So I Wrote

As promised, a woe-is-me entry.

Hell

o.

I had that meeting with my therapist and I don't know quite what happened. I didn't get that awesome, yay! feeling this time. I felt misunderstood and like she wasn't understanding what I was saying. At one point after I told her the story of The Big Traumatic Event, she seemed to actually not believe it had happened. Then, at least it seems, she decided that I was telling the truth and not misunderstanding the events. One thing about me that is sensitive to the extreme is when someone tells me that something only happened in my head. This is from when I was in therapy with my dad when I was 16ish and I told him that when he smoked inside it gave me an allergic reaction - my therapist actually told me to stop lying and said it was all in my head. I was traumatized after that. I went home to my mum's and just sat on the bed staring for a loooong while. My mum told me she was talking to me and trying to get a response from me, but I didn't even hear her. It was terrible. My point in telling that story is if my current therapist disbelieves me in this particular story then I don't know if I can trust her. Like, at all.

Another thing that seemed slightly off to me today was the fact that my therapist backtracked from last weeks assessment about me having bad self-esteem. She said that I know a lot about myself and can express my opinon to others and say no too well for me to have bad self esteem. Que? I was so surprised by this that I don't think I explained myself very well at all. I think I should write it down now actually, so I can tell her next week. Honestly, the tapes I play in my head saying I'm crap, worthless, OMGSHUTUP THEYHATEYOU CAN'TYOU TELL? are so loud that I am crippled socially. Even online. Even now when I'm typing there's a wee voice saying "shut up shut up shut up". I can be very assertive, but I've always been like that. It's just something I am. On the outside I look very calm, collected and organized - it surprises a lot of people to hear that I get very anxious and very nervous. It just doesn't show on my outside. I learned to have a very good poker face, very early on. Can't a person be a bit polar like that?

In other news, I got an A on a paper today. Fun times! I read it and honestly think they made a mistake giving me that A. I distinctly remember when I was writing it that I was just typing whatever to get it finished, and in the process of doing that I left out words, I misspelled words and I repeated myself. But maybe the rest of it was ace? I was a bit embarrassed reading it.

 

Wishing I had something new.

I wish I had something new to write about. But I don't. I am still the same fucking person who can't fuck.

I've been to two meetings with a psychologist to evaluate if their firm could help me, and in that case who and how. Apparently they've decided to help me, but I'm on a waiting list. So sick of waiting lists.

The first time I met the psychologist, I noticed that she was a woman. Then, quite quickly after my first observation, I noticed she was a hugely pregnant woman. I felt like I was going to traumatize her unborn child with the stories I was about to utter in its presence. I still feel a bit guilty about it, really, but I suppose that is just misplaced emotion.

That first meeting (holy crap, I typoed that word to emeting. How philosophical is that shit? Damn.)  was a bit awkward from my end. She was fine. Better than fine. Obviously very good at her job as I started sobbing ten minutes into the appointment. Very embarassing. I couldn't stop crying for hours afterwards. I was very dehydrated.

What got me going was, as per usual, talking about my dad and how much I miss him. She listened very kindly to me explaining that my dad wasn't a bad man, he was a sad man who did bad things because he didn't know how to express himself any better.

I told her all about the alcohol, family dysfunction and blah-de-blarghhh. She listened kindly to that too. Afterwards, and for days, I felt furious with my mother. I still don't understand her role in the whole thing.

When I saw the therapist today she asked some more specific questions about the blah-de-blarghhhs. She commented on how I speak about horrible things and I don't show any emotion about it besides laughing. I told her that I'm aware that I don't. I think I laugh because the things I say sound so absurd. Absurd things make me laugh. My other feelings are walled off that it would take tremendous force, I think, to access them. Or some well asked questions, I suppose.

As proof that I really don't have anything new to say, the last chunk of therapy time was devoted to the massive amount of guilt I feel toward my husband because I am not a bangin' type of girl. I also feel angry, sorry, alone, lonely, misunderstood, mousey, very very very sorry and also sorry about it.

Really. Nothing new. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.

More spew. Sexual spew.

It seems I have fallen down a hole. Hurrah for downward spirals.

I have a mantra going in my head from the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep about all the things I do not do well, or could do better. Basically, I suck at everything. These thoughts are increasingly taking over my dreams aswell.

I guess at least I am good at falling down holes of depression? Is this something to be grateful for?

I feel so much pressure. I need to do more laundry, I need to eat less carbs. I need to go to the gym more. I need to study so. much. more. I need to work on myself. I need to harass the system until they give me a therapist and then plead with them to just try, please try to help me. I need to work on my marriage. I need to sell a piece of furniture. I need to gear myself up mentally for 4 weeks of travelling to work experience thingy. I need to be happier. I need to be more adventurous. I need to be more care-free and less laden with my past. I need to be able to act on my sexuality more. I need to get a job and more money. I need to have more friends. I need to be a better friend. I need to stop doing this to myself and I need to keep doing it.

I need to get out of bed. I don't have time for this shit.

I am so emo I can't stand myself. This feeling of my own skin being completely gross is so intense that I can't lay still, I can't take my mind of it. 

I called for a therapy appointment this week. I really didn't want to, but my husband made it very clear to me that I needed to. I hate begging for them to help me, it is embarassing and degrading and I never seem to get where I want. I am scared they will turn me away again. I am so scared someone new will tell me that my sexual trauma is too much for them and they need the resources for someone they can help. Please help me. Am I so broken that they can't even try? Why won't anyone try?

It is making me despair. This sexual thing is in my head every day. I feel that every day I am shrinking to less and less of a person because I can't often have sex without physical pain/flashbacks, and therefore don't like to have sex at all. A person who has sex and enjoys it is 100% of a person. I'm at about 25% right now and I keep sinking every day. It won't be long until I am a nothing.

I think about all the women my husband could be with and how adventurous and fulfilling their sex life together would be. Chairs, tables, walls, floors, stairs, pilates balls. Outside, inside. Upside down, standing, sitting, kneeling. Legs stretched into positions I cannot manage. Hours of sex. Phalluses everywhere. All of it in one marathon session. Marathon sessions every day. During which they manage deep philosophical discussions, in which she never gets sad because she is so happy all the goddamn time. And none of them ever need to flee directly after to the shower for ages and cut themselves to make themselves forget what they just remembered.

How stupid and emo do I feel about the cutting? So very stupid and emo. But if I regress during sex, it would only make sense that when I come back I pass through the ages when cutting multiple times a day was routine - so if there is a razor nearby it seems to be fair game at that point. The colour spreading across my skin is so calming to me, I've never experienced anything so instantly calming as self mutilation. But I do realize how... childish it is. But I don't know how else to cope. I don't want to comfort eat anymore, I don't want to shut down my emotions for days on end - I don't know how else to cope. I certainly don't want to talk to my husband how I feel in those moments.

Maybe I will realize that I will never be able to function normally with sex and what then? What then, internet? What if I can't be that wonderfully extroverted sexual being I know - I know! - my husband wants? How can I even bring this up to him without causing him to despair? What if the entirety of the life I want was taken away from me when I was eight and I can't retrieve it? What if the sexual trauma and the following sexual disorder will take my husband from me? What then, internet? What if I find out that my life already ended when I was eight years old and it has been completely futile living on since then because I am doomed to stay 25% of a person?

Because it's not only a sexual disorder my childhood gave to me. I am so fucked up in so many ways and the list repeats itself in my head constantly. Afraid, socially inept, self sabotaging, introverted, no communication skills, stiff, controlling, fat, abused, abandoned, witness, adult child of an alcoholic, bullied. Scared scared scared. I spent my early life living in fear and I've kept living the same way. Instead of being afraid of my father I became an emetophobe. Instead of letting people bully me, I became socially phobic and reclusive.

Instead of becoming stronger, I seem to have become more weak.

Not to mention whiney. Good God I can't believe they let me on the internet to defile it with long winding bohoo stories about how I feeeeeeeel.

I am a tea kettle.

The pressure I build on myself is really ridiculous. "Oh you can't write anything for your blog today because you feel all shitty and it's not going to be funny, and when did you even try to write anything funny last? You're lame."

Nobody reads this blog so, in theory, I can write whatever I like because nobody is going to read it anyway. Sometimes I pretend I am just writing to a friend and I don't even know if this friend even reads my blog.

Today I cleaned my kitchen. I cleaned my kitchen after I had dinner. I had dinner after I went to the store to get cream and coke light. And brie cheese and slim jims. Before I went to the store I was asleep. I slept all day because I couldn't see the point of getting up.

During cleaning my kitchen I watched Grey's Anatomy and pretended it was as good as actually studying medicine. Which I am supposed to be doing. For two days I've not studied at all and it's the only two days in the past two weeks that I haven't had a headache.  

Now, instead of studying I am waiting for megavideo to let me back in. Usually I use megavideo's time-outs to study. Then I use Grey's Anatomy to surpress the panic that I am not smart enough to study. And surpress the panic about the exam that's in a couple weeks.

I am also surpressing panic about how I have no money and so many bills. So many bills. I am surpressing panic about how I messed up on my diet and I am terrified, completely illogically terrified, that two days of less than stellar eating will cause me to gain 20 pounds. I am also failing at surpressing panic about how my nerve damaged foot will not stop hurting again, two years after the accident. It does not want to bend and it is swollen. I am worried about this. Without my foot I can't go on walks or to the gym and without those two my back hurts all the time. I am scared about all this. I am scared about how I may get emetophobic again as we go deeper into winter and deeper into the pitch black darkness that covers this country during winter. I am scared what going on anti-anxiety medication could do to me. I am scared what not going on anti-anxiety medication  would do to me.

As usual, I am doubting and scared and fumbling about. I wish I had the eye-on-the-prize motivation I had when I was in therapy for my emetophobia. Without that therapy I don't know where to go. So I'm stuck. Stuck in PTSD land, stuck in daddy-issues land, stuck in sex-is-so-difficult land, stuck in not-good-enough land. I don't know where to go and the pressure that I'm building inside myself is scary.

Fucking father's day.

It was father's day here last Sunday. I had blissfully forgotten it until I went to yoga in the evening, and the instructor told us to "reflect on our fathers" during the class. Yeah, thanks a lot.

On the way home I started getting flashes of good memories: Watching Lord of the Ring together, how we always used to laugh at the part where Merry and Pippin throw stones at the cave troll in Moria when arrows, swords or axes are making a dent in him.

When I got home I got flashes of things I feel guilty about: How I borrowed his English version of Hitchhiker's Guide and he had to read the Swedish version while at hospital getting chemo. I never ended up reading the book at all. To this day it sits on my bookshelf, unread, because everytime I look at it I get a surge of guilty guilt. Then one guilt ridden memory brought me to tears when I was in the shower. One of those surprise sob fests that you don't expect. You're fine one moment, lathering up your hair or whatever, and the next your face is screwed up and hot tears are spilling out at an alarming rate and you're not quite sure how it could happen so quickly and with no build up. I was thinking about how when my father was sick he had a hard time keeping any food down. One day I went to him and I made him this mexican style soup that had a lot of corn in it. He ate three bowls of it, and kept it down. He was smiling ear to ear saying it was so delicious and felt good in his stomach. I only made him the soup that one time. I was so scared to go see him. I was scared to realize how sick he was. I never even googled "lung cancer" until he had died because I was so afraid to really know what I already knew - he was going to die. He was dying. I couldn't watch it. I couldn't pretend cooking soup for him would save him. I couldn't go there and pretend that I was okay, that he was okay, that the whole situation didn't get me down at all. Many times after I had gone to see him I went home and and got absolutely plastered in my room.

But, as the duality of my psyche strives to be the most irritating and confusing it can, these guilty memories are always followed by memories of how I was treated by him sometimes. How his anger with life led me down dark paths and how hard it has been for me to survive that.

It is still so hard for me to reconcile these images I have of my dad. The dad he was the last few years he was a live, and the dad who destroyed everyone close to him. I wish I could take the blame for what he did because the guilt of even typing that he hurt us brings tears to my eyes and makes my stomach do a flip.

But I wonder if anyone in my family ever get tears in their eyes and a surge of nausea if they think of what they didn't protect me from.

God, I am so confused. I feel guilty for my family being unhappy. I feel guilty that it makes me angry at them that they  couldn't see past their own unhappiness long enough to see that the youngest member of the family was trying to kill herself every few months because nobody was even attempting to protect her, and yet she was bending over backwards to protect them. Taking the blame for things my mother did or my brother did just so dad would yell at me instead of them.

Fucking yoga teacher can go fuck herself with her fucking "reflect on your dad" nonsense.

Yoga is supposed to relax and center! Not send people into emotional turmoil. Fuck.

Harden! - It's Super Effective!

I am likely to consider it a side effect of my CBT therapy. I had to be hard on myself and demand things from myself that were very difficult and even downright sadistic at times. It worked for me - I have started doing it in all areas of my life now. I am much less likely to find excuses to avoid cleaning or studying now than I was before  CBT. I cheat less on my diet. Actually I don't cheat at all on my diet.

The problem is that I expect the same of other people. If someone, like my husband, has a hard day I am more likely now to take the "suck it up and deal with it" stance than the "aww, poor little baby" one. I am less emotionally oriented and more solution focused. This is not entirely a good thing. While it takes away a lot of my Hysterical Woman moments, it adds to other people's bad times because I am not neccessarily making them feel better with my "pfft, that's nothing. Pick yourself up and go." attitude.

But, then again, I've always had a problem receiving other people's emotions as well as my own. My brain overloads very quickly and shuts down the empathy/sympathy/any-feeling-at-allthy. My family never expressed any emotion except angry ones. So any expressed feelings = trouble, oh shit I have to get out. Those times never turned out good in my family. When my dad got mad I sometimes had to protect myself by shoving heavy things infront of my door so he couldn't get in. Not that he would hurt me physically. He would just make me really afraid that he would. Sometimes he raised his fist and stopped himself just in time. Most of the time he would just yell in my face with those furious eyes and I would stand and glare right back, terrified of showing that I was scared at all. I think if I had shown myself weak he would have tried harder to dominate me just so I would be crushed and under his control... and then what would have happened? My poor daddy, he was so conflicted.

I had to shut off my feelings so I wasn't overwhelmed with fear in those moments. Maybe all that fear that I pushed down were channeled into the emetophobia. Or maybe they are still there. I know when someone very dear to me prodded those feelings a little and suggested I listened to music that I listened to back then that I have avoided because it reminds me... well. I had a very "pure" PTSD moment. I was back in my room, my father was drunk and angry and I wanted to die. My husband later said that the energy around me was so intense after that hour with my friend (who is a therapist) that he literally couldn't be near me because it was giving him bad anxiety. I couldn't believe the intensity of the emotion myself. It was like I was in a bubble and all the things I could suddenly remember were stuck in there with me and there was not a breath to be had and I didn't quite know if I was in my kitchen or my dad's apartment and if my husband was my father and was he drunk? Or just angry?
I never told my husband this (I don't want him to inherit my daddy-issues) but as I watched him sitting across from me his face kept morphing from his own to my dad's. Every time it did I felt like I was going to vomit. Or start screaming. Or have a heart attack from the fear.

My dear friend later told me it was all normal.

After that I have never gone back to exploring those feelings. That was a year and a half ago. It scared me. I know I have to go there sometimes and face it. But I guess I'm not hardened enough yet. And I don't have a therapist. And I'm scared.

Well this blog post took a turn that I wasn't expecting.

To get back to my original topic: I shut down easily when it comes to emotions because they overwhelm me so easily. If my family ever showed anything but anger you knew disaster was just around the corner. I can only remember a hand full of times that every happening. And each time it set off emetophobic reactions in me. It's a protective shell I have. I guess the strength I used for my CBT has translated into abrasiveness and hardness toward others.

And it's really not my place to tell other's how to deal with things.

Man. Everytime I write one of these I really make myself look worse and worse in my own and probably everyone else's eyes.

What am I so far? A fat, cold-hearted, terrified-of-everything, socially inept stripper in the making.

Le update

Right. I was going to start this post off with an apology for the more than fair bit of whinging I do here but then I thought that, actually, there is nothing more annoying than people apologizing for things that need not be apologized for. And also this is my blog, my diary, my place on the giant internet so fuck off with your incessant demands!

One could say I fell off many horses after I finally stepped enough out of the denial regarding my therapist situation. Oh jesus fuck me, am I fucked or what? I can't afford the private therapist he recommended. Comfort eating galore. Surprisingly, however, I did not slack off school one bit. I will be studying this occurrence for years to come because WTF.

Speaking of school, I had a presentation due last Tuesday on sexual health and reproduction. At first I was completely shitting myself because seriously? I have to do an assignment with a group of girls I've never met in my life, forcing me to be social and accountable to other people (OH THE BLINDING HORROR!), and at the same time having sex shoved in my face every day for a couple weeks. I foresaw much wringing of hands and flinging of curse words... but in reality it turned out lovely. The girls were lovely. We laughed a lot, we worked really very well together and the subject matter was interesting and didn't make me run away at all.

I didn't forsee my problem to be after the presentation was done. Am I friends with the ladies now? Can I tell text them and harass them on facebook? They all seem keen to talk and are full of plans to hang out again but are they just being polite? I am so socially inept and penguin like about friendship that I really have no clue what is going on. Ah jesus. I would like to have them as friends.

In other news, my cat James turned three yesterday. And yes, he is adorable.

Stiffupperlip. Stiff upper lip. Stiff-upper-lip.

Ah. Well then. I can tell you now, internet, having had a couple days to digest this.

Another therapist in my life has come and gone. He promised so much, delivered so much, promised some more... and then took it back.

How many therapists are going to tell me that they cannot work with my certain brand of PTSD? How many people must I beg? Please, please, please, please, please help me get rid of this. It is corroding me, it is corroding my marriage, it's corroding my relationship with my family. He was the fifth therapist that I have told and good God how far and wide must I spread this certain horrible story until someone deigns to fucking help me out?

I am stuck in a moment in my head and how can I move forward in my life truly if someone doesn't help me and TELL ME how to get rid of it? I work like a donkey once I have the information - did I not prove myself with the emetophobia treatment? Please, please, please I just want to master my own brain without it flicking to flashbacks of things in situations where it most hurts. Why won't anybody try? I just want a chance to get rid of this. Just try. 

He did recommend another therapist to me. One who lives 40 minutes away and who I cannot afford because he has a private practise. I am so disheartened.  I am so disappointed. I feel like I will have to live with this twitch in my brain forever.

When he told me he would't be helping me with this (in a very round about way - talking about how many clients he has and blahblahblah) I had a moment where I just asked "why won't anyone help me with this" and my chin wobbled and my eyes leaked but that stupid stiff upper lip came back and I pulled myself together when I should have let myself fall apart into hysterics. I should have cried, wailed, screamed - I should have done something to make him see how awful this one thing really does feel.

Stupid stiff upper lip. Now I will have to wear it all the time. I will get wrinkles, and won't that be a shame?

 

 

I've something to admit.

I've something to admit, internet. I am ashamed of this admission in the same way I roll my eyes at myself when I call my teen-life hard because my father drank on the weekends. Pfft, alcoholic? I'm sure there are millions of kids who could properly school me about their parents who are full-time alcoholics and not part time like my dad. Wussy. Suck it up. Three days out of seven he would drink, only!

The next 'important' sentence I will write sounds to me fake in every possible way but I have been told that it is true. I've also been told that I should Just Get Over It. 

I am a 'victim' of sexual abuse. Except I'm not. I only witnessed it. Apart from the times I was felt up by the school nurse (and then left school, and did not return for a few years) and almost raped in Bulgaria. I cannot be too detailed because it is my worst nightmare that my family will somehow come across this blog and It will all be Exposed and we will have to Talk About It. But yes, it was within the family. Close family. But as far as I can remember, it was never done to me. But I lived in fear that it would.

Wussy, right? Tell the people who have actually been abused to come slap me across the face, because what am I whining about? Really? Nothing actually happened to me.

Except now it seems my vestibulitis comes from that time. The fact that I acted like a little slutty whore when I was a teenager comes from that time (but just online! Because I can't even do that properly.). The fact that my weight goes up and down like I'm bouncing on the scales comes from that. The fact that intimacy and sex is repulsive and makes me feel Dirty and Gross and Not There comes from that. The fact that my husband blames and resents me comes from that time.

The fact that I have PTSD comes from that.

Please, someone. Slap me across the face. Suck it up, suck it up, suck it up, suck it up you fucking pussy. Someone just yell at me to just to drop 20 pounds, spread my legs for my husband and do what a wife is supposed to do.

Please.

Day 4 of the bandwagon

Day 04 Something you have to forgive someone for.

I thought all evening and a lot of today about this. I am a pretty forgiving person. I'm really good at seeing other people's perspectives and wearing their shoes - there isn't much you can't forgive when you do that.

Although, I am very confused right now. I don't know up from down, in from out. I am so confused about how I feel about my parents. I've always been adamant in my conviction that my parents were as little to blame for my shitty childhood as I was. I am sure this cycle of abuse and fucked-uppery didn't begin with them. I've always protected them if someone - say a therapist, my husband or a friend - put forth the idea that they actually fucked me up and they are to blame because they are my parents and I was only a child. I've fought people hard to protect my parents. Or the idea of my parents.

But, fuck me, they haven't done much to protect me. This revelation has shifted my way of thinking these past two weeks dramatically. As I've written in past entries, I've been fuming with rage. I've gone so far as to throw things into walls and just yelling questions into the ether.

Why didn't they love me?
Why didn't they protect me?
Why was I witness to such horrors?
Why wasn't I allowed to be a child?
Why didn't they do anything to help me?

I described more of my childhood to my therapist this week. It was very difficult. I don't think he expected to hear the things that came out of my mouth. He said I should have been put into foster care.

Foster care.

I... have such a hard time accepting that what I tell is really the truth (a PTSD thing) so hearing him say that was difficult. I've told myself to suck it up for so long that the horrors of what was my reality have become silly to me. Silly girl, you are just whining. Your father gave you this and that, and you lived in a beautiful home. Shut up your whine hole.

I am so angry at my parents for what they showed me a relationship is because I am emotionally retarded now. I have the relationship maturity of a child. I am so afraid of intimacy that sometimes I panic when I get a hug. I'm, as with everything else (FUCK!), fighting tooth and nail to learn how to open my mouth and communicate at even the most basic level because in my house there was literally no speaking. The only noise apart from the TV and hum of the computer was my father yelling. Preferably right in my ear. When people get angry I flee for my life into another room, out of the house, into my meter thick shell. Away away away away away.

I'm pissed as hell. I am 23 years old and I am so emotionally handicapped, and I know who made me that way.

My parents.

Fuck, I am such a cliche I can barely stand to write this. But it's the truth and I write the truth. I deserve to let my truth be heard now. I've hid everything for so long. I've let my parents secrets, their marriage, their shortcomings fester in me so long that I'm starting to become them and I DO NOT WANT. I would rather die than to live their life. I am so sick of being their rubbish bin, their parent, their protectors, their rehab, their nurse, their rehab, their punching bag when. I. was. the. child! I needed parents, I needed protecting. I deserved these things! I deserved a childhood that didn't leave me so damaged that I have a list of mental diagnoses that I have to work through to live a happy life.

But I didn't get these basic things. I have to give them to myself now. It's hard work and fucking hate having to do it. And I am angry about that.

Fuck looking at the situation from their view. They never, ever looked at it from mine.

Today, they do not have my forgiveness.

(Guilt. Sorry mum. Sorry dad. I wish I was stronger for you)