101418 III – Can’t sleep

I’d like to think that what I’m currently going through is normal. That everyone faces their mortality and own fallibility. That these turbulent feelings in my heart that churn and shake are all a natural part of being human.

But when she listed some of the broken shards of me I felt some small sense of shame in realizing I was different, and that that somehow was justification for what they called “my twisted reality.” It’s an ironic paradox I’m lost in, because “justification”in this context means that it’s normal.  “Twisted reality” means that it’s not– but those tangential musings are beside the point as they are nothing more than distractions.
Because the fact is, people haven’t understood what I call normal. They might see it as plausible but some people have never had to live it and so they haven’t yet begun to think it.

Tonight I feel utterly broken amidst the wails of a crying inner child. Instead of telling her to hush, I simply comfort her as best I can. I let her throw her tantrums, let her ask her existential questions about the meaning of life, and to fully feel the intensity of her emotions until they pass.

But within that moment, I feel like I’m 12 again. I feel like my world has just crumbled to dust, and my mind is once more lost in the aftermath of too many losses happening at once, from the end of my childhood to losing all my friends and my beloved Grandmother who passed away that year. And against that struggle of turbulent change came a hopelessness and despair, and somewhere, some time, it was ingrained into me to be kind– the kind of kindness that was for others’ sakes; the kind of kindness that my father would tell me to be because he preferred it and it led to an easy result than dealing with the existential questions he couldn’t fathom; the kind that only covered up the part of me still hopelessly searching for meaning in a world that had just scattered to dust.
It isn’t enough to be kind. What I needed was to be authentic.

And I suppose that’s why I left home forever when I was 24.

The PTSD diagnosis came when I was 25, when the environment triggered my existential thoughts once more. Once more the world crumbled, but this time I was alone and carried 13 years worth of buried thoughts and feelings that burst like a dam breaking.

It’s been years and I’m still struggling. And some nights like tonight 12-year old me calls out to me, and it’s really a terrible pain that just needs to express itself, as well as, mostly, time to be, without judgment or shame.