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Nov 29, 2014

The death of a friend.

Two weeks ago a woman I had grown to love dearly left. Death came swiftly and deftly; an instant leave-taking without a moment for pain or remorse. It was a gentle death for which I am grateful, not only because it is the kind of death I wish for my most beloved people on this earth, but also because I am certain had she been given even a second, Rebecca would have been highly irritated with the timing.

Rebecca lived life with wide enthusiasm, open handedly, and gratefully. I don't believe she would have felt anguish or remorse because she was a Cancer surviver; she had plowed those fields already, and witnessed their flourishing as she healed from the great ordeal of survival. Rebecca won the lottery as far as cancer is concerned, and with great awareness she lived thankful for each and every day afterwards.

In Buddhism, death is as sacred as life. I don’t know where we go, if anywhere, when we die, but I think if our spirit rejoins the whole that sustains us, gives us light, the very grace that makes everything on this planet so profoundly beautiful, then probably the regret we feel when we die is momentary - a quick “oh no! But I had to… I wanted to.." followed by release as we grasp the bigger picture of it, the grace as integral to dying as it is to living.

Maybe this period of leave-taking takes an instant, or an hour. We who are left, on the other hand, are bereft, grief stricken, struck by the sharp blow of missing. We are left for days and years learning to abide the spaces left vacant and silent. We have to accept the departure.

So I don’t believe she is feeling the way I am now, wherever she went, and I am glad for that. I think all I can do is accept that she left, and feel gratitude for the time I had with her. Rebecca was a crisp full breath of life for me over the past 6 months, a sparkling light in the right direction. Her vibrant method of living, her unlimited generosity and reach lifted me out of darkness over and over again these past 6 months. I marveled at her, how nourishing she was to all who loved her, and at how she loved - it was vast, broad strokes of azure, fierce reds, and golden yellows and oranges. The way she loved was as singularly unique as the blossoms of her Night Blooming Cerius.

How lucky I was to witness the grace of Rebecca.

Aug 29, 2014

Recovery...

So, June was not my last court date. How nice if it had been. In two months, I will have been in the criminal court system for two years for a crime I did not commit.

I had the ambitious idea of writing a blog about the experience while I went through it - describing each step, including what led me there. But writing about mental illness while mentally ill turned out to be rather unrealistic.

Part of the issue with complex PTSD is triggering- it causes flashbacks, for one thing, and for the first 8 months after the trauma that finally knocked me over, I had to be medicated to stop them with a drug called Seraquel. So attempting to write about the very things that were making me worse, generating my sense of powerlessness, perpetuating my sense of hopelessness, and leading me to plan and attempt my suicide, was just a bit triggering (to say the least).

One of the things I have learned from this experience is that I never adequately understood my own emotions - actually, I didn't recognize them. I didn't even know what they were - was I angry? or actually feeling ashamed? Was I frightened? Or sad? I couldn't even identify primary emotions let alone the secondary emotions based upon my primary feelings. It's a problem most of us who have experienced early childhood abuse have - if we could feel our emotions life would have been pretty crappy, so we learned early on how to ignore them for our survival.

Anyway, so there I am in little moments of clarity and ambition thinking I am going to write a BLOG on this sh*t and tell my story, completely overlooking how I actually felt, and how I might actually feel writing it. So, in a little mini example of what happens when you have no idea how you feel about something, I set myself up for failure and failed to write a thing.

Good decision making must be made based upon good information- if you ignore key data points, like, oh, how you actually feel, nothing will be good about the decision. I think they call this in the research world, "garbage in, garbage out."

On a positive note, I've spent the last 2 years learning how I feel- not really by choice, because how I felt overwhelmed me like a tsunami and I was not able to shut it down, but the outcome is the same: I am learning how to recognize and name my feelings. Hurrah. I believe despite how awful this is, that when I can identify my feelings, and then actually observe them and use them as important information, my life might hopefully be different in the future.

I'd like to insert here that Seraquel is amazing. I was physically shutting down from flashbacks, which in some can look like narcolepsy. I simply fell asleep wherever I was because my brain just shut down the whole system in reaction. There I was sitting on the couch writing a list of things I might do that day - laundry, try to vacuum my room, or at least, put the vacuum cleaner in my room (baby steps), and the next minute, I was asleep. I started Seraquel and the flashbacks stopped. Absolutely, 100%, stopped. AMAZING. it was amazing. It brought back some functionality, or at least the ability to finish the list. I was grateful.

There is one drawback, and that is there were some very useful flashbacks, such as things I had actually completely suppressed as a child. Unpleasant discoveries, but helpful in explaining a few things.... But I couldn't handle the consequences of those flashbacks let alone the flashbacks of the final trauma, so it was a matter of health to decide to allow the rest of those memories to stay hidden. Maybe another day.