Today I am out in the world, enjoying my now without concern for then; riding a train into ‘the city’, visit the museum, maybe some window shopping, a bite of dinner, and meet a friend for an evening out. Sounds fun, and for now I feel safe and sane. It’s hard not to pretend all is well with the world, harder still to enjoy this right now without being mired in emotional crap and painful weirdness, but I am committed to the idea of it.
Here comes my train…
I’m crabby today. It’s a good day, I slept pretty well other than the nightmares, and I think I started the day in a pretty good place in spite of them. Still, I’m irritable. Hormones? Maybe. Too be fair, though, I have something ugly on my mind a lot since December and it hurts me to think about, but I am no longer allowing myself to ‘avert my eyes’ from the mess in my head.
Rape.
There. I said it. It’s a word. It has meaning, and frankly the meaning is not up for re-definition. It should be easy to understand, easy to define – and easy to accept how common it actually is, and have the decency to be appalled and wonder why we allow it to go on. I am angry about all the damned arguing about ‘the nature of rape’ by people trying to save a buck on legislation intended to curb it, or provide needed resources to victims, or worse still by rapists trying to rationalize or excuse their particular variety of sexual transgression. I’m so sorry (sarcasm) it’ll be expensive to help all those victims – how about fixing that? How about fewer victims? How about ‘rape is not ok‘?
Sure, I’m a rape victim, too. I’m sorry to sound so commonplace about it, but if you’re shocked by that, perhaps it would be a good idea to find out just how common it is – even in the U.S. It’s probably easier on the heart to contemplate the overwhelming horror of rape used as a war strategy to terrify and weaken a population, rather than to consider the prevalence of military sexual trauma – rapes committed by soldiers against other soldiers, or marital rape (yes, it’s real, and no it isn’t ok), or child sexual abuse, or… yeah. All rape. None of it acceptable. Funny thing – in the abstract it’s pretty hard to find people to support and condone rape. Go ahead, ask around, I’ll wait…
I haven’t found a lot of people interested in going on the record as ‘pro rape’, myself… but as a rape victim, it gets weird really fast as soon as the reporting of a rape begins. In my experience, it actually doesn’t matter how heinous the rape, or how violent, or how ‘obvious’ or how vigorously resisted… the hideous vicious questions come fast, questioning whether it happened, maybe it was a misunderstanding, was it consensual? Then the reminders that accusations could ruin the life of the rapist… Do rapists get anything but support? Not very many rapists go to jail for it, or so it seems to me.
It’s on my mind because I am a victim of military sexual trauma, and I am being encouraged to submit documentation for disability compensation. It is surprisingly difficult, and extremely painful, to have to put the mental energy into the paperwork, to have to consider it, event by event, in detail – names, places, timelines, details. The pain is enormous and I feel very alone, even though I know rape is so common I could likely just walk up to any woman I see and find myself in conversation with another victim. I don’t want to share the pain. I don’t want to taint my relationships with the details, or put poison into the consciousness of my loved ones. But I have to think about it, and I have to write about it, and today it is making me very cross with the world…
I love sex, personally, and I’ve managed to remain very sex positive in spite of having a rape history, but balancing my libido, my every day sexual needs, with these feelings about this topic… I feel confused and vulnerable, and I don’t know with whom or how to talk about that. There are a lot of people who suffer from the odd notion that women who love sex can’t be raped, or are somehow less entitled to be protected or offered support when it happens to them. There have been a lot of times in my life when it was made pretty clear to me that because I enjoy sex, value physical contact with my partners, take pleasure in pleasure, that I’m less deserving of consideration if I’m raped, or less trustworthy if I report it. The message often seems to be ‘why didn’t you just like it’? As if there’s no difference, or as if my will and desire and consent don’t really matter. Or perhaps I should just cut the rapist some slack, since I’m ‘used equipment’ – after all, what did I lose? I want to shout “my body is mine, I get to choose!”, but I know damned well no one is listening, and plenty of people making actual laws don’t even believe that my body should be my own to control. Read the news. I feel angry and powerless every time I think about being raped. I hate admitting that; it feels like the rapists won.
Sometimes it just all feels like too much to bear. I feel like I ‘just want to go home’ – like a child, going to a safe place in Daddy’s arms, during a scary storm… but there is no ‘home’ to go to that escapes this, and there are no ‘safe places’, and there is very little understanding in the world about this sort of crime, the effect it has, and the message we send to women when it is tolerated or excused. So… I have something ugly on my mind, and it hurts, but I guess it is time to really deal with it, after all these years. I teeter on the edge of just turning away from it, every day, and pretending it isn’t real, but that hasn’t worked so far, I’m still broken.
I need to paint… but I am terrified that any of this might hit canvas and make it somehow more visceral, more real. I actually don’t want to share this pain… it seems cruel. I am afraid, too, of what I reveal to myself… it shames me in some small way. Art should not be cowardly.
I had a great evening, yesterday, but a poor night’s sleep last night. I woke restless and anxious in the wee hours, and couldn’t put it to rest with meditation, yoga, or having a quiet contemplative smoke in the dark. I knew what I was anxious about – I’m just about finished moving, but there’s just a thing or two more to do, and I feel a noticeable and probably appropriate ‘performance pressure’ to manage the remaining tasks well. Even at 49, I sometimes find myself inappropriately ‘eager to please’, like the small girl ‘helping Daddy with projects’ that I once was. Is that ‘something to fix’? I often wonder; I’m rarely certain.
I’m tired. Four hours or so of sleep isn’t enough for my best emotional balance or cognition. I already know this about me. I want to learn to deliver my very best in spite of limited sleep – because sleep disturbances, nightmares, and insomnia are all part of my experience on a pretty frequent basis. I want to master treating people well, even on bad days.
Now I have MC Frontalot ‘Your Friend Wil’ stuck in my head. I’m not surprised. I find hope for the world in the existence of Wheaton’s Law, in general. I find dismay in the number of news articles published every single day wherein the subject matter is really not much more, or less, than someone being a dick to someone else. Seriously. What’s up with people being mean, or inconsiderate, the most common definition of ‘being a dick’, and what makes any one of us think it is ok when we, ourselves, are being dicks? I had considered linking to some of those very articles… discovered so many exceptional examples that doing so quickly looked like some sort of thesis research and less a blog post. I challenge you to go directly to your favorite news source of a current events type and not find at least one article on the ‘front page’ that details someone being inconsiderate, rude, abrasive, insensitive, or mean at the heart of it.
I’m tired, I haven’t had enough sleep – but I am resolved to get through today without being a dick to anyone, especially my loving partners. I mean – wow – how ungracious would it be of me to celebrate the wonderful evening we shared last night by being a dick today? So, ok… back to that ‘mindfulness’ thing, I’m guessing.
I’m rambling, and feeling vaguely that I ‘owe you an apology’ for it… my focus and cognition suffer when I’m fatigued. I guess that’s true for everyone, but I know that with my starting point today I will want to be extra cautious with my behavior later, when I’m more tired, or risk irrational mood swings or tantrums. I wish I understood more clearly which pieces of my puzzle are my brain injury, my hormones, or my PTSD…although…I don’t know that the information, if I had it, would change my experience.
I really want to get completely settled in to my new home and paint. I am struggling to express certain things – to myself, I suppose, more than to someone else, and I know I hear me so clearly in texture and color.
I am having a very nice morning. I was musing about just how nice, and the feelings that gives me, and watching the sun rise, as I waited for my bus to work. The colors were amazing; crimson and scarlet and magenta and orange, pale streaks of mauve and a hint of lavender off to the edges, and in the foreground the contrasting darkness of the trees, bared branches of winter, reaching across those bold colors. I was struck by it and eagerly pulled out my camera (phone) to capture the amazing vista…but my camera will not photograph a sunrise. A little frustrating, but not a big deal. I keep hearing the phrase in my thoughts, though, as I wait for the bus… “My camera will not photograph a sunrise.” I have the vague sense that as sentences go, it wants to tell me more, but I don’t find more there to know.
My brain injury is a frontal lobe injury. It effects memory and executive function, and likely has for the entirety of my adult life. I contemplate that a lot lately, and how that may have changed my experience of life, and how well/poorly I handle relationships and social interactions or make decisions. I have a lot to learn… having found out about my brain injury doesn’t change past behaviors or experiences, but it has serious potential to change my understanding of how my behaviors and experiences have evolved, what has driven my choices and decision-making, and why some things frustrate me so much (and I hope, also what I can do to improve on how I cope with those things). I spent the solitary portion of my morning reading about memory over coffee. I moved on to reading about executive functions while I rode in to work, and during my morning break, a short article about the frontal lobe. I read a lot. (Words work for me, mostly, although I have to read things more than once, take notes, cross reference bits I’m not sure about, and talk things through to gain an in depth understanding of a subject.) This morning I am a little awed at how easily the ‘issues’ I’ve had, challenges, bad behavior, and weirdness line up so cleanly with the information in my reading regarding frontal lobe damage and potential consequences to executive function and memory. I keep staring at the words and wondering why, if I can see these connections so easily here and now, no one looked at the list of shit I’ve been working through for so long and made the connection in the other direction? (You know… “Damn, considering X, Y, and Z, I have to wonder if you are suffering from some sort of damage that effects executive function?” I mean, seriously Medical Science, it actually seems that obvious in hindsight.)
It’s a lot to think about. I vacillate between feeling beat down to the point I can’t go on, overwhelmed to the point of giving up, and feeling like I do today; hopeful, and armed with new knowledge about how and why I am who I am, and where I can go from here with more appropriate tools. I am hoping that gaining a deeper, more profound understanding of how my injury effects cognition, decision-making, and memory, that I can develop a better set of coping skills – more effective, more reliable, and less ‘guess work’. How do I change how I cope with my brain injury so that I am able to treat people consistently well? How do I make good decisions, and take care of me? How do I reduce the level of agitation and turmoil in my every day experience knowing now that much of it is born of simple frustration, fatigue, or challenges that are a by product of my injury? As is so often my experience, I have more questions than answers.
I need to paint – there are things I need to say that I don’t have words for; a sunrise, a memory I can’t quite remember, a portrait of a fracture I can’t see… I need to feel heard.
Yesterday’s pain loiters in my consciousness, an unwelcome visitor whose incessant self-centered small talk has become a sort of white noise of negative messaging in the background of my day; anxiety. My intellect, and years of experience, tell me the anxiety, although difficult to dismiss or suppress, isn’t ‘real’. Well, it isn’t real like my keyboard, my office chair, my desk, or the sounds of humanity all around me. It’s a very different sort of ‘real’, commanding my attention without a concrete presence.
I am trembling and nauseous, watchful and hesitant, short of breath and feeling the weight of my fears and doubts on my chest. “It will pass…” I tell myself, over and over, as I work. “Focus on work, follow the routine…” the mundane details of daily life distract and soothe…eventually. I’m sleeping at night… that’s something. Anxiety is much worse if I am not sleeping… but the nightmares ruin my concentration and feeling of peace. Nightmares of violence, nightmares of being trapped, nightmares that are my sleeping mind alerting my waking mind that I feel overwhelmed – as if I didn’t know. The headache isn’t helping me with finding balance and feeling calm, a search that has gradually become more a puzzle than a journey, over the past year. I hurt and it clouds my thinking.
…I need some quiet time to think. I need to spend some quality time with myself – figure things out, focus on my heart, my soul… I need to paint. Peculiarly, although I am aware of my needs, I struggle to meet them lately. My last opportunity, and only opportunity since before the holiday season, ended badly – I was anxious almost to the point of terror, and feeling more lonely than solitary, confused, and somehow bereft of purpose and meaning, both trapped and exposed. It wasn’t a very good way to spend 24 hours and now I find myself vaguely reluctant to try again, even while I feel like I can’t manage my time well enough to get a moment alone. Being a human primate, a being of both reason and emotion, sometimes seems needlessly complicated.
I need to walk more; I can really think when I am walking. I need to be more consistent with my yoga practice; it helps me relax and be mindful and serene, and compassionate with myself. I need to talk less, and listen more. I need to find a quiet space to call my own. I have hopes that the rose garden can become that space, over time… I sure need to figure something out, solve the anxiety like a problem, somehow.
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Evening Light 