Psycho Babble

Feel free to move on… there is kink to this, but it’s not particularly pleasant.

Those who have PTSD will know what I mean when I speak of ‘trigger points’… for some it can be a colour, a spoken phrase, a particular sound.  I have two… a voice raised in negative emotion and a particular time of year.

We’ll skip the voice thing… it has no bearing here since I will no longer be meeting any potential play partners face-to-face.  The time of year thing… I seem to share this with many other people who have had devastating losses and other types of significant trauma.  While the passage of time has helped – the event in question happened 14 years ago today – it seems that I cannot escape the grip of the season.  For one terrible week every year, I relive in sharp detail a sequence of moments over the course of a week in March 1997, culminating on the 26^th of March, a day that will be forever burned in my soul… I second-guess myself (because of course hindsight is 20/20) and generally feel that I am ‘not enough’, that I failed in a cosmic sense and cost three innocent children their lives.  I very nearly died that day as well, and at times in the first year following I wished I had… but here I am.

I could write many, many paragraphs on the event and what led up to it… and actually, I did.  I wrote a book as a matter of fact, in which the event was a facet of a larger journey, which has since been published and is available on amazon dot com if one knows where to look.  I also had a memorial web page up for a while, when my sister had a domain, but now it exists only on my computer.  While both works were cathartic to execute, they do not entirely dispel the annual reckoning.

This year, like clockwork, it was as if a switch was thrown on Monday morning and the anvil dropped… everything came rushing back.  What if… I should have… why didn’t I… as a human being I fail miserably… no wonder everyone walks away…

Yeah.  Want a little cheese with that w(h)ine?

So… emotional pain aplenty.  How to deal with it and get through the week, knowing it’s a time-limited phenomenon?  Keeping busy helps… and this was definitely a hectic clinical week, plus the final gruelling week of a very intense course in school.  Physical pain helps.  Lots of it, as in ‘whip me, beat me, make me chew ground glass.’  I didn’t have time to truly do a scene… but did do something that was likely ill-advised.  Too embarrassed to actually describe it other than to say it was rather a bloody mess, lesson learnt, and hopefully something I can laugh at in a couple of weeks.  (No, don’t worry, it wasn’t the ground glass option!)

In the end, it’s remembering that ‘this too shall pass,’ shouldering on and coping as best as I know how.  And deep thanks to a very good friend and damn sexy typer who kept me grounded and delightfully distracted this week!