The girl in my head....

I started writing this blog roughly 6 years ago. I was looking to fill up some time as I just quit my job to support my husband who was promoted to Interim Chief of Police. Our lives were turned upside down when he took the position. Political controversy, lack of support from city government, lack of support from officers led my husband to clinical depression and almost caused him to lose his life, not to mention his career. I, in turn, sat by helpless. I was powerless to help him. At first I enabled the drinking. Then I got saddened by the drinking, until finally I got fed up with it and called 911 for his own safety. We've had a long recovery road since that day - February 6, 2013. I never finished this issue of my blog. Things must have fallen apart around this time. 6 years later, I've hit a bump in my life. A friend reached out to support me and suggested I return to writing. So, I returned to see where I left off. Upon reading my words, my heart filled with sorrow for the woman writing this. It brought back memories of this time in painful and vivid detail. I am no longer the woman who started writing these words - but I want to continue writing them for her. And acknowledge for myself that I survived it, and how I learned to love myself in the process.
Here goes nothing...

I just finished reading The Girl on the Train.

Even just typing that one sentence makes me stuck. I am flooded with emotions. And when my emotions overrun - like a kitchen faucet someone forgot to turn off and it's overflowing and making a huge mess - they are uncontainable. There are so many of them: flooding, overflowing, unmanageable, unnameable, utterly intractable. It completely overwhelms me and I have extreme difficulty verbalizing them. Articulating them, making them coherent, is damn difficult. And frustrating. There's nothing like having your body and mind overwhelmed with so much FEELING, you can't sort it, can't name it, can't even put your finger on it. Like the shadow you catch out of the corner of your eye, as if someone is right beside you. You whirl around and no one is there. These thoughts are simultaneously tangible and intangible. Trying to transform them into a thought and expression that makes sense can take me hours. Sometimes days. The thoughts in my head could be considered a hoarder's wet dream. Like an attic so full of junk, my head is a treasure trove of memories, pain, thoughts, you have to navigate through the mess to find what you're looking for. Which can take a long time, and lead to frustration when you're hurt or angry and need to express what it is that hurt you. I have never been particularly astute at expressing those feelings, I clam up. So the thoughts and the hurts and the feels, stay inside. And fester. It's not good. With a lot of work - and a lot of support from my husband - I have learned how to navigate through that mess. I've sorted and cleaned the junk in my attic head. I've learned to throw out a lot of thoughts that I kept on replay; I learned those songs and words were never meant for me. They were lies I told myself because I always felt so worthless, so undeserving of anything good.

When I finished the book I sobbed. The book's characters triggered memories for me. The main character just pissed me off. She was weak, but then, so was I at the time. I didn't know how to stand up for myself - to my ex-husband when the gas-lighting would get extreme, or to my current husband, who was an obliterated mess from so much booze, he would pick fights with me for no reason. If you're not familiar with the book, it's a psychological thriller of sorts (my favorite kind), where the main character is either a witness to or a participant in a murder. You come to find out that (spoiler alert) her ex-husband is the culprit, and through years of manipulation, makes the main character question her reality. That was my reality. I was married to someone like that for 15 years. I always knew something was wrong, but I could never pinpoint it. He was so good at lying, evading and manipulating, I couldn't contend with it. It brought back 15 years of painful memories to the forefront of my brain. Part of me is saddened for what I went through, when you realize you are, and have been abused, it's like a punch in the stomach. I denied it because I wasn't what an abused woman looked like. I was never beaten, I was treated fairly well, we never fought - but I wasn't loved either. There was no love, no intimacy, no appreciation. I was only there to take care of his needs - otherwise - I didn't really matter. I felt like a piece of furniture - nothing more. I had been a volunteer Victim Advocate at one time in my life - this did not fit the traditional sense of "abuse" that my college courses and subsequent experience led me to believe. It makes you feel put down, not worthy, it did horrible things to my self-esteem. My brother, who counseled juveniles for years, brought it to my attention when I finally separated. It took him almost an hour to convince me to even consider I was abused. I had been in the criminal justice system for so long, this type of emotional abuse was never on my radar. I've been out of this relationship for 10 years now, and I still doubt myself whether I was ever abused. I still tell myself it's not what I think it is.
It's a struggle. I've done work. I've come a long way since then. But, I am not done dealing with those demons quite yet; there's still some parts of my history I need to wrestle and wrangle into a manageable place in my memories; I still need to forgive - not just others, but myself; I need to process the abuse inflicted by both of my partners - the former and the current one. The former one will never apologize, the current has made his amends, has gone through treatment, and has made drastic behavior changes in our relationship. I'm still waiting for my turn to process, to work through, and to put away. It occurred to me a few years ago, that I have no memories of my first marriage. I was married for 15 years and had two beautiful daughters - but they entire sequence of events is gone from my memory. I can count on one hand the memories I have of that time - and the majority of the ones I remember were not good memories. Every now and then the oddest experiences (like reading a book of fiction) will trigger me. It's like I'm totally fine, and then something reminds me of an experience and I am suddenly in my attic-head, all of those old painful memories I precariously put away, come tumbling down and I'm wallowing in a mess. It's not a good trip to go on. To be suddenly thrust into a whirlwind of emotions can be debilitating to me. I freeze, I can't articulate what I'm feeling because I am feeling SO. MUCH.
I don't think that girl in my head will ever go away. She's a part of me. She's there to remind me how NOT to be treated, how NOT to let others take advantage of me, how NOT to let someone make me feel bad. She's not alone in my head - there is another element of me floating around in there, and she gets stronger every day. She resurfaced the day I told my ex to fuck off and leave. I have my own warrior and she is fierce and protective; she is my instincts, she is my healer. She is at the heart of who I am. I am so glad she never left; she just went dormant, biding her time, knowing I would always be waiting for her to return.