Neverland

I spent my day laying in the warm, overgrown grass in my backyard. Blackbird by Sarah McLachlan playing over and over in my ears. I stared at the tree branches above me and longed to slowly rise through them and fly away, soar up to the sky and never let my feet touch the ground again. My psychiatrist says it is normal to wish for ignorance but I have to push through the falsehoods and realities in my life that give me anxiety if I ever want to conquer them.

He motioned towards the tattoo on my collarbone, the one that says "You cannot conquer what you won't confront". He asked me why I got it. It was before my assault when I branded myself with this "pretty" quote. Of course it held some meaning to me back then but I didn't have nearly as much to conquer at the time. I didn't have so much to confront. 

I'm supposed to try to leave the house as often as possible. Even if I just drive to the grocery store parking lot for five minutes then come home but all I want to do is put my headphones in my ears blasting them so loud that I can't even hear my own thoughts. I want to close my eyes and fly away. I'm not looking for a place like France, Spain, Africa. I want to fly to Neverland, to Hogwarts, to Wonderland. Somewhere that has a different reality. Somewhere with tiny bottled drinks that can make me small enough that I can hide away. No matter how much I try there is no hiding, because what I wish to escape from is inside of me. 

I watched the movie Host recently and it was a beautiful comparison to my situation. I often feel as though I share my body with another being. My PTSD has a life of it's own. It makes my legs shake, my eyes water, my heart race, my skin sweat and I battle quietly inside my head with it pleading with it to find a new home. It makes me see and hear things that aren't really there, not anymore they aren't. It makes me irrational and angry and the combination leaves me lonely. 

It is hard to remember why I fight all of this. What future do I have right now? The days roll by so slowly, and I fear I have little to look forward to. Then every now and then I have a day where I wake up and for no explained reason I'm me again. The sun shines again, the coffee tastes amazing again and I feel like Tegan. It may last the whole day, it may last only an hour but I love the time I get with that girl every time she wakes up. It is like looking at yourself in the mirror except you are the reflection. You see yourself in a distant third person kind of way. That can happen when you talk about yourself so much I guess. 

If you haven't heard the song, you should. The link is below.

Goodnight Neverland...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8ac3tEltTU

No place like home

My house is noisy at night. The fish tank filter, water fountains, not to mention the hubby's snoring. Aside from all that the night is when I feel most alive. I guess three months after I quit bartending I still feel most like myself when the sun goes down. My medication has worn thin and it is easier for me to think.
After my last appointment with my psychologist I did some research on what he called "non-epileptic seizures" What I thought had been panic attacks were apparently something entirely different.
When my psychiatrist asked me to explain to him what a "panic episode" was like for me, he explained to me that usually when someone has a panic attack they can completely internalize it, you could look at them and have no idea that something horrible was going on inside them. My experience has been very different. It starts with flashbacks that lead to half-hour to hours long episodes in which I would become a tightly curled up shaking, sobbing,austing. 

mess of pain. It is usually followed my major disorientation, I would be completely unaware of how long the episode lasted, and it is completely exh
The worst one I can recall hit me when I was in the middle of the staircase in my house. I had started to feel that heavy weight on my chest that makes it hard to breath. The dizziness followed shortly and I hurried upstairs to my bedroom to get the number for the crisis line my victim advocate had given me. I was halfway down the stairs when I felt a physical blow to the chest and in a whirl of dreadful memories I lost all physical control of my body and collided down the stairs. 
I recall a brief moment of conscious thought during the episode that I reached out to my phone next to me and with all the means I had I texted a simple "sos" to my husband. He called me promptly but I was unable to give him any audible response to whatever he was saying and I did not understand a word of it. My mind couldn't connect his words to anything I could understand. I laid there shaking, crying for what felt like hours until I lost consciousness. My younger sister found me later, still at the bottom of the stairs. 
All I recall after that is a splitting headache and an incredible pain throughout my body. I realized passingly that there was blood on the floor that had spilled from a gash in my head. My hair still hasn't come all the way back in from where it was torn out upon my landing. 
I later put together that after Jordan couldn't get a coherent response out of me he called Danica thinking she could get to me more quickly. The "lifetime" that I laid there turned out to be about forty minutes. 
It was shortly after this incident that I finally decided to seek out professional help. 
Sometimes my husband looks at me with a grim face asking why I won't go to the store with him. What am I so afraid of? Nothing bad is going to happen. It is hard to put into words the fact that I carry the bad with me. It is a sort of disease that falls into occasional dormancy, that can awake at any moment without warning. It is bad enough to have something like that happen to you in your own home but can you imagine experiencing that in a public place, In a building full of strangers...staring...confused...scared of you not knowing that you are not the threat? I will fight my battles but for now, I will fight them within the walls of my own home.

Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow?

Predicting my days is like predicting the weather. Sunny? Chance of rain? Yesterday I woke up with allergies so bad I could barely see. I took my normal allergy medication that I took all season last year and within an hour I passed out. I woke up at 7 p.m. on my couch with my breakfast still in front of me. The only explanation I could come up with is that I had a bad medication interaction with my new anti depressant/anxiety medicine.
I was sad that I had missed an entire day, I had dressed and planned to spend it in my garden. The more depressing thought followed that when do I not lose an entire day? I've been awake since 8 a.m. and here we are at 3 p.m. All I have managed to do is unload and load the dishwasher. The rest of my day was spent streaming t.v. shows online and taking pills to drown my emotions for four hour periods.
I had a plan. I had a really good plan. I graduated from massage school in October and I had a great agreement with the Marriott hotel I was working at that allowed me to do as much in room massage as I liked, charging whatever I liked with minimal overhead. I could make in two days what I would normally make in a week. After I was sexually assaulted behind the bar by a strange man all comfort I had with being in a room with a stranger vanished and so did the hours of work I had put into creating that dream.
That is not the only thing I have lost in the last few months. I lost the sense of equality I had in my marriage when my husband was forced to take over my half of the bills. Even with the fact that he took this on without argument, it has caused a distance between us that is so painful. We were trying to have a baby. Six months we had been trying. I know I wasn't pregnant yet but I feel like I lost a child when we decided it would be wiser to wait until I get better.
I guess it would probably help if I had a timetable I could imagine. When I was in school I knew when my completion date was. When I was engaged I knew my wedding date. This endless timetable makes it so hard for me to imagine a future beyond it. When does it end? Does it ever really end? Do people ever recover to 100% after being here? Will my husband get his wife back? Will we ever have that child or will I always have to be on the medication that makes pregnancy an unsafe option for a baby?
I lost so much. So much that was right there at my fingertips. Dealing with the events of my past do not compare to the pain of everything in my future that slipped away. I've lost my sense of purpose. When do I get that back?

What lies beneath

When I am explaining what I'm going through to my husband, I often compare it to a physical injury that he can really visually imagine. Often this comes off more dramatically than I mean for it to. For instance if he were to wake up, come downstairs and ask me why I'm crying at the computer right now, I would tell him that I feel like someone slashed the sharp blade of a hatchet across my forehead and used a staple gun to patch up the open gaping wound. Pretty dramatic right? I would take physical injuries over my mental struggles any day. If someone saw me with an injury like that, they wouldn't ask me why I look upset. They would understand the hell I am going through without explanation. Instead, they look at me, seemingly normal. They think, "She looks fine to me, I don't get what she is so upset about.". 

Frequently, when I am having a tough day, I browse the internet looking for souls like mine. I search for people who remind me that I'm not the only one living like this. Today it didn't help as much as I would like. When you search for a PTSD community, 90% of the time you are going to find war veterans. I find it difficult to relate to that community because I wasn't in a far away place where I had been told what I would encounter. I was in my own home, my place of work, places where I lived under the illusion that I was safe. I'm not saying that being attacked in your own home is harder or more difficult to deal with than what veterans go through by any means. The struggles they deal with are similar and they have to deal with them in their personal space when they come home. It just isn't something I can relate to. I wasn't out to fight a huge battle, I was just trying to live my normal life.

I wonder how the men who have victimized me in the past would feel if they knew the lasting affects that were created by their actions. Would they apologize? Would they feel any guilt or remorse? Would they wish to take it back? Maybe they wouldn't care at all. Victims walk down the street seeing their attackers face in every stranger they pass. Do attackers ever think of their victims? Do they wonder where we are, what we are doing, and worry about an encounter with us in the future? I don't think they do. I imagine that they rarely give us a second though. 

It is a lonely feeling. I know I have an army of people who love, believe in and support me. But when I leave the house, I don't take that army with me. I'm alone, open, vulnerable. 

My past is proof that I don't have the strongest luck on my side. In the past I have heard people say that while what I went through sucks, the odds of it happening again are slim. It happens again and again. Wrong place wrong time. They say I'm too nice, too friendly. I wish I could be nice and friendly. I used to love striking up conversations with strangers. I simply cannot conduct myself that way anymore. I've been burned, boiled even. 

I know this is long, I know that it is late. I had to vent, get it out of my head. I had to try to calm the static noise buzzing in my head and calm the crazy. Sometimes it feels like I can literally feel the crazy stirring in my head. Most of all I am just scared to fall asleep. No good comes from my dreams. I just have to face it, it is time for bed. Thank you universe for giving me a place to release my mind. Goodnight Neverland.

The first..

This is where I have to say that the twelve steps of PTSD which I believe to be true, don't always happen at separate times. You can experience several and even all of them simultaneously. This is the story of the first time I experienced what that is like. I have to warn you, it is graphic and may not be easy to read.
 Shortly after that first incident with my father my parents divorced and I moved with my mother.
Life wasn't easy after the divorce, my dad moved to Arizona with my five older brothers and I stayed in Utah with my mom, two younger brothers and my younger sister. I had suddenly gone from middle child to oldest in the house and I wasn't prepared for the expectations and responsibilities that came with that.
It is hard to keep exact facts straight at this time because I was young and while my siblings and myself usually stayed separated with the parents we initially left with after the divorce, there was still a lot of going back and forth that went on.
I can't always trust my memory these days because my mind likes to play tricks, but I believe I was about 14  when the next and probably most traumatizing event happened in my life.
In the little town I grew up in there was a water park with a yellow slide that we would spend a lot of our time at in the summer. I went with my friends, family and often the families of my mom's friends.
We were at the midnight session at the park and everyone was having a blast. We hiked up the stairs, sped down the slide and splashed around in the pool. There was one local guy there, the son of one of my mom's closest friends. He had been giving me extra attention that night and I was loving it, I had never really been a recipient of attention from boys my own age and this guy was cute and older than all of them. His name was Jesse and he was twenty at the time.
We had been laughing and joking around for quite awhile when he caught me off guard by asking me if I would show him my breasts. I was very self conscious about my appearance at the time and had no desire to remove my bikini for him, but I was afraid that if I said no he wouldn't want to hang out with my anymore that night. Instead I told him that if he could catch up to me in the waterslide then I would show him, knowing very well that no one was as fast as me at going down the slide.
We hiked up the cold, wet staircase. It smelt strongly of chlorine and an old musky smell from the aged carpet. He kept his hand gently placed on the base of my back, just above my bikini line. The contact made my skin buzz and I felt my face flush red every time we made eye contact. As we came closer to the top of the tower I started to doubt how wise it was to make the deal I had. I felt dizzy, my mouth wet with excess saliva caused by the uneasy nausea stirring in my stomach.
We walked to the mouth of the slide and without saying anything I thrust myself into it with as much speed as possible, determined to keep distance between myself and the man following closely behind me. As I burst out of the end of the tube I felt the cool water rush over me with relief.
The relief vanished with the color from my face when there were suddenly hands around my waist, pulling me close to the large man behind me. I felt a hardness against my back that made my entire body freeze. Jesse turned me around and stared down into my eyes, his face looked like stone in the dim light reflecting off the water.
With one disturbingly sharp move he grabbed my hand and slide it into his shorts, I felt the same hardness that was against my back seconds before suddenly brush the palm of my hand. My insides turned into knots, I wasn't sure what he was thinking but I was sure it was something I didn't want to do. Before I even had time to react to where my hand was, I suddenly felt his slide into the back of my bikini. My fight or flight immediately kicked in and I pushed him off and rushed away without a word.
As painful as these memories are, the events afterwards were much harder. You can read about what happened then in my post "What You Don't Know Can Hurt You".
What I carry with me the most from this time is the pain that came from the absence of support from my family and the indescribable anger and resentment it created.

Under lock and key

I had another nightmare last night. That isn't something as unusual as I would like. I think my nightmares are the hardest part of what I'm going through. I lay in bed at night, exhausted but too afraid to fall asleep. I don't know much about what happens in our brains when we sleep but somewhere along the way the part of my mind that reassured me when I woke that it was only a dream has vanished. When I awake, I'm never certain that the pictures and images from my dreams aren't really part of my reality. The light from my window hits me, my eyes flutter open and I lay there paralyzed. I spend my mornings crying over the friends I have never met who lost their lives in the flurry of my unconsciousness. I have mourned the death of a child I loved with my entire body that has never been born. The line between imagination and reality has dissolved, I can no longer trust my own mind. I have been certain of conversations I have had, memories I visit often and found later that they never existed in reality. I have spoken fondly to a friend of a day we spent together in a park only to be humiliated when I am corrected, and learn that it never happened. It confuses me. I'm not sure which of my memories I have actually experienced with others and which ones were created in my dreams, branded into my mind and sold to me as truth.
Since I have exited the world of employment my days blur together. I try to fill them with chores and hobbies. All within the safety of the walls in my home. Until I learn to face the two worlds I live in here, the conscious and unconscious, I cannot face the reality of the even larger and more uncertain world outside me. Once I lived a life where the idea of spending a week without leaving the boundaries of my home sounded like my personal hell. Now anything that extends beyond them is a threat. My comfort zone is everything to me. I made a career out of being social with others, serving and entertaining them and feeling excitement listening to the stories of the places the have been and the experiences they have had, sharing my own stories of triumph and pain. Now every stranger is a threat. I don't trust them, I have lost faith in the general goodness of humanity. I have been a victim a the hands strangers more often than anyone should at my age. I have been raped, sexually assaulted, mugged at gunpoint. I can no longer move through life carefree and open minded. call me a cynic but the world hasn't given me a reason to feel otherwise. The risk of pain that comes from being open is too great. Home is where the heart is and I'm keeping my heart and body locked away safely in my home.

What you don't know can hurt you

I started to write a post about the second traumatizing event in my childhood, but I found it to be a lot harder than I had expected. Maybe eventually I will finish it and tell the full story but for now an abbreviated version will have to do.
I was about 14, I was at a water slide park with my family. A man by the name of Jesse, who was about 20 at the time forced himself upon me sexually in the middle of the pool. I was traumatized and humiliated. It wasn't until the next day when I went to confront him about it and he reacted with hostility toward me because of my rejection of him that I told my older brother Alex.
It is only now as an adult that I realize how much the sexual assault has affected me throughout my life. At the time it was the lack of support I received that broke me. My mother and Jesse's mother put us all in a room together and they all proceeded to criticize me, saying I had probably instigated it. He told them that I was flirting with him and I was just throwing a fit because he rejected me. My mom and everyone else believed it.
I felt sick to my stomach as I had to sit face to face with this man who had violated me so clearly and defend myself. Where was my support? Even if I had wanted the attention he gave me the gap in our age made it hugely inappropriate.
To say that this caused me to resent my mother would be an understatement. I felt a hot anger towards her. I was later forced to go to Jesse's mom's house for dinner, and she didn't seem to understand why that was a bad choice. Jesse wasn't there but his siblings had grown to hate me for the accusations I had made at their brother. The entire night made me sick to my stomach.
Without a true understanding of my rage and a healthy place to vent it I became violent. In one culminating moment when I told my mother I needed to get out of the house and clear my head and she told me I wasn't allowed to go I reached out and struck her across the face. That is a moment I will never forget and I'm sure she won't either. She called the police on me, told them she had an out of control teenager and asked them to come handle the situation.
It was moments later as I was standing in my front yard in handcuffs that one of my siblings came out of the door saying my father was on the phone. After a brief discussion it was decided that moving to Arizona with my father would be a better option than placing me in Juvenile Detention.
I eagerly accepted the alternative, feeling a strong desire to run away from everything in that small Utah town that had betrayed me. I had no idea that I would be carrying the darkness from it with me.