6:35 p.m. - 09/06/02
-::light of some kind::-
I came close to ...something... today, but managed to choose a different path. I'm exhausted or maybe just relieved...
It started with a physics test I was so ready for (so. ready. for) and certainly could have handled. The constant stress of the past week skyrocketed with that test, and I started to make simple mistakes again and again and again, which only led to more stress. I got about three-quarters of the way through a twenty question test before completely disintegrating and having to ask Mistrandy to let me take the rest of it on Monday. I was hoping to take my physics and psych tests today, and I didn't even finish physics. But that wasn't worth breaking down over...I broke down, more precisely, over the reason I hadn't finished the test. About the pain I'm still storing and the people still running rampant in my head.
I want them out of my head...
She was really wonderful about it, and I did what I always do to get by: laughed at myself, joked about my behavior, and my feelings of frustration. By the time she left for the weekend, I had so thoroughly banished my emotion, that I was spinning the crazy-circles at full speed. Come on, come on, come on...
And it wouldn't take long. It wouldn't be hard at all. There's got to be a way to break through the crazy layer to the feelings. There's got to be a way to be real again. All the options popped into my head, and I had to shut them up, had to wait, had to start talking, out loud to the "empty house" calling forth the emotion, calling forth the pain, the anger and the sadness, the betrayal and the hurt. The tears can't blow off that party; they just can't.
If you just sit inside the craziness, the truth will come. It always comes. If you white-knuckle/fidget your way through it long enough, the emotions will rise. And maybe that's what kept me from doing it for so long, but what I want now is more than a way to escape the craziness. It's a way to find myself again. I want to find my way back into myself, and I only know how to do that through my feelings. The emotions are my allies; I have to keep them on my side.
So yes. I started talking because if I start talking I can find things more easily. I didn't talk for most of the time I didn't feel, so the two correlate a bit for me. I found the feelings again, I started crying, I watched myself cry in the mirror, which is a habit I've had since childhood. I think it helps me feel like I'm talking to someone. To talk to a mirror (or to talk in the dark.) It never helped me practice speeches, but it does help me cry. And I needed to cry. Because it's abuse and sometimes it comes up and smacks you upside the stomach and you have to just sit down and bawl and come to remember all the things you've come to know... at the same time you're crying all the tears left over from the time itself.
If I were mean to myself, I'd say that I did enough crying while it was going on to never need to cry again. But I didn't. Obviously. I'm crying now, and I'm not making it up, because who on earth would want to feel pain like this when no one is around to hold you?
It's ok. I know there are people here now, and I think I needed to be alone through it this afternoon. Or I would have called.
So Neverland was evil. And the voices still run through my head telling me things I don't want to hear and beating me up for problems that are not my fault, pains that *were not failures.* I was not a failure, a slacker, a moron, or a psychotic. I did nothing wrong. I had an illness that kept me from being able to live up to their standards. And *they* were wrong to treat me as they did and to neglect me as they did. Their action and inaction were both wrong.
I will repeat that; it will be innate.
One of the things I can't understand is how the structure was corrupt or the people were wrong when I was the "only person" so destroyed by it. I know other people struggled off and on, but I was the only one crying every day through multiple classes, shaking so hard I couldn't speak, panicking so that I couldn't hold a pencil, couldn't maintain my complexion, couldn't breathe. I don't understand how when I was the one in pain I wasn't the one wrong.
Someone kinder inside me said, Hey, girl, you have an illness. You have a mental disability. It's nothing to fault yourself for, but it *does* mean your needs are different and your abilities are different. They aren't all lesser; they *are* real. If there had been a kid at Neverland who couldn't walk, and the faculty hadn't known or understood or accepted that, if his PE teacher had ordered him to run laps, that would have been abuse. If, every day, they had watched him stumble, fall, cry- watched the pain of what he couldn't do, what was dangerous, disastrous, horrible for him- and never taken action, that would have been neglect. And classmates might have said, "Hey, I know laps suck, but you just have to deal; you just have to get them over with, play the games, keep up with everyone" he would have felt completely abandoned and alone. Because their not understanding was so wounding to him. The way it was to you.
I forget that I am not/ was not the problem. That I did not necessarily create everything that happened at Neverland, and that the problems I experienced were not the sum of everything I did wrong. It was not a response to my problems, though it did escalate as they did. The system was wrong before me, still is now. It makes me sad, but nothing can make me guilty. I'm out of there, and they're still in my head, but I have therapy and feelings on my side. I have a teacher who says, "Hey, do you want to just finish that Monday?" to my exhaustion and "I'm not worried" to my apology.
I am no longer there.
That doesn't make all the results go away, but it's good to know. It's good to say over and over again. *We got out.* Scraping, maybe, but alive...
chord
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