Update

I seem to kind of feel ready to write a blog updating “you” on how my life is going. For one thing, I feel like I’ve never met you before. There are people who ready this blog and I think they may have met who I was a while ago, but I don’t know who they are anymore because I am not the person I was trying to be back then.

I will be beholding myself to no rules, logic, or coherency in this post, and likely any damn thing that I ever write again. I’m done envisioning every judgmental person I have ever met reading these posts every time that I write them.

I’m going through some real shit.

Where do I even start?

I am waking up…. ?

The part of me that has religious wounding hates using language like “waking up”. But what I’m going through I don’t have language for. In fact, so much of my efforts over the last 2.5 years has been to try to find a community of language that could account for what I am experiencing myself go through. I find some examples of people healing their psychological wounds that had their nervous system forcing them to act in ways that weren’t from internal safety but from learned fear that is so frightening that even awareness is no longer allowed to perceive it. I suppose some people refer to this as the “shadow”. There are so many ways that people are talking about this internal development/healing process. So many feel it is something personal, pure, loving, attentive. Like a god. I feel like I am going through this healing-to-psychological-wholeness thing… I think I know what they’re talking about finally. What people call god. Or divinity. Or inner light. Or Higher Self. All this language that adores magical worlds. I don’t know that I can be convinced that this amazing sense of groundedness I am beginning to merge into needs to be anything more conceptualized than the joy of being a happy, healthy, and safe creature in existence. Simple. Why do we have to have all these stories about it? Am I missing something? Maybe. Maybe I’m not taking my spirit seriously enough. I am being willful. Stubborn. All those attributes that I hated in myself. While as a daughter. While in Christianity. And what do you do with someone who is being stubborn? You let them suffer. You withdraw your love and attention. And you let them suffer just because they have a will. They have a desire to express autonomy for autonomy’s sake. And they deserve to hurt for it. That was the relationship that I was in. I hated that I was willful. That I was critical. That I read into things. I don’t think it is a punishable offense for the ego to demand a bit of proof from this divine energy that apparently wants to “awaken” it or whatever. Why do we have to be so subservient to it? My ego is a part of me, too. It’s function is a part of me. It’s not just this annoying object in the corner saying crazy things over and over again. If you just look at your mind from the outside, the ego is just as equally important to BEING you as the full-bodied, peaceful awareness. Maybe this is what people are saying when they say “have compassion on yourself”. But that kind of language makes me burn up. THE ACTUAL FUCK DO YOU MEAN? And I suppose that’s likely because I have been suffering from a profound psychological wound of existential derealization and depersonalization which would less specifically be called Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I have never felt like a person. I have never felt like I belong here. I’ve never felt I belonged. I’m the odd one out. An outsider. That I don’t exist like everyone else exists and there is something very, very wrong with my perception of reality and of myself.

Basically, I have been suffering from developmental psychological trauma. It makes my skin crawl. Because I think of my parents. They show that they care for me a lot. I’ve had to pause here and cry. I am feeling more awareness about the truth of how I experienced my relationship with my family growing up. I have never really been able to honestly access a memory about what emotions I was feeling while I was growing up. For some reason, the only memories I had were words and cloudy photographs in my head. But I’m going through something where my mind is opening up on its own. It’s letting me be aware of the memory of feeling a feeling when I was younger, allowing me to witness it with my more developed knowledge of human wellness. From my more matured perspective, I am seeing more layers to the memory than just the story I tell myself about it and a few blurry images. There are quite a few memories that are known to appear in my mind’s eye throughout life. They’re haunting me, I guess you could say. But for the longest time they were things I wasn’t aware were there, even though, later on, I would find that I WAS actually aware at some level that it was all happening but a PART of me (that I use to manage that memory now) is not aware of remembering that you were actually feeling XYZ in a situation. It’s trippy. I seriously underestimated the nuance and complexity of having a human mind. I’m really grateful that there is actually something I can do about my psychological wounding of all these years. I have had hellphobia for the longest time but only now do I realize that whatever I envisioned hell being, that was exactly what I was experiencing that whole time. I had no idea that my awareness could box itself up in a little box and tell itself it doesn’t exist and just let the machine run itself and let the military take over. So I kinda get what people are talking about when they say they are born again, they are free, they have Jesus in their heart, spiritual awakenings. All this euphemistic language a beautiful wordless experience of Being and knowing that that is actually you. Who you truly are. Not that you are actually some mermaid/unicorn magical being. But that you are love. Not intense romantic love. You’re the love that life feels when it’s well. Life needs love to go on living. Love is being aware. We could add more words but why. What’s the point? Isn’t it enough to just be with it? Isn’t the being, not the talking about being, the ideal point of living? Mentally being here for all of this. Not just in that state where you’re like, I should be mindful! And so instead of clearing your mind, you install a cop or a manager in your head to keep reminding yourself that you need to be mindful. It’s almost like trying to meditate is the first thing you should never do if you want to clear your mind. It’s the intention. The intention is the last thing that’s gotta go. It’s almost like unintentionally practicing remembering. I suppose this kind of reminds me of lucid dreaming. They condition themselves to check throughout the day if they are dreaming so that the habit will happen in the dream too so they can lucid dream. The unintentional intention. What a paradox. But for me, what helps me remember now is something important I finally understood very recently. And that is that every single thought I have in my head, the reactive ones, the scary ones, the angry ones, the ones that are constantly thinking about the nature of the mind, and the ones that are scared that we’re thinking about ourselves and wants to throw up, and the ones that are furious testing hypotheses for what we think might be wrong with our mind… all of them. All of them. Are just thoughts. I had heard that before. Thing is, … I never knew what thoughts were. Thoughts were really the only thing I was allowing myself to be aware of. And not even all of my thoughts, in fact. So I agreed intellectually, yeah, thoughts are just thoughts. But within myself, I saw myself as something much smaller and therefore I assumed that my constant fearful thinking was just me. I never questioned that anything else was happening to be aware of or contextualize differently. I forgot what it meant to shift your attention around, to experience your thoughts vs. being consumed by them, to feel peace of any kind. This is nuts. I didn’t know it worked like this. It was right under my nose. This whole time I have been trying to see if more knowledge would help, or physical activity, or talking to the public and strangers about it. I have been desperate, y’all. I have been drowning for a long time secretly in my head and telling no one the true extent of it because I trusted none of y’all. This has not been a safe life for me. I have really never felt safe despite constantly being safe. I have been hiding my own conscious experience of my being a human from my own conscious experience because my mind had not been developed enough to feel safe enough to truly learn and understand what has been happening to me let alone on this planet.

I thought those girls in bunkers who missed out on so much of humanity were the truly traumatized ones. They’d have a mess of trauma to work through. That’s an obvious one. But me. I thought I was recovered. I mean, it’s not like I hadn’t been constantly trying to talk about it this whole time. I have been talking about my psychological wounds out loud for … all of my life. I have generally always been in distress. How has anyone missed this? It feels like the part of my mind that builds constructs, built a construct around the definition of the mind and said to itself, “that’s the person that does that constant chatter in Marie’s head and has to deal with crazy-making neighbors in the basement who bother her with all kinds of things when she’s just trying to cope with the stresses of life”. That’s Marie. Sounds like dissociation to me. I have been very seriously considering the possibility that I have been wounded in such a way that has impacted me my entire life and is leading me to a place of having to reorganize everything I thought I knew about reality.

Oh, and I don’t want to talk to any of you about this. I don’t want to hear your opinions on what I’m going through or what I should do about it. This moment of trauma recovery has become incredibly serious, tight, and focused. Like I said, I can see why some people call it “born again”. I feel like I have a newborn and I am righteously fucking it up 99% of the time. My baby (fried nervous system) is absolutely aghast with a lifetime of denial and inattentiveness. I had no idea little trauma baby. I had no idea. I thought you were a Trauma Teenager. I had no idea you were a Trauma Baby. It doesn’t talk. It’s wordless. It’s primal. And it’s attitudes that I haven’t let myself express for a very long time because they were conditioned out of me. Like tantrum. And unapologetic terror and betrayal. You’ve all been players on my dissociative stage. I feel really disoriented when interacting with other humans right now. You have to realize that I am in the middle of a process where my entire self-referential reality is going through a completely unanticipated upheaval. An entire reality … thrown out the fucking window. I am a mess. You may have seen me in person recently or not. But I’m sure I didn’t seem like I was a mess. Well, that’s the mess I am. I am so fucking bottled up and scared. And I am beginning to learn how to attend to that. The truth is I have been an incarnate fried nerve. I’ve referred to my awakening as three kids stacked under a trenchcoat. But likewise, you could say that I have been an electrofied nerve pretending to act like a societally acceptable human being.

It’s nuts. I don’t feel like I truly know anyone. There is no one that I really feel very safe around right now, but honestly that’s always been true. It’s just that now that I’m more aware of my true psychological traumas, they’re harder to ignore in addition to the greater awareness I have of my own symptoms of anxiety in my nervous system day in and day out. I feel really unsafe and scared right now. But I always have. But now I’m saying it. And my awareness of it means that I can’t fake it. And if I feel I have to, I pay the cost of lighting back up my burnt out nervous system. So basically, I feel like I’m taking on this arduous task of nursing this incredibly wounded, but totally healable, nerve to health. So I can’t really do any social games or expectations right now because I simply can’t waste the energy playing along. I have a nervous system to show up for. And that’s where I feel that deep type of pride-filling responsibility that I imagine a parent would feel about their child. I have the responsibility to heal this Baby Trauma Nerve.

Anyways, I’m bored. I wanna watch some TV now or something. Maybe I’ll write more later. I have no idea if I actually gave you a summary of what’s going on. Oh, let’s see if I can explain it so a 5th grader can understand. I learned that the way I saw reality has been skewed and causing me problems my entire life and that no one saw it happening in me and that I am having to single handedly create a relationship with my mind right now and it’s terrifying and exciting.

OK, good night.