Category: Pieces of Me Page 2 of 5

Infection-rate is through the roof, hardly any measures in place, most of the population protesting them.

So what to do when elections? You vote for the parties that promise Covid is a hoax and will lift all measures. They will also destroy our relations with Europe, our social systems, our school-systems, our (already inhuman) immigration-policies but we’ll take that as a plus…

I’m raging. I want to scream from the top of my lungs and blow the whole fucking system up. Everything and everyone.

I allow myself to feel that way and let it be. Accept the storm, the fire, the blood-thirst. All of it. Don’t diminish, don’t inflate. Just be. Let it burn out.

There’s work to be done.

Love and I always had a complicated relationship. I thought I didn’t but I do.

Spoiler: I had to consciously allow myself to be loved. I had to accept being loved.

I’m a free spirited person, I love hard and freely, no backsies. When it comes to giving love, every day is christmas with me. I’ll shower you in love to the point of…. You being sick of it? Can’t imagine, but that much. I love easily and big, that’s all I’m saying.

I could not for the life of me, explain my anxiety surrounding Moam. Why was I feeling fearful, why was I drawn back to the last messages for reassurance when I already knew what I knew, that he loves me back. Since I’m very aware of everything being projection I figured I was projecting past experiences onto my present situation. That makes perfect sense. When all you’ve ever known is betrayal you get careful. So I left it at that and figured it would subside in time. All I had to do was stay alert regarding my own patterns.

Then something happened that kinda shook things up. I almost ended a years long friendship. I didn’t but I wanted to. One remark triggered a lot of shit to come to the surface.

Love, in the circumstances I grew up in, was another word for danger, pain. Love that was offered always had a price. Of course now I now better. Whatever it was, it was not love. Still, those old neural pathways are there. One remark I misinterpreted made them all fire up, at once. My friends love, so I decided, came at a price. He had loved me for 14 years and now it was time for me to pay up. I panicked. Told him he was out of line, to not do that again, kept every feeling I had to myself and just decided to not contact him again. Case closed. Friendship over.

It took some days to settle down. When the storm was over I was a bit surprised by my own thoughts. I was going to throw away 14 years of friendship over one remark. I found that bizarre. Even for my standard. It was almost as if I had been waiting for a reason to run, to be able to say ‘See, I knew it’.
But, knew what? What was it that was proven? That I was NOT loved? That this had been some kind of elaborate master plan to get into my pants. A plan that overspun more than a decade? That’s preposterous. Why was it so hard for me to just accept that he loves me, just for me, no backsies.
Long story short, because I just never had. Accepted that.

For crying out loud, my before-last relationship had told me in not so many words the same thing; If only you would have been able to let me love you. I now know what he meant, I didn’t then. It’s so simple; loving is from me to you, I control that. I give it, I take it. No danger. You loving me, ahhh..See where I’m going. Being loved, accepting love is having no control at all. If you love me, you can take it away again. Plus by being loved I’m exposing myself to the betrayal that is connected to it. Being loved is fucking scary!

So, after some time I reached out to him. I was going to do things different, that was my promise to myself. I told him what had happened and why, what I had discovered. I opened up and told him I needed him to do the same thing. It was scary but I figured, the only way out is through.

It wasn’t hard to recognize the same pattern with Moam. If I was being completely honest, I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop, something that would make me say ‘See, I knew it’, something that would allow me to run away. I still have those feelings. I wish I didn’t.

Every action he has taken, every word he said, the message is the same; I love you, no backsies. So, I am accepting that, or trying to. Or at least not let my actions be dictated by a lack of it.

Will there be an end to this rabbithole?

My sleeping pattern has slowly begun to normalize. Not there yet but I see progress. Last few months my sleep has been so scattered I could not remember any of my dreams. It’s only since the frequency of waking up has gotten down that I been able to do that. Well, some.

I’ve always had different types of dreams, also had weird experiences regarding dreams. I remember during my childhood I always had the same type of dream; not being able to walk or run, flying away, being lost, being naked in public. Common theme was being trapped and needing to escape. That’s not a hard one to explain.

As I grew older I started having lucid dreams. They were always accompanied by sleep paralysis and occurred mostly in times of extreme stress. Sleep paralysis scared the shit out of me. I don’t know if you ever experienced it, it’s terrifying. Your mind is awake but it’s on the cross point of dream and reality (read; hallucinating) while your body is completely immobilized. There was a point that I was so stressed out by the thought of sleeping that it made my sleep paralysis become a daily nightmare (..) Didn’t take long for it to become a vicious cycle so I needed to find a way out.
The only thing I could think of was just let it happen, stop fighting it and see what happens. Not panic.

Took me weeks to get there. Stop panicking while panicking takes some practice… After a while it worked. I remember calming down and just waiting. The shadows that scared me before, the crushing weight on my chest, they just stopped moving. I remember thinking to myself ‘what would happen if I thought of a window’ to just walk out of the space I was in. Before I could finish the thought I saw the window. The window I envisioned in my mind was right in front of me. I flew through. That was my first lucid dream. Once I got the hang of it it turned out to be really, really cool.

I still have lucid dreams though not as much. I haven’t experienced sleep paralysis in years.

I have dream meetings, don’t know how else to put it. The setting is always neutral and there’s always myself and somebody I have a real powerful connection with in real life. Sometimes it’s checking in with each other, getting an update on life. Sometimes it’s saying goodbye to each other and ending the connection. These dreams always leave me feeling peaceful. Sometimes a bit sad, but peaceful.

Then there are the house dreams. When I dream of my house, that’s me. Most of my life my house was in ruins, beyond repair. Those are gone. My house is fine.

Of course there are the dream-dreams. Walk through the front door and you’re in the swimming pool and that’s completely normal. I don’t have many of those. Or I just don’t remember, very plausible. Those I don’t pay much attention to, it’s just processing everyday life stuff.

The other ones I mentioned, those are the ones I pay attention to. The reason I do that is because of a really strange experience I had when my son was very young. We shared a dream. I said what I said.

When I woke up it was still really early in the morning, what woke me up was my son. He was crying and calling for me.

What I woke up from was a dream that was so strange and emotionally overwhelming that I had to take a moment to process. I had been in a cave-like space. An enormous cave. It was made of black material. Solid black smooth walls, with millions of tiny shining stars within it that lit the cave. It was a beautiful light, soft, comforting. And familiar because I had been there before, once. There was water in the cave, a river running through it, a peaceful stream. And a boat, patiently waiting to be boarded.

I was there, and my son was there. I kneeled before him and took his little hands in mine and I looked at his little face, his blue eyes. I was feeling his sadness and my own grief. This giant boulder of pain in my heart because I knew what I was about to do. What I had to do. He knew it too. I remember the exact words I said

‘I love you, baby. I love you so much. If there was any other way to keep you safe, I would. But I can’t. This is the only way that I can keep you safe.’

He cried as we walked to the boat, I cried too but I tried not to let it show. I didn’t want him to hurt because of me too, he was hurting so bad already.
Before the boat left he told me ‘Mommy I love you. I love you forever’, I said the same thing to him.

His crying woke me up. My face was wet from crying and I needed a moment to gather my thoughts and clear my head, wipe my face. As I got to his room he was sitting up in his bed, his face red and wet from crying. I held him tight. When he calmed down he told me about this dream he had where he was in a boat, alone. And he was drifting away from me. The last thing he heard me say was ‘Baby I love you. I love you forever’.

A few months after this, there was an incident that changed the course of my son’s life forever. So yeah. I pay attention. I pay close attention.

‘

I was floating in nothingness. In my head I heard a voice say ‘its coming straight for me’, and I could see it was. It was above me and closing in. Something that looked liked an solid object but I somehow knew it wasn’t. It was a force-field in a solid-like shape, rectangle maybe, there were clear sides in white and grey noise. Static. I welcomed it.

As it went through me, or I through it, I felt a surge in my body, electricity.

After that there were people, not many but more then two. They were kind and friendly. I overheard one asking another ‘but is he acting like a jerk. Has he ever? Because that’s where I failed. I was such a jerk.’

There was someone else, a man. A big dark man, with piercing dark eyes. He had a beautiful face. I can’t remember his face, but I remember his eyes. We kept finding each other. It was as if he was checking up on me to see if I was still there, and me him. There were touches. Slight. Almost by accident but on purpose. Hands touching, an arm. And eye-contact. We didn’t speak a word, we didn’t have to. We both knew what we were saying just by looking at each other. There was a familiarity between us, an unspoken knowing that we were there together, even though we weren’t at that point. A feeling of belonging together that’s so obvious we didn’t have a need to verbalize it. It just was.

After that I woke up, but not like normal waking up. It was like ‘oh, I’m in my bed again’. There was this single thought in my mind ‘It al fits together’ and this feeling of ‘Everything is ok. Everything will be ok. Don’t worrie’

I feel weird.

I have no feelings of shame. I was brought up with shame, shame that was focused on me as a person. Not on anything specific about me, but on me as a whole person. ‘Shame on you. I’m ashamed of you. You should be ashamed of yourself’. It was never specified for what or why. The message was always ‘You should be ashamed of yourself because that’s what you are’.

I still can’t make it stick, literally. If the imposed shame has no concrete target, it holds no power. Not over me it seems anyway. It won’t stick.

It’s just a theory, but I find it plausible that if you raise a child with a projected shame on the whole person, it won’t take hold. Shame is always about ‘something’ that should be hidden from the outside world. ‘Something’ can not be everything, ‘something’ is just a part of something.

I’ve always taken myself very seriously when it comes to who I am, what I want, what’s for me, what’s not for me. At least that’s what I’ve tried. I’ve never taken life in general very serious, though. You are born, you die. In between, you do the best you can. We all fuck up. I fucked up a lot. In the past, now it is not too bad.

I don’t remember ever feeling deeply ashamed of anything. What I mean by that is an internal pitch black nothingness filled up with so much shame that I’d rather die than enter. People end their lives driven by shame. Just saying. Shame can be a deadly weapon.

There was a period when I had a distorted body image and there was some shame related to my body; my breasts were too small. I was ashamed of that, I tried to hide that (something I would NEVER have admitted back then). My stomach was too fat, I tried to hide that too. Or just a big pimple on my face. Anything I felt like hiding, things I’d rather not have other people see, there was shame involved in that I guess. I’ve had that.

That only stopped when I started to consistently remind myself that I am not my body. I HAVE a body. It is my home, it transports me, It’s where live. It gives me the opportunity to, while lying in bed, to speak my mind into this voicerecorder. I am not my body, I have a body.

When I could let that truth in, I could also let go of all that so-called shame around my body. I am not my short legs, this body has short legs.

And extra skin, I can fold it into a little face. I carried two children to term so I no longer have a tight stomach. In spite of my marvelous six-pack my stomach looks a bit messy. Damage from usage. Added functionality. However you wish to look at it.

In terms of shame, the world has never really gotten a hold of me.

But… Yes, there is always a but…

I have PTSD. It no longer controls my life but it’s there. I can feel it waiting. I’m used to it.
I have been ashamed of that. The funny thing is that I never realized it was shame. I just never talked about it, it was not a topic of conversation. I avoided it ever being a topic. That says it all, I guess.

I realized, in hindsight, to me it was personal failure, weakness. It was proof of my destructibility, my vulnerability, maybe even proof of my mortality.

I got into a situation where I was painfully confronted with myself on this and I decided to dissect it.

Statement: My damage is proof of my failure

If I regard failure as loss, my downfall, or ultimately; my death, then the whole statement is nonsense. If I have proof of my death, I have already died and the damage proves it. But: I didn’t die, I am very much alive. That makes my damage proof of that fact, that’s the only logical conclusion. My damage is proof that I am alive. Survived. Not just that, I won. Because: I am alive. Otherwise I would be dead. Simple.

There have been multiple moments in my life where I made  the choice to keep on living. Live, not die. If I had failed, I would not have been here and the damage would not have been there. In any case, it wouldn’t be part of the equation.

The damage is proof that I have fought wars. Sitting here is proof that I won those wars. My damage, my scars are my medals. It’s the stripes I’ve earned. I had to fight hard for that, I earned it.

I carry battle scars from wars I’ve fought and won. I’m not just a survivor, I’m not just a warrior. I’m a fucking general.