Tuesday, March 24, 2020

writing my way out of PTSD?

This is supposed to be a thing that will help me heal. Writing the pain and anger and confusion. But writing is so hard right now. I don't want to feel those things, and they all well up in the writing. Someone I trusted for a time told me that continuing to write would be the thing that would help me heal. But the writing feels like being stuck in the sadness and muck and stuckness. It feels pointless. But when I write those other things the sadness pours out there. So perhaps writing it here will clear some space for that other writing.

I feel so broken, but I don't feel like the bad things are what broke me. I feel like somehow I showed up broken and unable to remember how it happened. I want there to be something as clear-cut as a repressed memory that I can recover. Something that helps me to understand when it all went wrong. Something I can point to to explain why this sense I make doesn't make sense in other people's worlds. Something to explain why I'm so afraid. I recognize myself in descriptions of the abused, the victim, the survivor. But I don't think I am abused, or a victim, or a survivor. I think I'm just kind of messed up. And when the suicidal thoughts creep in it's because I can't imagine how my existence might be justified. Heck of a way to commit suicide: by global pandemic. No one would ever know. Their grief would be swallowed up in the collective grief. They'd be part of the community of those who lost, those who loved.

I am so far away from myself right now that I can't feel his hands on me when I can see them on me. I feel so much yawning touch hunger, but the touch available doesn't seem to go there. I want to feel crushed beneath him hard enough that I can't help feel it. Hard enough that my brain goes back into my body instead of meandering off somewhere. Perhaps I do understand why those scary things work sometimes for some people.