Cafe Hitch-hike

2017-11-14

Making boxes and containers

Could it really be that much of the work I did on myself was making boxes for containing and restraining things rather than actually healing it and letting it go?

Certain pains fade but others don't, I thought, so the ones that don't are what you learn to contain, like the radioactive byproducts from nuclear energy. I had the thought that it's our job to build a container and storage facility strong enough to withstand holding radioactive materials while the half-life of its toxic properties fade, and then they can be reintroduced and properly disposed of, right?

When I get anxiety attacks, it sometimes feels like a drainage or sewage line in my gut breaks and I really feel whatever it contained. Maybe the anxiety is that radioactive waste wanting some way to be treated differently. It's like what someone said to me: depression and anxiety don't necessarily get worse with age, but just get harder to contain because we don't have the energy to distract ourselves, busy ourselves, or run from it like when we were younger.

At least I can say I can recall periods of my life when I had low anxiety. This is a fact. I can even say I had low depression as well. Sometimes it was because I kept myself distracted, but sometimes I was not.

I can then say sometimes I felt depressed or anxious even when I was with loving or supportive partners, and even when I was in love with someone. I can even say I was anxious even in the throes of infatuation, or that it made the anxiety less obvious for a little while.

I can also say there were times it got worse, and I tried so hard to hide it in my face-to-face encounters. The rest of you just get to hear me gush about it on these pages because I don't tell a lot of this to most people in my actual life. God knows enough of my close friends seem to think I'm a downer at times, so I try my best not to show too much of that.

It really sucks when D&A eclipses many of my strengths and I swear they are nowhere to be found. Yeah, all my good points are on the dark side of the moon (or fell off the edge of the universe, hahah). Yeah, forget about the parts of me that are resilient, hard working, intelligent, charming, and pretty. Those things were tossed out of the window. Forget about the climb I had to make from my hometown (and all it contained and all I had to see) to where I am now (living a far better quality life far, far away from all of that).

Much of the work I did was disassociating from it. But now, when I see my nieces and compare their protected lives with what I had to see, I just about break down. It was absolutely unrealistic to expect a 6 or 8 year old to manage the insanity that was a regular part of her surroundings! I almost cry when I imagine if my niece Bebe were in those situations! It was around her age when I started noticing, "uh, shit's not right here." I realized that I coped by pushing the pain far enough to where I stopped flinching when I thought or mentioned anything about it.

I tell Rafa the less intense stories once in a great while, and I sometimes see a look of pain or concern on his face just from hearing. His life wasn't perfect, but it was far more protected in some respects than mine. If it caused a grown-up that much pain to hear it, weeeeeeell... what about the young girl who had to walk through all of that?

No more boxes and containers. It's time for me to really deal with it. Instead of praying I have the strength to manage it, I now pray for the strength for it to heal.

downwind | upstream