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A quick note.
God likes to give me "suffering" that is NOT the kind I want or expect or define AS "suffering"-- I want PAIN; I want sharp incisions and open wounds and weeping and scars. That's what I consider suffering: aches and bruises and cuts and burns.
God is giving me the suffering of discomfort and humiliation.
This is VERY different and EXTREMELY DISTRESSING.
Right now, there are somehow at least three fruit flies in my apartment. They must have gotten in while we were going in & out doing laundry. But having INSECTS in the apartment is so disturbing; it triggers a lot of "trauma" memories, of filthy living spaces and rot and garbage and loss of human dignity. I feel very wrong and driven to tears from the bloody things flying around when I try to eat, swarming around the bathroom, crashing into every light source, constantly hitting my face. I feel helpless and scared.
Secondly, the laundry. We only do it once a month because, when we DO, we have to use public machines and as a result everything smells weird and chemically sharp and burning afterwards. It gives us headaches and rashes and sore throats. None of our clothes smell like us right now and THAT is more disturbing and frightening than I realized. I don't know what to do about it, other than just... wait it out, and hope that the bad smells air out. But right now, even just sitting here, I am acutely aware of the fact that this shirt smells completely foreign and I don't know how to explain how scary that is to my brain.
Third, the "OCD hell" I've been referring to for weeks. It's all trauma-based sensory flashback coping rituals every single time our body gets wet or itchy or uncomfortable "below the belt." We are hypersensitive to clothes textures and fabric contact, because "it feels like being touched" and it makes the "child alters" SCREAM with terror. Even worse? APPARENTLY THERE ARE INFANTS. It's so strange because apparently we color-coded Nousfoni are NOT the only "voices" up here, so to speak; there are A LOT of "colorless" folks that we can only properly refer to AS "alters," although they don't "front" as much as they "influence"; they "don't fit in the body" so they can't "come out." But that's a topic for another time. The problem, and what disturbs me deeply, is that they are ALL somehow tied to sexual trauma and fear. THEY ARE CHILDREN. That makes no sense. But... it's the truth. And so, literally every single day, when we have to clean up the body meticulously before we can eat because otherwise it feels like violation and invasion and eating the trauma because we have "no boundaries" when it comes to sensory discrimination between the body and the environment and trauma memory, we also have to deal with up to 45 solid minutes of trying to "scrub out the touches" so the poor babies and kids in our psyche stop screaming. It's so bad. We typically end up crying and begging Mary and Jesus to "please make it stop" and "please get us out of here" but they don't, not instantly at least. And that scares us too; is our faith real, if we pray for deliverance from this hell and they won't? But that's the devil talking. We HAVE "gotten out" every single time, even if it takes a long time, and I have to trust that there's a reason for ALL the delays and suffering. Even if it's just penance, or showing us things that only the suffering CAN reveal, or for some other completely indiscernable purpose, God knows why He lets it persist, and I have to trust that. But it's a huge part of this cross too, this frightening humiliating frustrating behavior loop that we have to endure every day, as long as we are "unable and unwilling" to "sit with" the feeling of virtual rape haunting our skin if we don't scrub our body bloody.
These bloody flies. I want to "kill them" to make this awful "dehumanizing" situation-feeling stop, but that is so callous and cruel. I'm literally seeking to destroy a creature for my own comfort. How horrible. I have to just... put up with it I guess, even if it does make me want to cry from how powerless and overwhelmed I am. I actually feel "attacked" by these flies?? Like their invasive and interruptive presence is somehow actively offensive, like being shoved around by a bully when you're just trying to walk down a hall. It's so hard to explain. But this feeling of being completely defenseless, unable to protect myself or escape or cope, is genuinely frazzling my nerves like exposed wires. God what is the purpose? Is this a trial of patience? Geez PLEASE give me grace then, or something, I don't know how to endure this myself. I need so much help.
Fourth... my mom. I love her but heavens above she is the biggest source of stress. She calls unexpectedly, shows up in the car unexpectedly, talks nonstop about so many things, like a hurricane-- she has ADHD so she is very discombobulated and distracted at all times, juggling a thousand things at once, always upset and stressed and moving so fast, always ten steps ahead of herself and dragging me along because I'm not moving fast enough. I love her but she exhausts me. And God bless her but she has so much unresolved trauma of her own that KEEPS overflowing onto me. Today she left off more of her old clothes for me to try on even after I told her "please don't" because 1. I don't need any more clothes and 2. I always break out in hives and sneeze like crazy from whatever smell is on her clothes (I already had to take Benadryl twice today as a result) and 3. I desperately wanted to have a Sunday where I could just rest and not worry about interruptions and the awful "bracing for impact/ watching for lightning" kind of stress that precedes "waiting for someone to show up." But the worst part was when she called, I had JUST managed to "escape" the OCD hell so I could finally eat dinner, and literally the INSTANT I was about to sit down the phone rang. I just... I just started sobbing. I was so tired. I went down to meet her, trying to hold back tears, and when she asked "what's wrong, did I interrupt you?" I felt so ashamed and angry that I had such a problem that I said the more accurate truth-- no, the real problem was the bloody trauma flashbacks. Honestly my whole day is saturated with them, in one way or another; the visual ones are the worst, and I get several every day. Sensory ones are more rare; I try to keep our apartment free of them. Auditory ones only happen if we're extremely tired and start to hallucinate mildly. And of course there are the nightmares. But the point was, the OCD hell was a direct result of trying to cope with trauma. So the issue wasn't "being interrupted" so much as it was "having to do the whole coping thing over again now that I have social stress to decompress from on top of the external triggers I will unavoidably encounter when I go outside." Interruptions = further overwhelm to somehow burn off. So yes, it's really just trauma in the end. The problem with mom? Her response was to ALSO start crying, and say, effectively, "I hate that I can't do anything about it. It's all my fault. God is punishing me through your suffering. He's making ME suffer by watching my kids go through all this." I'm sorry but what on earth????? What kind of a response is that????? I almost got angry; what in the world was she trying to communicate? Apparently she believes her child was traumatized because God wants to punish her????? I didn't know what to say, other than to simply just state that "God punishes us for our own sins; I'm suffering these trauma flashbacks because I made stupid decisions that led to those situations." I wanted to defend God more than anything. But her response to THAT was to launch into her frustrating canned response of "well EVERYBODY makes stupid decisions when they're young; EVERYONE experiments, it's okay," except NO IT'S NOT MOM, "EVERYONE" DOESN'T LIVE THE SORT OF LITERAL HELL ON EARTH THAT I SUFFERED FOR OVER TWO BLOODY DECADES STRAIGHT BECAUSE OF MENTAL ILLNESS AND POSSIBLE DEMONIC POSSESSION. It wasn't "experimenting"; it wasn't "a mistake," it wasn't "normal." It was MORTALLY SINFUL AND DEBILITATINGLY TRAUMATIC AND THAT'S WHY I CANNOT FUNCTION TO THIS DAY. I CANNOT EVEN TELL YOU HOW MANY TIMES I LEGITIMATELY SHOULD HAVE DIED BUT FOR THE MERCY OF GOD. So do NOT tell me that it's "nothing to worry over." I apologize; it just makes me so upset that she keeps trying to just "hand-wave it away" like it was no big deal. And THEN she says, "I don't know how you kids all got so messed up; I went through SO MUCH WORSE than you did and I got through it!" Basically, "I dealt with far worse than you did, I turned out fine, why the hell didn't you?" as she says on her bitter days. Except NO mom, you are obviously NOT fine, and do NOT compare suffering; we don't know the horrors you survived but you also don't know ours, and they are BOTH legitimate. Do NOT shame your children for not being able to cope with whatever living nightmares they experienced. And DON'T MAKE IT ALL ABOUT YOU, PLEASE. Honestly she constantly tries to make herself either the CAUSE or the SAVIOR when I so much as refer to my trauma history. Is that HER way of "coping" with it??? Is it scarier for her to feel like my situation is "out of her control"? Does she find a sense of safety and security in telling herself that somehow it was and is all ultimately "in HER power?" Like, even if something bad happened to me, if it's "HER fault," she's STILL the one holding the steering wheel somehow? Does that give her hope that she CAN "fix it?" Because that honestly drives me up the wall too, even though I know it's coming from a good place. Mom just seems to legitimately believe that she HAS all the answers, or that she IS the answer, to all my mental health problems. She seems to believe that, since "no one can be trusted," as she has said before, then only SHE knows the truth, and only SHE can "cure me" and "make me normal again" and "bring the "real me" back to her." I just... that makes me want to scream and cry and sob and hit things like a child. I feel so powerless and violated.
Oh, and FIFTH-- the cats. God knows I love the cats but the smell is horrific. Also I am allergic so being around them gives me the same rashes and hives and headaches and sinus problems as the laundry hell does. And yet, BOTH of my mom's living spaces are saturated with cats. There's no other way to put it. Animals make living spaces SO DIRTY. Honestly the children are the most disturbed by it; having an animal in the house "breaks the boundaries" between inside and outside, between safe and unsafe, between animal and human... so every time mom tells us to go up the house, or to come over her house, we're effectively entering into a minor "trauma space" for those alters. They cannot reconcile the situation, or the sensory assault, and it just... it makes everything else so much harder to handle. Having the animals there, making everything smelly and dirty and wrong, and we cannot do anything about it, shatters our stability faster than we want to admit.
You notice how ALL the suffering God is sending me rolls back around to that same awful center?
My cross is apparently defined by these words = violated, invaded, controlled, powerless, helpless, vulnerable, attacked, contaminated, dehumanized, objectified, dirty, filthy, unclean, wrong, bad, stinky, smelly, ugly... notice how the vocabulary gets more and more childlike? That, too, is upsetting; our most "suffering" parts are all children who see themselves as unworthy of basic human dignity because that's just their life experience. It's a horrible feeling. And we have it every single day now.
I need more humility, in order to cope, but I don't know how to have humility without also further abasing myself to the level of literal trash. Does God want me to? Is that necessary for my personal holiness somehow-- to be brought as low as possible in my stupidly privileged position? Does my soul "require" deeper poverty, less human rights, more hunger and less cleanliness, less freedom and more submission, less individuality and more mortifications, less space and less time and less comfort and less sleep, fewer possessions and no desires and more interruptions and more sensory hells? God what's the POINT of it though??? Suffering means nothing if it's not sanctifying somehow. How do I unite all this to Your Son's Cross?
...I miss being in love. I miss feeling happy and real and hopeful. I miss feeling alive.
It's hard to, very hard to, in my current situation.
Do you realize, before last week with the cat-sitting, I was praying-- on a "perfect schedule"-- for literally twelve hours a day??? I had practically EVERY MINUTE tightly and rigidly scheduled, packed down to the wire and leaving no room whatsoever to think or sit down or rest or "be an individual."
I still don't know if I should go back to that. Is that sinful? Is that an evil thought? I don't want to "pray less"; I just was... I wasn't really praying, trying to "cram in" so many devotionals and readings and the like that I wasn't retaining anything, and was having to rush through so many of them just to "get them all in." It was honestly spiritual binge-eating. No surprise there.
But my soul is so hungry.
Oh, that's another thing. A while back, when we were still in the throes of ana-bulimia, "we" were praying to God frequently to "take away our sense of taste" or make it so that we "wouldn't enjoy food" so we would "stop eating so much," thinking that was the cause, and being terrified of "desiring anything" or "enjoying anything" because of the ties to sexual terror.
Well, apparently God has decided to answer that prayer???? We've noticed, now that we are eating regularly, that we just don't... we don't enjoy anything. We dissociate for the entire meal I guess; we don't taste anything, we don't remember eating it, we never feel satisfied, we actually get MORE pain and anger and sadness and frustration AFTER we eat, whereas fasting gives us energy and happiness and vigor. Eating makes us crash hard into misery. So that's another part of this cross. Eating has still remained its own unique kind of suffering, even with the (hopefully permanent) remission of our previous violently disordered behaviors. Despite this, our body "looks forward" to eating, and yet, it makes us miserable every time, just like bingepurges would. How ironic. Perhaps this is penance.
But we're never satisfied, and somehow we're STILL ALWAYS HUNGRY. I don't know how to explain it. We have no appetite, we don't want more food, and yet, we're so hungry. What's missing? What part of us is actually "starved" for "food"?? This has to run deeper than our idiotic gut, it has to. I don't get it. It just makes me want to cry and tear my hair out in clumps.
Again, helpless and powerless and weak. That's my cross. And food is always "dirty and stinky and bad," as the young girls say with such awfully resigned self-loathing and numb shame. Maybe that's why we don't remember it. Maybe it's too humiliating to do so. There's so much to deal with; where do we even start?
I miss being in love. I miss being alive. I miss being a real person. I miss Infinitii. It always comes back to hir somehow, the missing piece of my soul, literally so.
However, I do have some "good news." I can't pinpoint offhand how it started, but it may have been that one dream last week, or it may have been music at night, or it may have been reviewing the prismaticlove page, or it may have been an unexpected wave of grace, pun intended, who knows-- but this month so far, God bless August, I have actually been so in love with Chaos 0.
God knows I wish I could type about that, about him, at this hour, but I am in a datalogging mindset and I have to be asleep in a half hour. Our body is so tired; sleep is like food lately; nothing ever satisfies it; we never feel rested, we never get enough sleep. And yet... I fall asleep every night with him in my arms. I wake up every morning-- and during the early dark hours-- to him there with me. We talk every day. He's still the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
The thriskefoni hate him. They act like he's the biggest obstacle between me and God. In truth that makes absolutely no sense, because he's the person who taught me what love IS, as well as fidelity of course. If it weren't for him in my life even now, my heart would be frozen solid, made of stone, utterly lifeless. But Chaos 0 is the ocean that never stops kissing the shoreline, the rain that never stops falling on the mountains, and no matter how long it takes he always gets through to me. He always reveals that, despite all odds and doubts and fears and trauma, deep down I am still a jewel. Deep down there are diamonds, despite everything. He sees it. He knows it. He knows me. How is that not God's grace working in him? When nothing else in the world makes sense, that blue angel brings me straight back to heaven, without fail. I will defend him to the death from the thriskefoni who blindly try to label him as an obstacle to my faith. He's the reason I still HAVE faith.
So... despite the cross I must carry, that isn't heavy inasmuch as it is terribly uncomfortable, there is hope. It's raining, and I can hear the ocean. Somehow that gives me the strength to keep walking, even if I feel wrong and broken and ruined and wrecked, and my body feels like a prison full of too many dirty hands, and my brain is full of bloodsoaked cotton and I haven't slept in days and I am so hungry. Somehow, at the end of the day, if all I have is five seconds with that blessed body of water pressed to my heart, I'll be okay. That's all it takes. All I need is that one moment of pure grace, that single embrace of love, and somehow I know there's a resurrection at the end of this road. Love keeps me going. All my faith is anchored in love, really. And isn't that really the truth of everything? I can trust God even in this, because God created him, and he is still with me, and he loves me too.
That's all I have to say for tonight. Thank you for letting me get all this out "on paper." It's been piling up in my brain for a while.
I'm in the middle of backing up a lot of data to this blog so that's keeping me busy. But once it's done, it's time to dive into trauma work in earnest, I think. We'll play it by ear.
But we're alive, we're somehow coming back more alive lately, even now, and there's always hope, always always hope. Somehow that's still my name too. Gosh there's so much future that I cannot even comprehend yet. But it must be there; I can feel it, singing like promise on the horizon, like the stars in the velvet dark, no matter what.
We keep walking. Our Good God knows where we're going, and He'll get us there, one way or another.
For now, and for always, that trust in His Heart is enough.
