Just had a session with my doctor this evening and i feel like my brain was drilled open and the things that I had been burying were hauled out. The things I keep suppressing burst out like a geyser.
It’s not your fault, she said. Stop whipping yourself. Give your self some credit. Be kind to yourself. He was just the wrong person. It’s not your fault; it’s just you had a lot of love to give–that’s all. You have to love yourself more, she said.
“Did he apologize to you?”
“No, not really. It’s a ‘sorry’ that went along the lines of ‘Sorry, it’s just that.’ But not really apology for hurting me. For using me. For his treatment of me towards the end that sent me over the edge,” I told my doctor. “But I have to reconcile with myself that I will never get that so I deal with it. I have to accept that I won’t get answers. You don’t get closure from someone else; you get your closure from within yourself.”
“What are you doing to get out of your episodes?”
“During lockdowns I couldn’t do anything much. Not even go biking to clear my head. Then I got Covid that further trapped me indoors and in my brain. Now that I can drive, I can see friends from way back. Those who knew me before shit had hit the fan. That’s why I’m going back to my roots; to what I was–to who I really am. To the things that made me like myself. It’s my way of loving myself,” I said.
“Good that you are able to pick yourself up now,” she said.
She then lowered my dosage of the anti-anxiety med, which may have been causing me to get sleepy more than necessary. She asked me if I could already sleep on nights I’m off it (because I now take it once every two nights). I said yes, I think so I can now.
I no longer wake up every hour, I said. Covid was bad; I was asleep 75% of the time but it was good that I made up for the months I haven’t been sleeping. It felt good,” I remarked.
Nap time. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Just like today, I was joined by my cats during my after lunch sleep. I always get sleepy by midday. Because of this I will just take my anti-anxiety med once every three days.
But my anti-depressant will still be there during my entire 12-month therapy. Hopefully I won’t have triggers by then. I wish the things that hurt me and had killed me over and over will just be a bad dream.
I have to confront these feelings again that I try to bury because whenever I get triggered, I go through the cycle again of being at the bottom and then struggle climbing my way up from that dark hole.
As a reply to all the things I wrote on this same date last year: NO, he does not miss me, he does not regret it and I just disappeared (no fading away). That’s it. That day I was writing about has never come and it will never come.
Confront these feelings. Don’t run away from it, don’t hide. It’s for my own good. There will come a time that I won’t get triggered anymore. That it won’t hurt anymore. That it’s not my fault and he wasn’t just a nice person. He was a coward for not telling it to my face and resorted to just breaking up with me on the phone, didn’t even give me that dignity after all the things I’ve done for him.
I have to confront these feelings head on.
I have to admit that writing yesterday’s entry got me triggered again. I stayed in bed the entire morning and I finally pushed my butt to get on my seat to work after lunch. My shrink was right, my trigger is anything connected to my feelings about him. It bogs me down. It’s not stress about work that keeps me from writing–it’s this trauma.
My kids are preteens now. They’re starting to get pimples and their bodies have started to change. They have grown so much that the top of their heads would soon reach mine. And yet, a part of them are still children. Like how they jumped up and down my bed, damaging a part of my new bed frame.
At the welding shop. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
So I had that part of the frame welded and reinforced at a shop near our old house. Now my bed no longer creaks, thank goodness.
I have a towel hanger that has collapsed already. I’ll bring it to this shop for reinforcement.
My new shrink says I should process this trauma properly and she’s going to help me with that.
Yes, she called it trauma.
And I’ve been running away from the trauma by rushing through the process of recovery. She says I need to confront this trauma because it will be a cycle that will keep on bogging me down all the time. It’s the reason I couldn’t write and just stare at the ceiling when I get triggered. It’s like one step forward, two steps back. Just like when I discovered about him and thatgirl. I was back to zero.
She said alcohol is not the answer and medicating myself with alcohol to numb myself and make me fall asleep is dangerous because 1) it’s a depressant and 2) I have a history of alcoholism in the family.
Since August, when I hit rock-bottom, I’ve been under her care and gave me the right antidepressant and anti-anxiety meds. It has helped me so much because I’ve been in denial that I have trauma. Those months that I wasn’t sleeping… That I wake up every 30 mins. Then every hour. It was only when I had Covid that I felt I had really been sleeping, like I was making up for the months I hadn’t had any peaceful sleep.
I also get triggered by every little thing connected to him or that girl whom I started to hate. I have unfollowed her in all social media platforms even though we’re friends. You see, it’s just like a soldier with PTSD going nuts when he hears a loud bang, thinking it’s gunfire.
It doesn’t help that I carry the weight of the world as a single mom, during a global pandemic, and I’ve been carrying my entire team and all the stresses that came with it because of bad leadership. So I’ve been sweeping this trauma under the rug so I can juggle the stress at work and as a single parent. But all these three stressors compete all the time, hence, my bad stress management.
I just realized now that I am rushing my Covid recovery. Twin I and I biked from our apartment to UP this evening but we were just barely inside the campus when I got very dizzy and my vision became wavy. I thought I was going to collapse. I was hyperventilating. We stopped for a moment to steady myself and catch my breath and then we slowly made our way back home. I’m still weak.
Resting. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I am not yet fine. I’m still sick. I still have long Covid symptoms. Right after a hot shower, I went straight to bed. Twin A checked on me and found me hot to touch like I have a fever. I still have a headache as I type this on my phone.
Why am I rushing my recovery? Because I’ve regained the weight I lost when I was really sick with Covid. I feel ugly that I am back to being fat. And upon deeper analysis, it’s because I’ve always thought that my being fat has contributed to the many reasons why he used and left me. He exploited my insecurity. And that’s the reason why he went after a journalist who was stick-thin and very young.
I need to be kinder to myself. It seems like I haven’t accepted the fact that I’ve been used; that every cell in my body is rejecting that thought but it is what it is. I have to accept that and I shouldn’t blame myself for what happened. There’s some kind of disconnect between what I’ve been trying to tell myself and what I am really feeling deep down. I have to work on that.
I need to work on my PTSD, if indeed this is PTSD.
(My old shrink–literally old–just diagnosed that I’m co-dependent that’s why I got stuck in an abusive marriage with someone with a narcissistic personality disorder but she refused to work on my annulment case. Now the Supreme Court ruled that psychological incapacity in annulment cases need not be medically certified by a psychiatrist and that term is just limited to the legal definition. So I dropped that old psych, good riddance. This new psych is for my therapy because I want to heal. And heal soon.)
According to the American Psychiatric Association, the symptoms of PTSD fall into four categories. Specific symptoms can vary in severity.
Intrusion: Intrusive thoughts such as repeated, involuntary memories; distressing dreams; or flashbacks of the traumatic event. Flashbacks may be so vivid that people feel they are re-living the traumatic experience or seeing it before their eyes.
Avoidance: Avoiding reminders of the traumatic event may include avoiding people, places, activities, objects and situations that may trigger distressing memories. People may try to avoid remembering or thinking about the traumatic event. They may resist talking about what happened or how they feel about it.
Alterations in cognition and mood: Inability to remember important aspects of the traumatic event, negative thoughts and feelings leading to ongoing and distorted beliefs about oneself or others (e.g., “I am bad,” “No one can be trusted”); distorted thoughts about the cause or consequences of the event leading to wrongly blaming self or other; ongoing fear, horror, anger, guilt or shame; much less interest in activities previously enjoyed; feeling detached or estranged from others; or being unable to exprience positive emotions (a void of happiness or satisfation).
Alterations in arousal and reactivity: Arousal and reactive symptoms may include being irritable and having angry outbursts; behaving recklessly or in a self-destructive way; being overly watchful of one’s surroundings in a suspecting way; being easily startled; or having problems concentrating or sleeping.
It’s my mind. I’m on my 9th day confined here in this box. The previous days I have more hours sleeping than awake. However, I have more waking hours now but I can’t spend too much time scrolling through my phone or staying at my computer because it gives me headaches.
So there are moments I just spend staring at the ceiling and walls. And remember.
A few days ago I discovered some stuff that J left behind that I should send back to him. I could just burn them but I have no means to do that here unless I want to burn the whole apartment compound down. I needed to purge him from my life. For my peace. I needed to do this exercise, this act of purging. It’s like this is with finality: I’m done grieving over you. I don’t want to have anything to do with you. I don’t want to remember you, just like when you erased me and pretended I didn’t exist.
I don’t want to die with this bitterness hanging over me. How he treated me like I was just a servant, a sugar mommy, and how I just accepted a small nugget of affection, which I thought was love. In his eyes, if something was wrong it was always my fault. Everything was my fault. I get blamed for so many things even when I tried my very best.
Having lived through Covid gives me a new perspective. Choose people who choose you. I now realize many people love me. They kept sending me food and medicines. They’ve been sending me help. One friend even offered to look after my kids if I’m taken away by the LGU.
I don’t have to beg. I don’t have to fight so hard for it. Love that is not freely given is not worth fighting for. This person, J, is not even worth fighting for. That person is not worth remembering.
For months I’ve grieved for somebody who didn’t even grieve for me. Who never regretted hurting me. I nearly went out of my mind because of somebody who was not even nice to me.
I asked this here one time: if I no longer exist in memory, do I no longer exist? Now I flip it: Yes, if he doesn’t exist in my memory, then he no longer exists. He does not deserve to occupy precious space in my head and heart and I must make more space for more beautiful memories with people who genuinely love me and who would fight for me until the end.
I am sleeping better the last few nights compared to the previous weeks when I wake up almost every hour. The pain was just too much that it has completely wrecked my body clock. My body is now recuperating by sleeping every chance I get during my leave from work.
Lying on my bed before falling off to sleep, be it night or day, gave me a chance to ruminate over the things that happened recently. J’s recent behavior made me question everything about him and everything that went on between us. I probably put him too high on a pedestal that’s why I didn’t question things that I should have. Now, I am questioning whether there was some truth in the sexual harassment case against him in his last firm. When he told me about it after he was stripped off of his company phone and company laptop when he was forced to go on garden leave, I totally accepted that it was false accusation and that it was an injustice and that they just wanted him out of the company.
Now the way he pursued this kid from within my circle sounds so carnal. As one of my friends said, he is scary creepy.
It puts things in a new light that I haven’t viewed before.
Maybe his scary creepy behavior would be ok for some local woman/girl who wants to snag a foreigner boyfriend to milk or wants him as her ticket to going abroad and out of poverty.
Maybe I was too blind, gave him too much credit. Excused him too many times. I believed in him so much that I ignored everything else.
I don’t know what else to think. I wish he would leave the country soon so he could stop hurting me. This city is too small for the both of us.
I want my sleep back. I want my sanity back. I want peace. I want to stop hurting.
The world around me is collapsing; everything is on fire and yet this administration is doing nothing but politicking and ransacking the coffers. The healthcare workers are going on strike tomorrow. Our foreign debt has gone into trillions but we couldn’t see where the proceeds of those debt went to. No vaccines, no wide testing, no effective contact tracing. Those useless face shields are sources of corruption. Every corner of this administration was flagged by the state auditor.
I have to admit that the latest discovery about him chasing the kid in my circle hit me so hard like I was back to square one, like back in December-January. I had avoided him all these months and yet he is still capable of killing me several times over. How many times do I have to die?
I don’t deserve this pain. I don’t deserve this. I’ve tried so hard to claw my way back up and be normal again. But no, he pushed me back into that dark pit again. It took me days to feel a little bit myself again.
What my friends pointed out though is that with his latest antics, he sounds desperate–enough to chase shallowness (the kid) and not to mention creepy. If a much older guy goes pestering us on chat and goes personal, automatically we would think he is a dirty old man (DOM) and I’ve had my share of those kinds in my business. And J’s impulsiveness now has ruined his reputation within my circle. Even though I chose to remain silent, I can’t say the same for my friends and that girl’s friends and everybody else in my circle. They know who he was to me. We belonged in one trade organization anyway, where everyone knows everybody’s business. It also includes some of the country’s biggest publicists as affiliates.
I can’t do anything about it. He brought it upon himself.
It’s really, really painful. It put me down for a while and I got physically sick. I had to have myself checked and had to go through some tests. Well, the results of my lab tests aren’t pretty, based on the ranges as some of my numbers were out of range. I don’t know how my ECG fared so I would only know when I have my next check up.
I swear, I will be back on the saddle and will put on my running shoes again and do cross-training. I will be back to climbing mountains in no time.
I swear I will rise from this darkness. I swear you will regret everything.
