Scars Remind Us #WQWWC

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“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” ― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Today’s topic for Writer’s Quotes Wednesday Writing Challenge (#WQWWC is “Healing”. I originally intended to post another quote, but then I had to address the fact that the source person isn’t an author. Not that I’ve read anything by Cormac McCarthy. Frankly, I just stumbled upon this quote on Goodreads by looking for quotes on this topic. However, the quote really speaks to me.

My psychiatrist’s appointment last week opened me up to a whole lot of trauma memories. Up until that point, I hadn’t thought that anyone would ever believe me again, after my dissociative identity disorder and PTSD diagnoses had been removed and everyone had basically decided I wasn’t a real enough trauma survivor at least until or unless I got re-assessed. That’s how I interpreted my psychiatrist’s insistence that I get evaluated for dissociation when I was still living with my husband. She was a great psychiatrist, but she never quite considered helping me with my trauma symptoms without a diagnosis. Then again, neither did I. Now I may even be ready, sort of, to ask for the re-evaluation myself.

The memories have been coming flooding back at me over the past week or so. I mean, I had flashbacks before, which is why the psychiatrist proposed I start topiramate, but they weren’t as bad as they are now. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to start on the topiramate until next week, as my care facility’s physician is on vacation and she needs to okay the prescription.

That being said, the fact that my psychiatrist is willing to prescribe me this medication specifically for my trauma-related symptoms, to me means she takes my trauma seriously. No-one before has ever suggested I try any medication or therapy for my trauma without my first going through the assessment process. Which, to me, means needing to prove my past and the resulting experiences are real first. Well, I can’t, because my dissociation makes me doubt my own reality.

Besides, one of my core traumas is not being validated for who I am. This has meant I’ve had to wear one mask or another, or sometimes several at once, my entire life. For this reason, I do not know who I am at all and constantly doubt my reality of experiencing post-traumatic stress symptoms.

In this sense, it is rather hard to process that most of my trauma didn’t leave physical wounds and that the traumas that did cause physical wounds, aren’t the worst ones. If my traumas had left physical wounds, there would be physical scars to remind me that the traumas were real. Now, there are mostly just emotional scars. I am still learning to validate the experience of my emotional wounds.

#IWSG: Reasons for Writing

Posted on by Astrid

IWSG

It’s the first Wednesday of the month again and this means it’s time for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group (#IWSG) to meet. I did pretty well in the writing department over the past month, although not as well as I’d hoped. I mean, I didn’t write a blog post for #Blogtober20, or at all for that matter, everyday. Particularly towards the end of the month, I was less and less motivated to write. Let’s hope for a good writing month for November then.

This month’s optional question is why you write what you write. Albert Camus is quoted as saying that the purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. Such a fitting quote on the day after the fiasco that is U.S. election day. I don’t usually share my political views on here, but let me be very clear that I don’t support Trump. Now I must say that Biden is pretty far from my ideal president too, but at least he isn’t as much of an idiot as Trump. But I digress.

Flannery O’Conner, an author I’ve never heard of, is quoted as saying: “I write to discover what I know.” This resonates more with me than Camus’s reason. I mean, like I said, I don’t share my political views on here much. In case Camus means that the written word is everlasting, I doubt mine is. Though I’ve been able to conserve most of my writings from the early days of my online journal and before, I’m not sure they’ll last forever or even close to it. The Internet evolves faster than we know, after all. WordPress may not be here for the rest of my life, or even the rest of this decade. With its stupid decision to enforce the block editor, who knows how long it will be able to survive?

I can, in a way, relate to O’Conner’s idea of writing for discovery. Or self-discovery, in my case.

However, I don’t just write for myself. In fact, I cannot keep myself from writing with an audience in mind, even when I write in my own private diary. It’s been this way even years before I knew about the Internet. In a sense, I write to discover what I know, but also to share what I know. Maybe that’s a bit snobbish, but oh well.

Quote of the Day (February 19, 2020): Everyone Sees What You Appear to Be

Posted on by Astrid

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.” – Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

When first starting this blog, I intended to do a daily quote of the day post. I never did. In fact, my “Quotes” category has only four posts. I do like quotes though, so when I figured I had nothing else to share, I decided to do a quote post again.

Today I checked out a sort of guided self-discovery journal called Happy to Meet Me. This quote was printed above the first prompt. The prompt was about common misconceptions about you. It asks you what you wish people would automatically see about you.

This is harder than I thought. After all, the prompt isn’t what you wish people didn’t immediately know about you. I mean, that would be easy. I wish people would see beyond my blindness. But then what would they see?

I think most people would see me as still somehow disabled if they didn’t see I’m blind. Like my sister said when I was a teen, I don’t appear like someone my age judging from even my way of walking. Of course, I have mild cerebral palsy, but the average Joe won’t have a clue. They’ll most likely think I’m intellectually disabled. Until I start to talk. Then most people will be baffled and start to assume my every way of being different is due to blindness again. After all, most people here are still pretty clueless about autism.

I don’t really know what I wish people would automatically know about me. I mean, back when I was still more serious about blogging, I knew that people had their blog name printed on T-shirts and I even for a fleeting moment considered getting one myself. I’m glad I never did, as honestly in the age of smartphones I don’t think I’d want people in the streets to be able to Google me without ever having met me. I mean, my blog is way too personal for that.

I can think of things I wish professionals would automatically know about me. I wish they understood the disconnect between my intellectual and emotional functioning. I can also think of things I wish friends would automatically know. I wish they’d know about my interests. But what would I want other people in general to know? I guess I’d start with the very basic: I am a human being just like you.

What do you wish people would automatically see about you?

Quote of the Day (August 30, 2018): Cultivating Mindfulness

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“The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.” – Jon Kabat-Zinn

I had another session of dialectical behavior therapy with my nurse practitioner today. In it, we discussed the skill of participation, which essentially boils down to doing something with attention without constantly being aware of the fact that you’re doing it. This seems pretty contradictory to me, because how do you do something mindfully without constantly being aware of it?

In this repsect, this quote speaks to me. It describes mindfulness as a way of knowing what we’re doing and paying attention to it.

It also seems that this may be what Pete Walker means when he describes the flight-freeze continuum of healthy relating to self in his book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. He says that the healthy middle between freeze and flight is the middle between doing and being. Freeze then is the state of constantly dissociating, daydreaming away time, while flight is the state of constant doing stuff, working time away. I tend to fall closer to the freeze end, while other people might lean closer to the flight end. Whenever I’m upset, I retreat into my own world. Someone who is a flight type would more go and do stuff, such as housekeeping, work, etc.

Kabat-Zinn in his quote says that mindfulness means being awake and knowing what we’re doing. It means not mindlessly staying busy to avoid hard feelings (flight), nor means it being disconnected from one’s surroundings (and oneself) to avoid hard feelings (freeze).

Now I seem to understand where the flight-freeze continuum also comes in handy in my DBT skills training. Flight then describes rational mind, not feeling anything because we’re busy doing (work, housekeeping, etc.). Freeze describes emotional mind, being stuck in the inability to do something about our experience. The middle ground in DBT is called Wise Mind.

Quote of the Day (August 9, 2018): Gratitude Unlocks the Fullness of Life

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“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.” – Melody Beattie

I once read that gratitude is happiness coupled by wonder. It means that we recognize that what we have is not a given. I mean, being able to read a quote on the Internet puts me in the minority worldwide. Even with my disability benefits, which amount to only 75% of minimum wage, I am rich compared to other people in the world. Isn’t that humbling?

Today, I had a rather boring day. Still, there is a lot to be grateful for today if I really look hard. The fact that I slept well and had a lie-in as I didn’t go to day activities. Barry, our cat, meowing me awake in the morning, letting me know he’s still here. He is a true delight. The blueberries I put in my yoghurt with crunchy muesli this morning. My being able to be grateful for that definitely did turn breakfast into a feast.

As I started my day, I was grateful for the two comments I had gotten on my blog while asleep. I also appreciated the tons of E-mails in my inbox. They reminded me of the good friendships I’ve formed particularly on one E-mail list.

I went to have some exercise on the elliptical. Though I was scared by a thunderstorm pretty soon, I still managed twelve minutes of exercise and am going to try for another 30 or so later in the evening. I am grateful for my mobility. I am also trying to be a little grateful for the rain, as nature and the farmers really need it.

My support coordinator arrived at 3PM. We had a cup of coffee and then started making a cheesecake. Gratitude turend that activity into excitement. It was the first time either of us had made a cheesecake.

Later, when my support coordinator had left, I looked up some journaling prompts in some eBooks I had bought yesterday. One of them gave me the reminder that I am blessed. Ordinary things such as the boring day I had today, do not happen to everyone. Besides, they can be turned into extraordinary things with the help of an attitude of gratitude.

Quote of the Day (July 28, 2018): No-One Makes Us Feel Inferior

Posted on by Astrid

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”―- Eleanor Roosevelt

This is so beautiful! It pretty much says that you’re yourself responsible for your feelings. NO-one “makes” you feel anything. I won’t go as far as to say we choose our own feelings, but we have remarkable control over our thoughts and our thoughts influence our feelings.

If someone tries to make us feel inferior, it’s our choice to rise above it and see this as something about them, not us. Another person does not define us – we define ourselves.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy owning our feelings. We struggle with this a lot. We are often told we have an external locus of control and that’s probably partly true. In oter wrods, we look to other people or circumstances to “make” us feel good. That’s not how it works and I realize this.

Of course, being a trauma survivor, I do not need to blame myself for having post-traumatic symptoms. A mental illness is not a choice. On the other hand, it’s not my abusers’ or anyone’s responsibility to make me feel better either. In our case, most of the trauma we endured was not intended as abuse. That doesn’t change its effects, of course. It doesn’t mean we don’t suffer and we are allowed to hold the people who hurt us responsible for their actions. But not for our feelings.

This does not mean the trauma we endured is not an explanation for our symptoms. It is. However, it’s not an excuse to wallow in self-pity. Enduring trauma is not a choice. Having post-traumatic symptoms is not a choice. Recovery, however, is a choice.

Quote of the Day (July 26, 2018): The Way to Get Started

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“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” – Walt Disney

This sure has to got to be the motto for this blog. And maybe for my healing journey as a whole. I may talk healing, but if I don’t work hard in therapy and such, I’ll not accomplish much.

This also reminds me of a conversation we had a few days ago with our husband. I said I miss talking to him, really connecting to him, like I did when I allowed my alters to be who they are. I thought my husband didn’t want us to be us. This isn’t the case. My husband told me to actually stop talking openness and connection and start opening up. That’s the only way to actually connect. And though that opening up involved talking, it also involved connecting on a deeper, more-than-words-can-say level. We loved it.