If that's the case, Aliens, I want a refund or else a different pod and a different personality. I don't really know how that works. You're smart, you can figure it out.
This has been one of the Top Hardest Years of My Life.
To be more like the people around me and feel like a "normal woman," I asked my doctor if I could quit taking my medicine over the summer. If I couldn't change the conversation, maybe I could change myself, thereby controlling how triggered I felt.
Around the beginning of September, I began to spiral out of control. By mid-September, I couldn't even keep my shit together at school. By November, I could no longer tell what was real and what wasn't.
I felt incapable of making decisions because I couldn't be certain that what I was experiencing was actually happening. I began to wonder if I really existed. I suspected that I did not, that I existed only in the ether that floated around and between all the "real people."
Andrea became worried. Christie became worried. Something was very, very wrong. Amid all the loss and heartache, I came to a point where I could no longer move. I was put back on my medicine, but it was too late.
In December, I went to the hospital for a routine OB/GYN appointment. While I waited for the Nurse Practitioner to appear, I stared at posters full of information about safer sex, HPV vaccinations, and pregnancy risks. At some point, I became completely hysterical. It turns out conversation isn't the only thing that triggers me now, posters do too! Hurrah!!!
In utter humiliation, I was wheeled down to patient intake.
I made it 6 years between my last hospital visit and this one. I made it a year and a half without tranquilizers. On Monday, I will check in for the start of yet another intensive treatment program, as I prepare for yet another absence from school.
Why am I telling you this? It's embarrassing as hell and really hard to write about, to be honest. But I think it's important to be authentic in our struggles. I tried hard to be "normal" -- but it turns out that my normal isn't anyone else's normal. I think I require extraordinary amounts of grace -- and possibly also a smidgen of pot.
As I've struggled to come to terms with my new realities (at least until the Aliens grant me clemency), one word keeps emerging: context.
It's something that only comes with time. Once you have put in a lot of years with someone, you recognize what's out-of-character for them, when they are issuing a cry for help, whether they are doing or saying things out of fear or anger or distaste, or if they are putting up a front to cover pain or deal with trauma.
As I look back on the fading year and look forward to the coming one, I have a hard time seeing things in context. Maybe it's because the pain is still unbearable. Or maybe it's because I'm really scared of what's to come.
I've lost a lot this year. I've been immobilized. I've broken down. I've lost my hair. And I've experienced a surreal amount of what these white-coat people are calling PTSD. I am weaker, sadder, and more in despair than I have felt in a very long time.
But...
* Christie literally forces me out on date nights with her and Kyle or the kids, sometimes with my blessing, sometimes against my will
* Carole asked if she could fly me out to Californa to see one of my 1st students graduate law school
* Sasha or the Bluebird girls text me every day to say they are rooting for me
* Miss Mary told me in tears not to worry about what other people think, "because no one can hold a candle to you, E. They can't even come close."
* Spike told me she will go to Norway with me this summer if I need a travel friend
In the face of loss and heartbreak, I am learning to be kind, to take risks, and that it's possible to hold more than one feeling at the same time -- in short, the world is not black and white. Maybe gray just requires context.
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