Monday: Today I’m grateful for feeling…

Displaced and struggling with large bouts of anxiety. The plumbers repipe the house this week and it’s a huge deal. There are so many holes in my walls and ceilings now. Aside from the necessary damage, they’re home at the same time that I am, even when I’m in therapy or having an SIA/CODA meeting. There is one room in the whole house that doesn’t have to be cut into at all so that’s where I’m camping. My routine is all thrown off, I didn’t get to swim this morning, I’m struggling to figure out when to work at the library with everything up in the air, I’m nervous that a bunch of strangers are in my home unsupervised. I’ve been on edge since last night, I didn’t realize it would affect me so much. Apparently the state of my inner peace is directly affected by the state of safety and independence that I have in my home + my routines. On the other hand, I’m *so* grateful to have a home that makes me feel safe enough that I’m disturbed when it is. The company should take 2-4 days, I’m hoping it’s closer to 2. 

Grief and anger for my brain capacity, for who I could have been. I’ve known that CPTSD causes brain damage but for some reason it really hit me today. My childhood literally stunted my brain. My telomeres don’t regenerate as they should, I have amnesia, my short term memories don’t code into long term ones like they should, and my frontal lobe development was inhibited. People with CPTSD die an average of 20 years earlier than someone without it. Granted, that last one includes suicides and deaths by addictions, which run rampant with CPTSD patients. Not to mention all the fucked up nerve responses that are costing years to retrain. I feel gritty with anger, feeling robbed of a healthy brain. It’s such a loss. I know it’s pointless: I love who I am, and who I am becoming. But there’s this part of me that mourns who I could have been, what I could have accomplished. I’m angry at how hard I have to fight to regain a wholeness that I had been born with and loss that I’ll never regain what it should have been. 

Embarrassed for feeling this way. I keep finding my inner critic shaming myself for thinking this, saying I’m “wallowing in self-pity” or “be grateful for what you have” or “this is small potatoes, you’re fine.” But it is a big deal, it is a loss. Here’s binary thinking for you again. So: I can both love my current self/my life AND mourn what it could have been. Why is it so hard to convince my critic of that? 

Fury, shock, devastation, resignation, and inferiority. My dad didn’t love me. When I cry over his assaults, all I can think is “How could he do this to me, how could he do this to me” over and over in a loop. Today it clicked, the answer I’ve always known: he didn’t love me. He didn’t love anyone, he was so deeply damaged that it wasn’t personal. The adult voice I have can’t seem to get this through to the inner children though. I have this crushing feeling that it was my fault: I cried too much, I was too boring, I wasn’t ENOUGH. I used to cry to my mom, asking her if he loved me and she said he did in the limited way he could. But I knew. It flabbergasts me how caught off guard I was today by knowledge I’ve always had, but it hit me like a truck and I had a big cry about it. My bathroom has been torn up from the plumbers and my bed is so full of drywall dust that it would give me asthma. I wish this revelation had come on a day where I had somewhere safe to retreat to. We’re sleeping in the guest room tonight. The guest bed has my mattress from when I was single, hopefully it will be a familiar comfort.

Feelin’ good…

• I started a memoir on CPTSD called What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo and it’s both a balm and a blister. I feel so incredibly seen though the life of this woman. Our traumas are very different but the processes we’ve gone through to recover and our analytical approach to healing are nearly identical. It feels eerie and horribly sad, even as it feels like a hug. 
• The plumbers are done. Tomorrow the drywallers come and hopefully they can finish in a day so I can have space to process again. 
• I managed a deep, vulnerable share in my SIA meeting, even with 5 random men on the other side of a door hammering away. 
• I realized therapy would fall in the middle of the drywallers tomorrow and that I would need it to be a big session. So I reached out to Jolene to ask if I could use a room on her property for some privacy to cry. She said absolutely. I felt so loved and supported, grateful to know people that DO find me lovable and worthwhile. I’m also proud of myself for reaching out, for asking for help. This may be the first time asking for help came naturally after years of practicing. 
• We had to take the TV down and pack it away for the plumbing. Cubu, knowing I was in a bad way because of my big cry, went through the trouble of re-setting up the TV and speaker system. He called me into the TV room and already had Avatar pulled up. It was so selfless and sweet. I don’t know how he thinks of these things so quickly, I was too sad to even think clearly. Again, I felt incredibly loved and cared for.
• I think Cubu finished the technical side of launching my website so it’s officially online now???!!!?! I need to edit it and update some posts from the time it was down, but I’m hoping to have it viewable by the end of the month!! I’m grateful to have someone helping me towards my goal, even if I could have done that one alone.