Stress in Groups, Peace Alone

I used to love being around people. The music and the huge crowds in clubs, bars, and concerts was exhilarating to me. I had fun spending a few hours pampering myself before hand (nails, hair, makeup done so carefully that each bit was flawless). I lost that somehow. "Social Anxiety Disorder" is what professionals call it. I am terrified of and mostly avoid social situations. I can still have fun with people I know and I am comfortable with, which are now just a few. Not many friends have stuck around through the last diagnosis and the subsequent treatments. I mean when you are in your late teens early twenty you want to be out, not sitting in someones home while they recuperate from a chemo treatment. The friends I have now did not even come into my life until after that.

Now as I start to try and rediscover life after several years of hell I am struck by how simply interactions can turn into terrifying encounters. Walking through a hallway of a crowed bar has turned from just that into this maze of how to avoid the people there because I do not know them. I do not know what they are capable of. I don't know if it just that I am out of practice in being around people or if it is the PTSD rearing its ugly head making me question the motives of everyone around me. Even the people I know I find it difficult to trust on more than just a surface level, I know they would let nothing happen to me but all the while I can not allow a deeper trust to build.

Although I have to say that I am grateful for them, even if I can never seem to truly trust them. They have handled situations with my anxiety so well. From taking me home during a panic attack to simply coming up and hugging me tight enough that I can for a moment just bury my head and focus my breathing to calm down. I know they can never truly understand the fear that I have being out and
I love them for trying reaching out instead of distancing themselves from me.

But even with their support and with them making me smile after I am out of the anxiety inducing situation I can not explain the relief of being home, in my room, sitting in my tiny little chair. Normally I have to have a show playing in the background to distract me for them thoughts before sleep that often lead to the night flashbacks and panics...but tonight I am finally so calm just being alone that I doubt that will be an issue tonight. My mind is finally finding a place of peace, at least for this night. So for me, who lives on day at a time, it is enough.

The Great Sleep Dilemma

Today has just been one of those days. With all the pain and anxiety I have daily sleep is a rare commodity. Even going to bed early last night and "sleeping" through the night did not give any rest. I just seemed to hang on the edge of actual sleep, like it was a cliff that I was to scared to jump off. Seven straight hours of that then over twelve hours spent awake as I progressively enter a more zombified state.

Why is my subconscious so opposed to rest? With the PTSD I have horrible nightmares. Well not even nightmares because nightmares are like dreams, they exist only in the mind. The flashbacks when sleeping are rarely worse than those when I am awake and neither can be predicted with any accuracy. So why is sleep the thing that I just can't seem to find.

My pain level on a daily basis is higher than most peoples when they are even injured, yet I have felt this way for more than two thirds of my life. Given that same amount of time is when sleep has been increasingly more difficult. Yet even with the use of heavy narcotics, always prescribed, I have issues getting past the threshold into deep sleep.

Now it is not even eight at night and I am getting more fatigued by the second instead of the minute. Not even sure why I am taking the time to write this post. As I do though I have been wondering more and more of why this happens. Each tiny part of my life gives an explanation for why I just can not find sleep all the while there is evidence that the parts are not the only cause.

I have PTSD and flashbacks which cause panic, I have anxiety knowing that it might occur, I have severe daily pain but medications that alleviate it have not helped, and this has all been ongoing for fifteen years. Over the counter sleep aids have not worked and prescription medications have caused me to have rather disturbing hallucinations. Even during the more productive periods of therapy my sleep hasn't changed.

Thinking back I remember a brief respite though when I was writing poetry nearly every day, but the words for that seem to have swept up in the whirlwind of everything else. But even then my sleep was still far from what a doctor would consider normal. Instead of staying awake for three days before my system essentially crashed I would stay up for only two.

So what is my point of this, my resolve for the situation? I have no idea. I am truly lost in this. All I can do is keep living day by day. Study when I have the strength, try and find joy in small things, and write whatever I can to see if maybe I can get that little spark back that was the only help to me years ago. Who knows, maybe I will find it and begin to post some poetry as it comes.

Star-crossed Love

Valentines day is tomorrow. A day to celebrate love and relationships, having lost all connection to its brutal beginnings. It has me thinking about all the memories from Valentines past. I was given a stuffed gorilla from my parents in 1998 when I first got sick. I remember being in puppy love with my best friend and it snowing on Shabbot. I remember being taken to a fancy restaurant by my high school sweetheart and out into a nature preserve with an iHome to dance under the stars. I remember two injured people in their first apartment trying to make a romantic dinner with one in crutches and one in a knee brace. I was planning a wedding then.

It almost feels like a dream. He was the father of the baby girl I never got to hold. He was the one who saved up a while to buy me a more amazing ring than I could ever have expected. He was the one who was there holding me the night I found out how sick I was. He was with me the first time I was given an IV for the biologic and tried to make me comfortable during the chemotherapy. His family was with me when I found the perfect dress, his sisters came up with all kinds of ideas for the wedding (even if they were generally all pink related). We knew that when we had more children what the nursery would be. Then suddenly everything changed. All of the issue that we had ignored came to the forefront of our relationship. A cloudy day in the spring saw it all come to an end.

It will be two years soon since it ended. Most of it spent trying to find a way to make things work off and on but there was never a chance at that. I can't say that I am sad for it. A piece of me will always love him as Bethanni's father. I will remember those good times like dancing under the stars or walking along the lake side after he proposed. But I don't want to live with that past. I want a future that is simply that, a future.

I rarely remove anything from my social networking pages, mostly because there is really nothing that I post that I would have to hide or remove. However I think a time has come to do just that. I loved him very much but people really can change.

Happy Valentines Day to whoever reads this. Single or not, it can be a good day.

***This is something I wrote for him a while back after I began to realize that he and I were not "fated" if you will to be together. Hope you enjoy it.***

Your eyes are conflicted with looks of fear and longing, pain and desire. A haunting knowledge that the past becomes repeated in the future and that this moment is ever moving towards the present. You try and seem like everything is fine and that things can work out differently this time. There is this senseless stupidity between you and I that grows greater with each passing second. As your hesitant hands reach for mine I choose to break loose of this perpetual cycle of deceit. I know you. Love will not let you leave, so let's agree to disagree, star-crossed lovers is what we should forever be.

My Own Gordian Knot

So many things to write about yet I can not seem to focus on just one. Each thing seems to connect together in this Gordian knot. The myth behind the knot claimed who ever undid would be ruler over Asia, such immense power and authority for simply untying a rope. So if Alexander the Great, who eventually sliced through the rope to remove the knot and ruled, managed to use a sword to destroy his obstacle what can I use? It is not as if my memories and emotions are something material such a rope that I can just take a knife and cut, so what avenues does that leave me to slice with?

This legendary rope was tied to an ox-cart, a thing used for traveling and business. Just as in the legend this knot in my life has halted each other aspect of my life. I am disabled therefore I do not work, I attended school until my health finally gave out so much that I could not continue, I have issues simply trying to restart all of that because of my anxiety disorders...I have stopped moving through life and am tied up to this place sitting here at my computer day after day knowing I am made for some purpose but still stuck.

As I am sure for generations people tried to untie this cart using their own logic, the issue with that is simple. Individual logic is limited by the persons experience. Eventually enough things happen in life and our expertise is finally narrowed into a small way of thinking. This is not permanent however as the human mind is capable of constant change. Alexander the Great allowed himself to learn from some of the great men of his time and not just in one subject. Through his own experience and the knowledge of other matters passed on to him by wiser men he managed to find a way to sever the knot that held the cart.

So what can I, a sick and neurotic young woman take from this great legend? I know from experience that my own knowledge is not enough to conquer the challenge that is binding me to where I am. I have been trying that for far to long without a bit of success. Therefore I need the assistance of others not just in the topics that plague me but in as many areas that I can find. Only then will I be able to find the blade that can undo this knot in my life.

Pure Raw Fear

Life is confusing for me. I feel vulnerable in every social situation. It isn't because I don't like being out and about its just the uncertainty that comes with it. Every day things like of grocery shopping, seeing friends, calling the post office over a lost package just seem so difficult to me. With everyone in my past not knowing who the person on the phone or behind me in line makes all my senses go into overdrive. I know it is from the PTSD, from a trauma I am not ready to talk about just yet, and there is no way to make it stop. There is only coping mechanisms to prevent a panic...the thing is most of the methods that have worked for nine years aren't working as well. From last October till now each attack has been progressively worse in public. The triggers aren't the same and sometimes there doesn't even seem to be a trigger. The most recent started at a concert and for the next two nights and three days every time I tried to sleep the flashbacks came in nightmares. I wasn't able to wake up and make them stop and each time I woke up more physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted than I had been before. I finally gave in and started taking my anxiety medication...which has let me get a phenomenal five hours of sleep. Based on the fact it is a quarter till three AM and I am wide awake and anxious again I doubt I will get anymore for a while. I have been to trauma councilors off and on for years yet couldn't seem to mesh well enough with them to get anything out of the experience. I am calling yet another one Monday and hopefully it will work out better this time around. I just know right now that this panic is overwhelming. The attacks don't last long but they feel like an eternity. The flashbacks are like nothing else in this world; what I see morphs into what I saw years ago, each nerve screams the same signals to my mind and I physically and visually relive the same few minutes over and over until I can't take anymore and end in a complete panic. A feeling where the fear is so intense I feel like I have stopped living, air feels like fire in my lungs, all thought and reasoning cease, and the world around me feels like a blurry darkness. Complete and utter helplessness. There has to be a better way of coping than this...