Countdown to Edinburgh: 6 weeks

Whoooeeee!

Samhain in an hour or so. Not that I'll be doing anything particularly special. A bottle of wine, too many candles and probably a spot of divination alongside Matt. Come to think of it that isspecial.

I really am damn lucky. Looking over the last year and a bit, I've made leaps and bounds, internally and externally. No, I don't just mean the fitness and weight loss. The next big step is approaching and I'm getting really excited about it. Nervous too, but mostly excited, because I know I'll find a nice place, and I know I'll enjoy the difference of having my own apartment. I hope I find somewhere that I can consider getting a cat too, but that can always wait.

Countdown to Edinburgh: 7 weeks

Merp! Seven weeks till I go home for Christmas, I have no idea why but I'm suddenly nervous, the last time I was home was a long time ago, not just chronologically, a lot has happened since then. I suppose I'm still not used to going back there and finding it just the same, and yet completely different, and I can never tell how much is the place and the people and how much is change in my perspective.

On the other hand, maybe it's only merp-worthy because of all that I have to get done before I board that plane.

There's a whole lot of hurry up and wait going on

But that's ok 'cause I've got good people to help me maintain my sanity.

Yet again I have various deep and profound things skittering about in my brain, but not one of them will stand still long enough for me to get a really good look at it and drag it out through my fingertips. Right now the mental pictures I have showing on the viewscreen are of (in no particular order): my man all sleepy and snuggly wrapped in a chenille blanket this morning; an auburn haired baby I've never met stagger-crawling around a house I've never seen with a banana in her sticky little hand, leaving a trail of nana-goo wherever she goes...myself sitting in an apartment I don't live in yet, playing guitar like I know what I'm doing while a young cat tries to eat my toes.

Somewhere in the very bottom corner of that viewscreen there's a girl on a tattered red loveseat, with too-long blondish hair and a forgotten pen and paper in her hand, sitting in the dark trying to figure out where she went wrong. I want to speak to her, to tell her it's ok, not to worry because in a few years it'll have worked itself out, not to think all is lost when there's so much yet to come...but she can't hear me, she doesn't know me yet, she can only find out by living through it until she sits where I sit now and looks back at herself as I'm doing. I can't help her. I can only help me.

Most of you already know that Saturday, the 5th of October, was Matt's and my 6th luniversary.

Good heavens, half a year. The thing that struck both of us is "where the hell did the year GO??" There are many parallels between our lives, we both had a large changover and restart on life in early fall of 2001, for him it was leaving the Navy, starting work in a civillian capacity, suddenly moving into his very own place for the first time...for me...well, you already know the story. So for both of us this 6 month benchmark is also surrounded by anniversaries of significant events of our own. There is a huge feeling of achivement for both of us looking back on the past year, both together and seperately. Well, when we manage not to be caught up in stressing about the future.

I'm having more frequent flashbacks and panics than I can ever remember having, they never did cause me to suddenly go foetal and hide under my bed, I had much too effectively internalized it all right from the start. Now they've become a relatively constant backdrop to my daily life. Driving to work, walking 'round a store, sitting reading somewhere, whatever I'm doing, it's there: that feeling of fear, not any specific fear, just FEAR...but I'm still standing, and it's largely due to him, I wouldn't be ready for this yet without him. I'd have gotten there eventually, but it would have taken a lot longer. He sees my strengths and it makes it so much easier to be stronger. Of course he sees my weaknesses too, if he only saw one part it wouldn't have lasted even 2 months, but he sees them in the context of how I overcome and work around them. To him, I am a fighter, not a victim, and it isn't everything, but it helps enormously.

I said a while back that I didn't want to be with another protective man. I was wrong, I didn't/don't want to be with another man who expresses protectiveness as posessiveness. Or confuses the two in any way.

Schiesse, work calls.

Pardon my silence of late…

I feel if I try to write anything for now it's going to turn in to a bland "what I've been up to the past week" opus. So it's not really worth it.

My creative writing brain cells have been commandeered by other sections, so there's very little going into my hardcopy journal either.

They're the important sections though: coping mechanisms, compartmentalization, stuff like that. I've got a bunch of little algorithms running constantly, and a secondary bunch of algorithms devoted to keeping the first set in check, so that they keep running, but don't impinge on daily life.

Yes, this is related to the introspection. With pie charts. This isn't a pie chart, but it's a major breakthrough: ever heard of delayed onset chronic posttraumatic stress disorder? Me either. But it fits. It covers and eclipses all the stuff about generalized anxiety disorder and low level depression. It also means that the one thing I've tried to cut out of my life, the part I didn't want to give any space to because it is so unacceptable to me…that is the part that I have to take out and give voice to. It is the part I have to face down and accept so that it shuts the fuck up and leaves me alone.

I tried very hard not to assign my largest problems to that one little incident, one week out of twenty years shouldn't be allowed to have that kind of effect. But apparently it did. I was traumatized. I didn't get to choose, it just happened to me, was done to me, and I still don't get to choose, I have to deal with it.

Finally recognizing that, however much I don't want to, has allowed me to see that it isn't that I'm fundamentally flawed, no matter how much trouble I had and caused as a kid, it isn't why I nearly crashed out of college. My underlying character kept me from failure, it didn't push me towards it. I had no social support, none whatsoever, and I still stayed alive, I fought with myself but I never drew blood. Furthermore, even though there are some wierdnesses gifted to me by my parents and how they taught me, they are nothing, abso-fucking-lutely nothing, compared to the emotional lesson taught me by those people.

It's not my fault. It's not my parents' fault. There was nothing we could have done in the face of such a betrayal.

Thus spake the algorithms, they're still working away in there. I'm almost afraid of what it's going to be like in my head when they're done running. What on earth will I do with the extra processing capabilities?

Maybe I'll write a novel.

Maybe two.

Even I don't how much of my self has been taken up with this task for the past six years.