#my life kinda sucks and I'm keeping my hopes into this selection I'm participating in next week

[purplebass]

Sorry for disappearing (kinda) but my mental health is not the best right now and some days I just need to draw away from ~spaces in general and keep interactions to a minimum

I think I'm ready to be back even though I wasn't away for so long so maybe you didn't even notice

[be-good-be-safe-be-kind]

journal

today's been… okay, i guess. had to do another ptsd eval as a check-up/update for insurance, one of those 'on a scale of zero to four, rank these things' which is never fun because while i can figure out the 'never's and 'every day's, it's the bits in between that are harder to place. and also the wording of rank how these things impacted 'you' in the past month. kinda hard when 'you' is somehow a constant presence and absence at the same time. and then there's also the nuances of each question, which i had to ask therapist for clarification and we couldn't really settle things. like how often are you impacted by memories of event vs impacted by body sensations of shakes and things like that and it's like what do you mean memories don't always have visceral physical reactions? then we briefly discussed the upcoming chag and how that's probably gonna shake some things loose up here -taps forehead- and not looking forward to that. with or without the weather being cold, or actively participating in holiday things, winter is winter, and it's a hate/love thing. managed to go to the grocery store after and tried tuning out the christmas carols and blocking out the holiday stuff everywhere, but then i still had to walk back to the house and pass up decorations on every storefront and every other lawn (shout out to the house with a giant inflatable pink unicorn, no tinsel or cheesy slogan or anything else up) and it fucking sucks. not the decorations themselves, those are mostly cool (see ^) but that i can't exist for more than a few hours at most because everything is a fucking trigger and i'm exhausted after a day of not even doing much.

speaking of memories. i went looking on youtube for something to listen to while working on nanowrimo, and stumbled upon a full set of a sort of reunion tour set from what might be my favorite band. put earbuds in instead of quietly using the laptop's speakers because i could tell there were going to be 'dial it up to eleven' moments, and also because i needed to drown out the holiday music. and it's nice, real energetic and familiar but also it's hard to listen to. not from a musical perspective, exactly, (there's maybe one song on piano and the stage banter is all right) but because of how many memories it's bringing up and things i didn't even realize were things. like i'm ten now, with a secondhand cd player and headphones with crackling foam snuck under my pillow, keeping the volume on minimum to keep one ear on the door and another on the baby in case we had to move. that's wild, man. not entirely unsurprising, especially considering mentioned other sounds as negative triggers while doing the eval, so why does it seems shocking that there are kinda positive sounds as well? not that hypervigilance is exactly happy, and some of the specific songs are associated with specific places less warm than a couple coats on a mattress, but some are also with the bittersweet shit. humming along with the records to shush the baby. letting the lyrics wash over me, wanting to be optimistic of there being a possibility of a great escape and knowing even as a kid that it's just a high school fantasy.

i'm fourteen now and doing sit-ups in the dingy school gym to avoid lunch, tiny ipod in my hoodie sleeve, rolling my eyes at the irony of listening to a song about running from jesus while hiding in the corner of orthodox school. i'm eighteen and rather than writing my tehillim final about which chapter and specific verses i'd recite every day or which one always gives me hope, i pick the final track off the album with the bleeding heart and, in typical emo kid fashion, say that if i did have to select a psalm it would be lines 2-3 of 22 ('my god, why have you forsaken me…'). sure, i knew as well as i knew at ten that just go is easier said than done, that you shouldn't spend your whole life holding on, but i also knew no one was listening to me, anyway, so i might as well doodle around some lyrics and call it a day. i also had absolutely no vocabulary or concept of trauma (aside from having shoah survivors visit our classrooms since kindergarten, and i obviously didn't experience anything like that, so there's nothing for me to complain about), and by extension, the words to say that i can't simply go because everything means something to me and fucks with my head. i'm twentysomething and sitting on a park swing, music on my phone, kicking leaves and mentally kicking myself for ever thinking there's a possibility of being anything other than stuck in the middle. 

i'm sitting here today, all of these things flowing in and out of my head and through my body during the course of an hour and forty-five minutes. i've felt more in the past day than i have in a while, and i don't know how to feel about that.