Triggered again

Okay, so important lesson learned. It’s a bad idea for me to read my posts to my wife right before bed. I just got triggered while reading them, then said something about being triggered. We talked for a bit, then she rolled over to go to sleep, and my brain started churning, as it has a tendency to do. The next thing I know, I’m grilling her about stuff and she’s not getting any sleep. Then I’m a mess, babbling about losing her, crying and just basically being stupid.

She did her best to reassure me but that doesn’t quiet my heart or stop my hands from shaking. It didn’t stop me from crying either, and there’s just no way that I’m going to be able to sleep now. We’ve been growing more and more distant over the last few years, and the stress of that is coming out. So when I get triggered I fall into that abandonment issue thing and I freak right the fuck out. I know she said she’s not going to leave me, and I believe her. I really do, but when I’m triggered my brain just completely bypasses all that and screams as loud as it can that she’s halfway out the door and hailing a cab.

PTSD times two?

The fact that I’ve been down lately should come as no surprise to anyone. One of my triggers got pulled recently and true to form I clammed up and tried to weather it out. The nature of this trigger is abandonment, which makes it very very difficult for me to engage others, especially those that I feel most afraid of abandoning me; which in this case is once again my poor wife, who is a real trooper, I must say.

Safety and security

What do you do when you feel the world sliding out from under your feet and there’s nothing solid to hang onto? How do you manage to keep functioning and acting like everything is normal? How do you keep putting on the smile, nodding and asking the polite questions? How do you keep them from seeing the hurt brimming just under the surface, when you know they don’t want to see it? Nobody wants to see it. They just want you to keep acting like it’s alright, like it’s something that will just be over soon and the real you will be back. Here’s the secret, I’m always here, I’m always me. The real me is the same me when I’m smiling as when I’m not. The real me needs help when he’s smiling and when he’s not, but it’s easy to forget, or not care or just not notice. How do I keep reaching out when nobody wants to reach in? Why am I always the one that has to do the reaching? What difference does it make in the end anyway?

Running away and hiding

All my life I’ve been either running away or hiding from one thing or another. I guess if you delve deep down, it’s probably been guilt and shame. I suppose those are the outworkings of my PTSD, but at the moment it’s mostly a crapshoot.

I actually physically ran away from home twice. Once when I was eleven and my brother was twelve and the next time I must have been fourteen. The first time we did it we rode our old BMX style bicycles about 20 miles to a friends house. It seemed like the longest distance ever. It took us nearly all day, but we were making a stand. Well, I guess my brother was, I was just kind of tagging along as usual. My father came and picked us up the next day. Oddly he wasn’t furious like I thought he would be. I don’t remember him exactly changing his ways either, though.

O sleep, where art thou?

So I laid down about 2 and 1/2 hours ago and I know it I didn’t get to sleep until well after 7am because I got a couple likes and a follow around then and I checked it on my mobile phone. So I only got about 1 and 1/2 hours of sleep, in which I had a rollicking good nightmare; the only thing I can remember from it is stuffing some cake down a fat lady’s throat and telling her to get over it. I remember being livid in the dream because people didn’t understand me and were making zero attempt to do so.

So it’s 8:30 am now, I’m tired as fuck and I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep when I lay down again…oh the fun times.

So I was talking to a buddy the other day who was over in the sandbox for a while and he was talking about somebody fucking with his vehicle. Immediately, he said, he had to check all around it, under it, etc for bombs. He went into high alert, called the police, etc. It turns out that one of his friends had flipped up the windshield wiper, that was all. To a normal person his reaction might have seen completely unjustified…I mean really, all that had happened was one of his windshield wipers had been flipped up. But I understand the kind of thinking that happens in this situation.

I’m guessing the first thing that goes though your head in a situation like that is, Why? Why was my vehicle messed with in all of these in this particular parking lot. Now if it was me, I wouldn’t have started thinking of a bomb…I have no reason to do that…but then again, I was never overseas. I would have started wondering who was trying to fuck with my head and what was it that they wanted…but the truth is that neither one of them would have been the truth. The truth is that one of his friends saw his truck and wanted to play a little ‘harmless’ prank on him. No big deal.

That’s the kind of thing that I have to deal with on a relationship level, and that’s a whole lot harder to recognize, understand and deal with. For my buddy it’s as simple as finding out that one of his friends had played a joke on him and then he knew that it wasn’t really a threat, and that his mind brought him to that place. For me, it’s a lot different. For me I’ll just suddenly and randomly get upset or angry or depressed and there is no apparent reason. Last night it was because my wife said she didn’t think I should bring the camera over to our friends house. I asked her why, and she said she thought it would make our friends uncomfortable if I was taking pictures of their mounts. (He’s a bit of a hunter and has some really cool mounts hanging up at his place.) I had mentioned something about maybe photographing a few of them, and had just finished getting the camera bag packed up.

To me it felt like she had just told me that she’s embarrassed by me bringing the camera with me. I guess I have no grounds to judge if she was right or not, my brain doesn’t work right, so I can’t really trust what I think anyway. It hurt. It felt like she was telling me I was the embarrassment. I don’t know if that’s what she meant or not, it doesn’t matter now. The fact that I’m awake after an hour and a half of sleep with nightmares is what matters to me now…and I can’t seem to warm up…that kind of matters to me a bit at the moment.

The fact is, it just doesn’t matter if she was right and I would be an embarrassment or not…I still feel the way I feel, and I’m still awake and my life still sucks. I can’t help but wonder how more of this she can take before she hits her breaking point. Everyone has one, I’m just worried that my sanity lies somewhere beyond that line.

Stupid and worthless

Stupid and worthless are two words that haunt my life. That’s the way I see myself, and it’s such a part of me that it’s almost as natural as breathing. I can’t naturally feel confident about almost anything. A great example is whenever I pull out my camera I feel like I’m doing everything wrong and that anyone who sees me knows that I’m doing everything wrong and they know I’m an idiot, and what the fuck does he think he’s doing anyway? Look at this idiot, taking pictures of stupid shit, looking like some kind of awkward tourist or something.

Another young suicide

It always tears me up to read of these, mostly because I was almost one of them. The exact circumstances are different every time, sure, but the root cause isn’t. The suicidal person feels they have no better option. Why? Because they feel alone, isolated and trapped with nobody to talk to. NOBODY TO TALK TO. The society that we live in is more connected and closer (physically anyway) than we’ve ever been before, and yet on a spiritual level we’re drifting farther and farther apart. I’m not talking religion here, I’d like to leave religion off the table for now. Right now I’m talking about that bond that exists between two people where they connect on a human level and they both feel it. That’s the connection that technology has a way of impeding, even though it makes communication easier in a way.

Anger and injustice

It’s two o’clock in the morning and I woke up about 20 minutes ago in a cold sweat. When I went to bed last night I left the window to the bedroom open, and it was cold in the room when I awoke. My pillow was soaked through and I left a sweat spot on the bed that visibly marked where I was laying. I don’t remember having nightmares last night, but I don’t discount the possibility of them either.

Meta blogging

I’m quite shocked at the amount of visitors that I’ve had to my blog. I really never anticipated being a blogger in the first place, and I certainly didn’t anticipate having 100 views in less than 2 weeks. I don’t know what I was expecting, to be honest, but about the last thing I ever saw was me writing a blog post about writing blog posts!

Part of my healing process is unburdening myself from all the bullshit in my past and that was the goal of this blog, and it still is, but that goal is morphing.

Pursuit of desire

I didn’t even make it to the bedroom; I’ve got too much on my mind to sleep right now.

Is it selfish to want to be desired, lusted after or wanted? All my life I’ve felt like baggage. When I was a teen I quit calling my friends on the phone that never called me. I quit talking on the phone for the most part. It was a lonely time in my life. I dated a girl in high school that became my first true love. Her name is Tracy, she’s a nice girl. There was a period where her and her friends would run from me every time they saw me. That raised such conflicting emotions in me. I didn’t want to be the guy that was literally running all over the school after his girl, but on the other hand I didn’t want her to think I didn’t care. I never stopped to think that maybe she should have considered how I felt about that. It hurt me deeply. Then there’s the father that never showed me any love, and my brother that had to ‘drag’ me everywhere.