It's a miracle I'm even alive... How bout you?

[Ecdysis]

I realised something today... It's a thought I've had before, but it's never quite hit home the way it has today...

It's a miracle I'm even alive anymore...

There have been so many situations during childhood of abuse, violence and profound neglect, and so many instances since of suicide attempts, trauma-related medical issues, self-neglect... By all rights, I shouldn't even be here anymore...

Today, I'm finding that thought liberating... Realising that the life I have now (even tho it's full of difficulties, challenges and burdens which are often too heavy for me to carry anymore)... Is a "bonus"... There was no way that I ever thought I'd make it to this age...

I'm finding that thought freeing today...

Yes, my body is a mess from all the trauma and its long-term effects... But the fact that I'm still breathing, able to walk on most days and that my chronic pain is at least bearable is, well... a miracle...

So many things about my life are a real shitshow right now... But I'm not homeless, I have food in the fridge, I have heating, I have a safe place to sleep at night... Those things are not... what was to be expected... I shouldn't take any of it for granted...

Usually, I feel like I'm failing at "normal life"... I berate and blame and shame myself for not being able to establish a "normal life" after all the trauma... Today, I'm thinking I can't even believe I survived the trauma at all...

I don't know why, but it's filling me with a deep sense of liberation today... Like I can free myself of all those internal and external expectations of what I "should" be doing... There are no shoulds... I'm alive against all odds and that's it...

I get to choose what I do with this unlikely new lease on life... which for all intents and purposes is a pure fluke...

I do feel like an idiot for not understanding this sooner... For always hyper-focussing on the loss and what got broken... For always seeing how things "could've been better"... Why couldn't I shift that perspective before? Why couldn't I see that me surviving at all was against all odds? And that that's a gift, a blessing? It's like PTSD had me in a trance, just hyper-fixated on the loss and reliving the trauma over and over and over and over...

 

[Teasel]

It’s a pretty wonderful shift in perspective innit. Focusing on what you have instead of what you lost.

 

[enough]

tomorrow i go in for a procedure that is non life threatening and i know i will be told “this might hurt” a dozen times and i will say “ do your worste, i have given up the will to resist” and they will laugh but i mean it. So many emergency surgeries, so many days in hospitals that i know what the drill is and why even register the pain, why flinch, why be nervous? Been there, done that, went home after.
It made me a great first responder, when i saw that surprised look in the eyes if a victim of trauma i knew where they were, and worse, when it was the shock shut down look i knew what that meant too.
Yep. I owe medical science a lot, at least to be a complacent easy calm patient tomorrow. Got this.

 

[Lost in the Woods]

I am constantly amazed that I am alive. The crowd I ran with had a high mortality rate. Motorcycle racing, drugs, alcohol, sailing accidents, and suicide. I feel like the guy in Apocalypse Now walking around the beach ranting about surfing while bombs are going off all around him. It is one of the few times I ask myself why me. I have no idea why but I think I just have a strong survival instinct. I think it is just fate. My fate is to suffer longer and maybe, just maybe, learn something from it all before I evaporate into nothingness.

 

[Friday]

<grin> The best years of my life are when I had the mindset that ALL THIS? Is extra. So make it amazing. Make it mine.

 

[Lost in the Woods]

<grin> The best years of my life are when I had the mindset that ALL THIS? Is extra. So make it amazing. Make it mine.

That is indeed what it feels like.

 

[arfie]

i feel like the powers that be assigned a special troop of angels to get me through my childhood. enough so that i earnestly believe it is realistic for me to expect miracles. the accident that didn't happen. . . the disaster averted outside my awareness. the small evolutions which heal, day by day.

I do feel like an idiot for not understanding this sooner...

"there is a fine line between genius and idiocy." ~albert einstein

nothing in life is obvious until we take note of it. it is hard to notice much of anything while you are in pain.

 

[Sues]

There is so much for me. Too much. All I can say right now is, me too.

 

[Lost in the Woods]

You know we are all very lucky. First off that we are alive. Second, our circumstances have forced us to engage in a lot more self reflection than most never do. Through our adversity we grow in ways so called normal people never have the opportunity to do. Painful, extremely so. But what we gain is beyond what so called normal people ever know exists. It really is an amazing adventure.

 

[enough]

been counting and I am up to 5 medical interventions that saved my life now. And lots of others that saved me from injuries that technically would have killed me but death was not imminent. My birth was traumatic and I needed to be saved, does that count? 6.
All of this hand shaking with death does make me aware that this is bonus time, but I am far from playing with the houses money over here, I think having to work so hard so many times has made me very aware of threats to what I have earned, bonus or not. When the threat comes in the form of a threat that I have seen take another life, I get a little cranky. I am absolutely the worst person I know of for shaking off a near miss in traffic, I have to compare it to the reactions I have seen in survivors of extreme violence, even gun shot victims. With a straight face and full knowledge of the implications I tell therapists that a close call in traffic makes me feel like I just had a shotgun pointed at my neck.
When you have damned near lost it, when you have had to work hard to keep it, when you feel like it is the most important thing you have because you have been shown over and over that it truly is, threats against your hard earned life are not taken lightly, and the instinct to react in strong and unrelenting battle against them is multiplied I think. It is in me for sure

 

[Lost in the Woods]

been counting and I am up to 5 medical interventions that saved my life now. And lots of others that saved me from injuries that technically would have killed me but death was not imminent. My birth was traumatic and I needed to be saved, does that count? 6.
All of this hand shaking with death does make me aware that this is bonus time, but I am far from playing with the houses money over here, I think having to work so hard so many times has made me very aware of threats to what I have earned, bonus or not. When the threat comes in the form of a threat that I have seen take another life, I get a little cranky. I am absolutely the worst person I know of for shaking off a near miss in traffic, I have to compare it to the reactions I have seen in survivors of extreme violence, even gun shot victims. With a straight face and full knowledge of the implications I tell therapists that a close call in traffic makes me feel like I just had a shotgun pointed at my neck.
When you have damned near lost it, when you have had to work hard to keep it, when you feel like it is the most important thing you have because you have been shown over and over that it truly is, threats against your hard earned life are not taken lightly, and the instinct to react in strong and unrelenting battle against them is multiplied I think. It is in me for sure

Interesting, Stan Grof a psychiatrist wrote a lot about trauma in the birth process and how it impairs us psychologically. It has been 30 years since I read any of Stan’s stuff but I recall that trauma in different stages of the birth process causes different but consistent personality traits. I wonder if what he was really seeing was PTSD resulting from trauma in the birth process.