This has not been an easy few weeks. I tend to make light of my difficulties, and try to not get all mired in them, but between my job stress, money problems, social issues, and the resurgence of some pretty intense pain that just won’t quit, it hasn’t been a walk in the park.
I don’t want sympathy, but I do need to say it out loud, so I don’t keep denying the impact it’s having on me.
I think that Natasha Richardson’s fatal accident also threw me for a loop. There’s part of me that doesn’t understand why I could have so many bad falls and survive, while she didn’t have as rough a tumble (from what I read), yet she’s gone. On the one hand, I’m so very grateful to still be here. On the other, I am feeling some survivor’s guilt that is buried very deep and is taking a while to get to the surface.
On top of this, I’ve been dredging up some rough old “stuff” that happened to me 25 years ago that was pretty bad. Basically, I got my wires crossed with the wrong person — I wasn’t reading their social cues very well, and it turned ugly, and that person was not only an active addict and alcoholic, but they were overly aggressive, as well. So, I got my ass kicked. More than once.
It left me not only physically injured, but it set me back pretty intensely in other ways. I couldn’t figure out what I’d done wrong, I couldn’t figure out why it had happened, and I ended up isolating and acting out in un-helpful ways, and generally going downhill and ending up with some nasty post-traumatic stress.
Now I’m dealing with it in therapy, and it’s not pretty. I couldn’t have picked a worse time to deal with this, considering everything that’s going on with my job and health and bank accout. But there’s never a good time to deal with this crap, so what-evah. Fine. I’ll deal with this, too.
I’ve not been sleeping well, and I’ve been having flashbacks. Unpleasant stuff. Trying to navigate all this is bad enough, but my TBI situation isn’t helping. I’m pretty much at an impasse with what to do.
One thing that has helped me with my flashbacks, playing Tetris at http://www.gosu.pl/tetris/.
I don’t know what it is about the game, but I’ve been playing it, on and off over the past couple of weeks, and it actually seems to be helping me with flashbacks. Something about the movement and the colors and how emotionally neutral the shapes are, is very soothing.
I had read something about it helping with ptsd flash backs — and why it may work. I’ll have to dig that up and write about it. It’s pretty interesting, I think.
But for now, I’ve got to get going to work and see what the day ahead of me brings.
Broken Brain - Brilliant Mind 