nccotus

used to be at 200 am. I just know it. For the longest time I used to wonder about 2 am and why it scared me.

a couple of weeks ago my new psych provider asked about my OCD and one thing I was able to describe was how I jumped from my bedroom door at bedtime onto the rug and then up onto my bed and pulled the sheets up to my neck and pulled my hands under the covers. And stayed like that for a while. Gifted kids can be that way. Obviously it suggested that I might have been being abused. More to the point is that, at age 63, after 42 years in and out of psychotherapy, I never shared that with any care provider.

what comes next is pretty awful.

about staying home from school–grade school–in New Providence, NJ in the 60’s. I just have to release this. No, nothing happened. First of all, every day, waking up to the alarm felt like poison, dread and fear. Somehow I got up. Dreamt of sending a robot to school, Once I got there I was in my school personality and was okay. At night, in my mind, I saw faces peering into the windows–the neighbors. I tried to die in my mind. For a very short period I dreamed of walking on my parents graves. That was my self- soothing.

but, the worst was when my mother let me stay home from school. she would ask me to make the decision and make it clear that it was my decision. Of course, I decided to stay home. It took moments. Maybe a half hour. Maybe an hour before I was ready to die myself as I started to say to myself oh no, not again, as that familiar feeling of disintegrating as if I was being disrobed of myself it’s so heard to explain but it was pure horrible pain. It understand now that this feeling I had held hidden and away and apart needed or needs to be up and up, instead, in other words, the opposite. Similarly the horrific pain at the Lodge Program at the State Hospital after the clamped catheter ICU incident in the 80’s. In other words after a brief springtime in my soul and then some terrifying stuff, the sheer shock of that ICU pain had me paralyzed a year later for several months before I fell into a relationship with someone who was willing to hold me for a bit.

Tonight I sent a message to my ex-husband, my son and my father who is 93 now: “Back in th High Life” by Steve Winwood from the 80’s. It is such a beautiful song and hit me so hard at the state hospital (where they had just gotten MTV!), in the 80’s. A recent New York City/New Jersey urbanite in high society but in failure trapped in a subtle and lovely community PA Dutch country pumpkins with no apparent possible return.

That widened my hi-low social/behavioral/mental/appearance et cetera status

from a subtlety to a gross gap of my own making that i have since fallen into.

I did not have the education to make proper choices about my life so they were chosen for me. By my husband over my family.

an infant tortured being doesn’t have a lot of status to make choices but I was guided to hang on to this son of an officer in the Canadian military in World War II to make a marriage that made sense. A marriage that allowed me to sleep at night outside a hospital.