I spent the first half of my session today processing my inappropriate feelings towards someone else’s marriage. But he does things! And she does things! And I can see his point of view! And her point of view! OH MAN THE FEELINGS!!! It was good to sit down and process them. She asked if I was struggling partially because neither of these people fit in easy boxes for me. No one is the bad guy. No one is the victim. I told her that certainly escalates my intensity of emotion but it isn’t the reason. She asked me point blank who I identify more with in the marriage and I said hands-down the husband. That’s why he scares me more.

Then we went through a lot of topics. This was a bits and pieces visit. I told her about the depersonalization stuff this week. She pointed out that when someone is hypervigilant to the degree I am depersonalization becomes a healthy coping method because it is my body trying to keep me from having a stroke or a heart attack or any of those other things people like me die from. She said that her DID patients she tries hard to work with them on not depersonalizing because they already have too much of it. For me, not such a problem.

I asked her about the eye contact/flirting thing. She said that it certainly has some merit as a thing to think about but in her opinion eye contact is probably not the REASON people are attracted to me. Lots of men want boisterous, exciting women. I excel in that department and I broadcast it from across the room. That can be enough.

We talked a lot about the whole “energetic” thing. My shrink is pretty woo woo. She said that I have probably experienced far more trauma than anyone she has ever met (that is saying something given that she helped start one of the big trauma centers in this country and she worked with international refugees abroad) and I really do just radiate the tension. I can be sitting still and I still vibrate with intensity. My comment was, “Yeah I always shake.”

I don’t know what to do about this intensity thing. I am really intense. I just am. I can sit completely silent in a room and people will still make comments about my intensity. I glower.

She told me to start researching Buddhist deities. She said that Eastern faiths understand that everyone has a dark side and that righteous wrath thing can be incredibly useful. Western spirituality pretty much focuses on “Be happy! All the time!” Well and the idea that some invisible sky friend will solve all of your problems. Good luck with that.

I believe in the core of my soul that there is no one out there looking out for me. If I am going to be saved I have to do it myself. Noah is the closest I have ever experienced to a savior and that’s kinda mixed and all.

Sometimes I feel very sad about relinquishing any hope that there is a God. I just can’t sign on to believing that someone was “there with me” but chose to not stop anything. I can’t believe in that. If such a God existed (s)he would be so vile I would want to set them on fire. So there must be no God.

It isn’t exactly “logical” but it is what I’ve got.

What do I want to be different about how my life experience works? What is not working for me right now?

The anxiety and hypervigilance are probably the biggest on-going hurdles. Sometimes I feel a little weird when I talk to people about the hypervigilance stuff. People regularly say, “Oh me too.” Then I keep talking about my physical experience, because I am so glad someone understands, and their eyes go wide and they say, “Oh not like that.”

I don’t especially want to spend my time playing the oppression Olympics. However I spend a lot of time feeling very upset about how often I feel like someone is going to understand and then they physically withdraw with what looks like horror because no… they don’t understand.

I want so badly to meet someone who has really recovered from trauma like my life. I haven’t met anyone yet. I meet people who have experienced less trauma who are more functional and they sneer at my inability to control my symptoms. I meet people who have experienced a somewhat similar level of trauma and they are shocked by how functional I am. They ask me to tell them how to do it. But I don’t know how. I just do it.

Sometimes I feel like an attention grabbing whore for talking about what goes on in my head. I should shut up because no one cares.

If you asked me at any given moment in time what was going on in head I would be able to describe different movie screens. When I am not suicidal I think primarily in text. It is like looking at many computer screens right next to one another. I’m tracking all of these different tabs.

I’m thinking about my behavior, my tone of voice, my physical mannerisms, do I have the shaking under control? Am I behaving in a way that will keep me out of trouble?

I’m thinking about what my children are doing. I have one maybe two tracks devoted to them. Usually one track is monitoring their current activities and another tab is constantly tabulating how they are doing developmentally. I think every single day about what things they should be learning or should be working on and how I can facilitate access. I go between all of the different “subject” I think they should learn and I’m constantly playing around with planning schedules in my head as to which order to introduce things.

Another track is thinking about food. Don’t you always think about food? What have we eaten today? What are we going to eat later? How much preparation will that take? When do I need to go to the store? What am I going to make tomorrow? If I don’t think about tomorrow today then I don’t take meat out of the freezer.

I have a track devoted to books I am reading. That one is seriously hard to “read” in my head because I have phrases from completely different books going through my head fairly randomly. I read history, leadership, historical romance, parenting, bdsm, food stuff, gardening stuff, and I don’t even know what all. Lots of other fiction. These phrases drift into and out of my consciousness. I have a book that I’ve read dozens if not a hundred times. I think about it all the time. Tiana. What does it mean to be a Pretty Woman? (In the Cherokee woman-of-high-rank way.)

There is always a sex track. It kind of baffles me when people occasionally tell me they don’t think about sex much. Oh man. I think about sex all the time. All day I’ve been wiggling because we had kind of a missed-weird thing last night. I’m getting laid tonight I can tell you that.

I have another track that is composing books I want to write. I always have 2-6 pages I am working on in my head.

I have another track solely devoted to processing all the random background noise I hear. Everything I read tells me that my hypervigilance is somewhat extreme. I have to think about what I am hearing consciously or the sound of the tree rustling in the background makes me tense, anxious, and unable to focus. I can’t let it be background noise. If I hear it and think about it I don’t freak out. But if I am not concentrating on processing what the sound means (if I am trying to listen to someone else) I can feel my shoulders come up. My neck muscles bunch and start to ache unbearably. I have a permanent headache.

I don’t think I am as observant about my surroundings as people who were trained in the military but I seem to have an unusual degree of knowledge about what is happening near me. It shocks me when other people don’t notice security cameras or security guards or where the exits are. I make internal lists of exit strategies for every room I walk in.

And I’m thinking about all of these things while I’m trying to have casual conversations. I don’t think I actually pay attention to people very well. No–it isn’t that I don’t pay attention. I have incredible recall. I am listening. I am processing. I’m making connections between what you say and the things I know but I’m not there. I can phone it in and be a better listener than most people can be while thinking about nothing else.

All of this would be easier if I didn’t give a shit what people thought of me. Before I had kids I didn’t care as much. Most of my anxiety symptoms were easier when I was younger. I didn’t have to think about my kids. I didn’t think about food the way I do now. For most of my early life food was not something I spent a lot of time thinking about. Food was something to submit to because otherwise you would die but it is an unpleasant process from start to finish.

It is kind of weird understanding that I am healthier now but I don’t feel better. Part of it is that I am just older. The years of constant panic wear on a body.

Today Shanna asked me what “health” means. I told her there are a lot of different kinds of health. Physical health pretty much means that every part of your body is working right. Your internal organs are happy, your skin is happy, things just work right and feel ok. Physical health comes from eating foods that strengthen your body and give it the nutrition it needs and exercising. Sitting is one of the fastest routes to ill health. Mental health is about what is going on in your brain. Healthy people experience lots of emotions. Sometimes they are sad, sometimes they are happy, sometimes they feel angry, sometimes they feel calm. It is the balance that matters. If you try to keep yourself from feeling a particular emotion you will never be healthy. If you feel just one emotion too strongly then you are not healthy.

I broke at that time to say, “That is more or less my problem. I am not mentally healthy because I still feel scared even though nothing is happening in my life to make me afraid. I am safe. Nothing bad is going to happen to me for a very long time if ever again. But I can’t stop being scared. Something in my brain kind of broke. I’m trying to figure out how to fix it because I would like to get back to a place where I can feel other emotions more easily.”

I told her that some people focus on spiritual health–which means a really lot of different things to different people. Spiritual health is more about feeling right about your place in the universe and about your purpose.

I told Shanna, “I’m fairly physically healthy and I feel ok about my spiritual health but my mental health is a bit iffy. So I see people who specialize in helping people deal with this kind of imbalance. That’s what you do when you have a problem. You go find a solution. Luckily we live in a time when people have access to lots of solutions they couldn’t have had a hundred years ago.”

I struggle with going back and forth between wanting people to like me and not giving a shit. I want the safety and security of position that comes with being liked. I don’t want the behavioral constraints. Cry me a river.

I don’t know how (yet) to feel ok about people disliking me. I need to learn how to sit with that. I need to stop feeling like being disliked will be followed by rocks. We’re grown ups now. They only do that to women like me in other countries.

If I walked into an area controlled by the Taliban and I talked about my life they would kill me. Good thing I live here.

I think that some of the depersonalization stuff comes from feeling like I am a larger-than-life person and even I don’t believe half the shit I’ve done. I mean… I was there… kinda… but I don’t feel attached to it. It all feels so unreal.

Someone I met when I was 19 mocked me gently recently for how “worldly wise” I thought I was at 19. I told her I didn’t think I was wise. I thought I was experienced. I was right. She slightly conceded.

I’m not very good at limbo. I don’t wait very well. And to me life feels like a series of stages. During any period of transition I start freaking out and I go do things to self-soothe. These usually involved other people and my cunt. (Wow. Spell check doesn’t like cunt.)

A friend told me that he would give anything to be able to walk out of his house and just decide to find sex. It has never happened. Almost all of the sex he has ever had has been after prolonged friendships that lead to courtships. (I said, “Hey! I wasn’t a prolonged courtship! I fucked you on the second date.” He said, “You are the one and only exception in my life.” I said, “Yeah it was kind of weird waiting till the second date. You seemed shy.”)

I’ve had at least sixty one night stands. I can’t imagine not being able to walk out of my house and get laid.

With that said, the reason I know I can go find someone for sex at any point I want is because I play the law of averages. For those 60 one night stands I probably asked 500 people. I’ve been told no a lot. I promise it didn’t kill me. I think being told no for sex is character building. Ha. (DA-That’s why I ask men. I know that not every man is just waiting to fuck me. Hundreds have told me so to my face.)

My shrink told me to think harder about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She asked me if I would actually like to stop being scary. I told her not really. It took a long time before I learned the value of the violence I know and I earned every drop of hostility I feel.

But it is very tiring. And it’s lonely. If I feel hostile instead of malicious then I can’t lash out at anyone just because I have these feelings. So I’m not sure that I want to stop being scary but I do want to figure out how to have more control over when and how other people are impacted.

I don’t really want to accidentally hurt people. If I am going to hurt someone I really want it to be about having the conscious desire to hurt them. That should be my goal. I’m ok with being the kind of person who hurts people. I earned those stripes a long time ago. I have learned enough self control that I only hit people who have asked very nicely and people who hit me first.

But where does that leave me with my nasty mouth? Just don’t open it? Carefully rehearse every single word I say in advance so that it isn’t inappropriate? It’s really tiring.

I have to believe that I will find a middle road. I have to. It is the only way. As a wise man once said: I will find a way or I will make a way. And don’t forget: If you see Buddha on the road… kill him.

My road is not your road. That’s ok. It only has to be mine. It takes all kinds, right?

When I think about why I write I know that it is so I can figure myself out and so I can be a known person. Without writing people will never know much about me. Even if they dislike me that is better than being unknown.

I feel weird about wanting to exist in this way. It feels like chasing fame and I’m not really doing that. I sure as shit have no intention of jumping hurdles.

A wise woman once told me that if a woman wants to continue to be relevant as she ages she must continue to become more interesting. Otherwise she will be ignored once she passes a certain age. (I don’t know what that age is.)

I have only my mind to offer. I have to decide really and truly inside my soul that what I have to offer this planet is really and truly worth the resources that are spent on me. I have to believe I am worth something.

I can’t just be here as Calli and Shanna’s maid or teacher. That really isn’t ever going to be enough for me. That will not quiet the demons raging in my head.

“Just don’t think about it.”

One day. Spend one god damn day with me as I narrate my thoughts full speed ahead. You try to ignore this shit.

What is worth doing? What is right in front of you. Just do it. Do your best. Try. You will fail sometimes. The more times you try the more times you will eventually get it right. You will figure out what is right for you.

Somehow I must find a way. I really want to be a source of support for my adult children and not a burden. I want to be a healthy partner for Noah.

What do I want for me? I can’t base everything on being for other people. I’ll fail. I’ll never get the parameters right. And man if I calibrate for Noah I will gradually be so weird I may not be fit for public. (I kid.)

My shrink told me to hurry up and finish writing the book I’m working on. She has clients who need to read it.

Will that be enough?