Haze Of Horror

[Dorian Gray]

A haze winds through my thoughts and emotions, separating my true self from them. This haze seems to intersperse ideas of its own, whispered thoughts that suggest my true desire is for my own demise. It is gray, light, and thin, but substantial enough to obscure me from connecting with my own reality.

At least, it's like that on bad days, like today.

On a good day, I feel my feet firmly planted; my favorite music tells my story; there is hope, light, and promise, and I am one--heart beating in time with the Universe. Awake.

I've only been recently diagnosed with PTSD (about 3 weeks ago), and am shocked at how well the symptoms fit my own. It is both a relief and a fact that makes me unfathomably angry. Am I crippled, forever? Will I never get better? Will my life become nothing more than an exercise in managing my condition? Do I need to accept my own limitations?

My ever-present anxiety ruins so many beautiful moments.

 

[atthree]

I've had so many beautiful moments, that I thought my anxiety ruined at the time. I reflect back on not knowing I had PTSD and the people that were involved. We evolve by forgiving the sap of a tree for leaving :)

 

[Dorian Gray]

Thank you for reading, @atthree .

We evolve by forgiving the sap of a tree for leaving :)

This metaphor is wonderful. I will remember it in times of great distress.
My diagnosis explains so many frustrating and confusing moments. I hope that it brings clarity so that I too may someday be able to reflect back from a seat of knowledge rather than bewilderment.

 

[atthree]

"A haze winds through my thoughts and emotions, separating my true self from them. This haze seems to intersperse ideas of its own, whispered thoughts that suggest my true desire is for my own demise. It is gray, light, and thin, but substantial enough to obscure me from connecting with my own reality." What this sounds like is the spirit of a new day. Sap moves slow as well as forgiveness, think of the bugs that may get stuck in it :)

 

[Dorian Gray]

the dawn;
More terrifying than the night, if only for the uncertainty it holds. Solitude, misery, pain all hold their own weak and sallow comforts; but perhaps only the chance and promise of dawn can liberate us from our numb and hateful slumber.

I am reminded of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory with desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain...

 

[Dorian Gray]

My mother was a schizophrenic who had her first psychotic break when I was 4 years old; she was 33. An implied curse of inevitability hangs over me like a call to a slow, but sure, death march. I'm 33 now.

My condition is the worst it's ever been. Year of the Beast. The clouds are gathering. Days are passed acting; false; foggy, unsure. The memories come back in floods of dreams that leave me choking on their evil brine as I wake. Salt water in the lungs, the stuff of sleep. She never knew me as her own. Raped by metal instruments. You have to take your temperature so many times, and a mouth temperature isn't accurate. You are sick, always sick, so sick, look everyone! My poor child is so sick. The cold metal and the gasoline. An armpit temperature isn't accurate, you have to get more accurate! And be still! I don't care if you're 12. Be quiet

I once broke a thermometer and played with the arsenic. I wanted to eat it to purge myself of the shame. I will eat all the shames and become the great devourer of my own agony. It's a self-containing cycle. Plug all the orifices and let no input out and no input in. Hide the shame, digest the shame, conceal the shame. Let it live only in me, unknown to others. Let it wash through me like acid! It burns through every vein in my body, scorching my skin with its heat, begging to surface, yearning to spray those in proximity, wounding, destroying, disfiguring.

A release of the foulest kind. I am monster and Light's Bane. Cross me not or you shall know of my true pain.

 

[Dorian Gray]

This is very difficult, but I must record these things to get better. Each word spoken aloud takes some of the power away.

Age 7 or 8: I was scolded in class for talking out of turn, and immediately hid under the desk, crying and shaking. I was terrified that the teacher would beat me mercilessly as my mother often did for some imagined wrongdoing. The teacher was annoyed and frustrated at my behaviour. Wasn't it clear what was going on? I wouldn't tell on pain of more severe beatings.

Would sit in my room, quiet, stilling even my breath, so I could trace her footfalls throughout the house. As she would approach, my stomach would go cold and drop. There isn't anywhere to hide in a house.

Getting beaten for getting my new shoes dirty playing with friends. I knew when I came back to the house that something would happen. And I wasn't allowed to go play after that

Just locked in the smoky, filthy house. Eventually I nearly died from double pneumonitis from the air quality being so bad. I was in a bubble, in the hospital, for over a week; I remember being so weak and ragged. I couldn't touch anyone through the bubble

Books were stacked everywhere, yellowing from the cigarette smoke that pervaded the house. Spills were left uncleaned; dishes undone; mold pervaded underneath all. Windows and doors were kept tightly shut.

Some of the books were full of obscenities, random obscenities scrawled by my mother during one of her breaks (it wasn't until later that she would begin writing on the walls too)

 

[Echo]

@Dorian - hi, what you are doing here is so brave. These were awful things that you had to experience. I just want you to know that I hear you. The real you is a survivor and it did not touch into your soul. I hope it helps you to share.

 

[Dorian Gray]

Thanks for reading and responding, @Echo. I'm still trying to uncover any fragment of soul that may remain under both the trauma caused to me, and the the trauma I subsequently caused myself in response. I hope you're right :-)

 

[Dorian Gray]

My mother's severe and untreated schizophrenia made her so unstable that the slightest thing could set her off. And by set her off, I mean transform her from a fairly mild-mannered, hippie-ish type into a teeth clenched, eyes full of wildfire, obscenity-spewing, knife-wielding terror. Anything could do it, and since I was locked in the house with her most of the time, my "behavior" was often the thing that set her off.

Several of thousands of examples come readily to mind:
She had developed a thing for hair picks for her awful perm, accused me of hiding them or taking them (she must have had 20 or more, in all different colors), hit me across the face repeatedly until my lip split, located a pick, and then proceeded to beat me with that. I had these weird pick mark bruises everywhere, defensive ones on my arms even. That was hard to explain away at school.

My bottom front left tooth has a chip taken out of it from where she struck me with a ring on. I was instructed to "brush it away" or be beaten. Of course I couldn't brush it away. I attempted to leave the house and was physically blocked, I attempted to go to my room and was physically blocked, and eventually submitted to an evening of brushing my teeth until my gums bled. I was a terrible, ungrateful waste. All the money spent on orthodontist work! Later she beat me anyway--I had somehow caused this chip and refused to brush it away.

I have a thousand stories of this, a childhood given over to systematic psychological torture. I was forced to play a sick woman's games, and they nearly cost me my life on several occasions. I'm having a difficult time recounting the more gruesome of the "games," but I hope to get to a place where I can. The sexual ones are the worst.

In her mind (at least, what I can infer), my transgressions (of which, I assure you, due to fear were nearly non-existent) were the justification for all of these sick and violent behaviors acted out on my person. She would then proceed to tell my father (who was never there) what an awful, sickly, and deviant child I was. My father believed her (or was it just indifference?) and generally gave me the cold shoulder.

Later, when it was well-established that she was, indeed, bat-s&#t crazy, my father believed me--but he still left the house when she would go into a break. He just walked away. And left me as the target of her aggressions. Later, in my early 20s, when I had finally escaped, he had the nerve to complain that since I had left, she was focusing on him. He called me in a panic once as he had awakened to her standing over him with a drill, staring at him. He started locking the door to the guest bedroom and sleeping in there. What I wouldn't have given for a lock on my door as a child! It's hard to feel any sympathy for him, but I am presently helping him manage his affairs. I'm not sure why I'm doing that. It is probably not good for me, psychologically.

My mother has gone missing. Neither the police nor the hospitals have any record of her. I flew out to my hometown last year to stage an intervention for her. It failed. My last memory is of her walking across traffic away from the gas station where I was parked, smiling and waving at me.

I need to stop now, as a sense of despair and worthlessness is creeping up through my body and manifesting as leaden limbs and a stomachache. But this is good. I will try to write as much as I can.