Hah! I rhymed.
Anywho, Hi folks! How are we all holding up around here lately?
I....am holding up. I am surviving with a clear and precise movement towards healthy coping and enjoying life.
With my anxiety and PTSD it is a really steep uphill battle to stay positive and move past all the hate and anger and vicious negativity I had endured the last 12+ months or so.
Let me rephrase that, I have been continuing to endure this vengeful hatred for a few months more now because my "family" doesn't know what it means to be supportive and empowering. All they really know how to do is bring you down and tell you what you're doing wrong and you'll never amount to anything without them...
Which you know, as well as I do, that's not going to make me happy....in fact if nothing else...it will make me depressed and angry.
I have a serious history of mental health problems that are not just inherited but also acquired, bipolar disorder, insomnia, ptsd, severe generalized anxiety disorder. I'm a cutter by nature. Basically, I substitute physical pain for the mental pain I am feeling at the time the cutting seems necessary.
It's a really strange feeling, a mindset that has no sense of order or rationality but it's still there just urging every fiber in your being to find something sharp and rip open your flesh to watch the blood flow and feel the physical pain slide a "bandaid" of sorts over the mental pain.
You go numb and after the first few cuts it gets easier to cut. I found out a long time ago, at the behest of my mother to find a different outlet for that mental anguish, tattoos and piercings are far more wildly accepted than the scars of cutting.
So I had one of my favorite Milwaukee tattoo artists cover my inner forearms in large and elaborate tattoos to cover the permanence of my mental anguish.
The piercings were an easy way to quickly make things feel better with less need for cash and more need for pain, it was an easy outlet until I had children.
Now most of my money goes to them and keeping my house together....but lately, having to deal with all this pure and unadulterated hatred I have received from the people I was supposed to be getting "help" from and call themselves "family" have pushed me....they've pushed me too far.
And the darkness is coming back....it's starting to seep into the edges of my psyche and it's getting difficult to be positive all the time. It's difficult to find the energy to even get up and do the usual daily activities, even my girls can see that mommy isn't doing well.
I'm not sure what hurts more. The deep ache when my girls see me crying and ask me if I'm okay or the sting of knowing my own blood would rather watch me flounder and fail and come crawling back to them before they say congrats or I'm proud of you......they both hurt equally as much just in different ways.
That makes coping so much more difficult in the end. And let's be honest, my coping skills have been in need of help for years.
I miss my mom and sister something fierce. My "adopted" kids, my godsons, the only two male children I will ever have or acknowledge in my life as my own....their current situations have me so concerned I lose sleep over it.
I've had my dystonia start to worsen from the stress and that in and off itself is a difficult beast to battle everyday when it's not super exacerbated. I don't think many people understand what I mean when I say I'm exhausted from battling myself all day.
I'm not just battling the mental urge to cause myself harm because of deep seeded emotional issues but I'm also battling the physical urge to twitch uncontrollably.
I spend a good portion of my day reminding myself that it's not unusual for me to have a switch in emotion so quickly and to just breathe, roll with it and keep going until the next switch happens...and then I have to deal with that in a whole different way. It's exhausting to simply exist.
My physical body is failing me in ways no one my age really understands. My mind is awash with emotions that don't make sense to be feeling half the time. Even my husband who has known every deep secret of mine for the past six years and everything that happened before I met him, is concerned about the way my disabilities have become so strong and out of control.
There are a lot of days where I have so much going on on the INSIDE that the urgency of some situations in the outside world don't quite register. One minute I'll be staring off into space, silent and motionless, it's like the calm before the storm because more often than not after a few moments like that I literally feel like just screaming and crying and throwing things because on the inside is just too much and I lose all rational control of myself.
And usually, my husband has to bring me back down from the affront of emotion I felt in a matter of moments because when I get to that point all rational thought goes out the window and only the worst possible circumstances could be possible.
Meditation helps....listening to music helps (I need to treat myself to that more often), smoking some herb helps (if you don't get it don't ask but it calms the anxiety and the pain and the dystonia like no pharmaceutical drug I've EVER taken), drinking a glass of wine or whisky, some time to myself, a short walk but with two kids a lot of that isn't accessible when they are awake or unoccupied.
I have a strong fear that I have screwed up my children mentally and emotionally in a way that will affect them for the rest of their lives and that it's all my fault.
I know it's not. My rational brain (when it does work) tells me that's not true, it tells me none of the unnecessary worries I have are rational to be having but the doubt, the fear, the self hatred....it's still there and it can be a beast to beat down back to submission so I can function.
I know that life will never be all sunshine and daisies, I'm not that blind. I just wish the happier times were easier for me to enjoy. I wish being social didn't instill a fear in me that no one else could possibly understand.
I long for a cure to this constant self doubt and apocalyptic worry I have but methinks it's something I will forever have to deal with.
Let's just hope I can win this battle in the end and that when my time does finally come i will be there for it instead of leaving this plain early because I can't stand the pain anymore. Physical or mental, living like this is tough....
It's even more difficult than being a mother to two toddler daughters. LOL
