Tuesday: Today I’m grateful for feeling…

Overwhelmed by my house, by my lack of safe space, by the amount of work that needs to be done before all the furniture can be moved back. Over half of the walls and ceilings need to be repainted, it’s insane. There’s dust on everything, I need my inhaler just to breathe in the house. I guess this is what comes with re-piping a house but I didn’t realize what it would do to me. It’s hard to be grateful for the safety from water leaks when I feel so displaced. I’m making a priority list of rooms to paint and clean so we can establish normalcy again but it will literally take months I think. 

Energized in a bad way, almost sick with anxiety and feeling like there’s no outlet for it. I haven’t been able to river swim for days because of the rain. Today I NEEDED to swim, I felt it through my entire body that I needed the water, the movement, the cleanse. I arranged my whole schedule around this trying to prioritize my mental state and the pool was closed for the lightning. I’m disappointed and left without an outlet. I could jump rope but it’s raining outside and there’s no space in my house with the furniture being everywhere. Feeling oddly defeatist, normally I’m more of a brainstormer than one who gives up. I guess I’m just feeling tired. I could sacrifice some volleyball but I feel that would do just as much damage, I need the activity and community. If we have to remake our house on our off time, when will there be time for me to process, to just rest?

Sickened, ashamed, and in despair for my child self. In therapy we put together another piece of the puzzle with my dad’s abuse. I feel like it’s almost whole now. I don’t have every memory but I don’t need to know everything and am not likely to regain them all. But I have what I need, I have enough that my behaviors make sense now. I feel both validated, empowered, excited AND mournful, furious, scared. It’s so strange to be sitting with all of it at the same time. My recent memory explains my masturbation phobia, my porn phobia, my fear of male arousal, my feeling of being used that comes with sex. Talking with my therapist today explained my complicated and phobic feelings/history about touching myself, my own pleasure, and sharing pleasure with someone else. And it’s all so twisted and sick and pedophilic, I feel like I’m reading about someone else’s life in a memoir. Like this couldn’t be a thing I lived through, this doesn’t really happen to people, it must all be fiction. People can’t actually DO that to other people. But they do and he did and now I have to work on denial vs acceptance. Bonus frustration for the fact that wounds take time to heal. Now that I can see the end of the tunnel it’s so hard not to push too hard.

Feelin’ good…

• I loved sleeping on my old mattress last night, Cubu commented on its comfort as well. I missed both the physical and emotional comfort. Our bed has been on the floor so we can flip it up to play VR. If we ever put our bed on a frame, I look forward to this mattress.
• Cubu held me as I cried today, even though it made him late for work and I told him to go. I’m so grateful to have a loving and supportive partner. I wonder how much of this support is voluntary and how much of it is his caregiving codependency though…
• Excited. My volleyball tournament is tomorrow and that would normally mean no volleyball after that. But this weekend the Corporate Challenge sport IS volleyball so I’ll get to play on Friday and Sunday too!! Hopefully by next week the rain will have stopped and I can start incorporating beach into my routine. 
• Seen, less pent up, after a therapy session. I told my therapist my memory. It took at least twenty whole minutes for me to say 2 sentences, I felt so immobilized. I went into it wanting EMDR for the memory but I guess I wasn’t ready since I could barely say it out loud. We worked on helping me find ways to be okay with my natural rate of recovery rather than pushing myself like I do. After crying I felt some release but, as always, a great deal of sadness and grief came with it. She tells me to sit with this and try not to intellectualize it.
• I loved talking to you, I always love talking to you. Hopefully by the time the kids are back in school, I’ll have gotten better at leaving Cubu to his own devices and we can have more regular calls. I feel like our conversations twist and turn so naturally and have a raw frankness to them that I rarely experience one-on-one. I’m grateful to have gained so much from this practice you started, including a friend 🙂