife. To friends. It's not enough. It still holds true that for everyone else it's just another Monday. Wife and friends have been working all day. Etc.  And drawing attention to myself is a mortal sin on its own (the programming lie). The battle between seeking comfort and avoiding backlash always rages. 

I was like wait…you mean it’s not normal for whatever you’re focusing on to jump sideways back and forth when you switch between which eye you’re using to focus on it? I genuinely thought everyone’s focal point jumped from side to side like that when they switched between eyes. Hell, I even do it at a visual stim sometimes! But apparently that means your eyes have convergence issues…dysfunction in “converging” two images into one combined 3D image seen with both of your eye simultaneously.

Anyway long story short, I basically only use one of my eyes the majority of the time (I have always known that; my right eye is just kind of…there? It works fine but I’m almost always looking at things with only my left eye) and I did think that was kind of…problematic? But I also thought it was just normal, that everyone has one eye that does most of the work. Genuinely didn’t occur to me that they’re supposed to work TOGETHER lol.

Like…I prefer to read things, especially on my phone, with one eye closed, and I often get double vision when I try to focus on a single point fair away. I have difficulty with word tracking when I read and my eyes struggle to not skip all over the page, but again I thought EVERYONE WAS LIKE THAT! I knew that my wife is a MUCH faster reader than I am, but I didn’t know it was like…pathologically so lmao.

But yo apparently BVD can cause a TON of other things, like persistent headaches and migraines, extreme light sensitivity, dizziness and vertigo, balance and coordination issues, falls, anxiety in crowds, difficulty finding items in a busy visual field, nausea and carsickness (especially while reading or being on your phone)… Are you telling me it’s possible I fall over regularly because my eyes can work together properly?? Or that my headaches and migraines might not have been so frequent growing up if I had gotten this treated as a kid???

Man February is just…a lot. My worst month probably. My mom’s birthday, e’s birth and death, Candlemas, the Super Bowl weekend, then my dad’s birthday on the 13th and Valentine’s Day the next day. It’s just all so much trauma stuff. I was feeling pretty off most of the day yesterday and then when I asked inside about it, we ended up getting painful CSA body memories and flashbacks of dad “celebrating” his birthday with us. Ugh. Fuck.

And then this morning shortly after we woke up, some doll parts began having flashbacks of Valentine’s Day “sex parties”…felt similar to the Super Bowl party flashbacks we’ve had? Different costumes though. And different vibes. But similar structure. I dunno. And in this one, at one point we had a flashback of having a seizure(???)…or at least we were convulsing. It was scary and awful.

I will say though…the release of the Epstein files has made it a lot easier to believe myself lately. Like cold hard proof that this kind of shit happened. Happens. Still happens. It makes me feel a lot less crazy but I also feel angry that so many people are like sHoCkEd and cAn’T BeLiEvE this stuff is happening to kids and I’m just like…survivors have been saying this for ages. It kind of makes me feel like even more of an outsider, an alien…but at the same time I feel a bit vindicated? I dunno.