part 120, or "seriously? i STILL live here?"

DISCLAIMER: I DON’T EVEN OWN A GUN, AND EVEN IF I DID, I HAVE NO DESIRE TO ACTUALLY KILL OR HURT ANYONE, INCLUDING MYSELF AND THE PEOPLE WHO RAPED ME.

I had an “episode” last week that really scared me. I was trying to accept that I might never be able to leave this shitty town. The reason I was doing that is because if I can imagine the worst possible scenario and determine if I can live with it, then all the other possible scenarios are much less frightening.

The bad thing was that, this time, I was considering the idea that I cannot live with the worst possible scenario, and my mind just kind of took some loops and twirls, and I didn’t (or couldn’t) say anything for over an hour. I was out with Jonny when it happened, and I am really glad he was with me, because I don’t know if I would have been able to get myself home in that state.

All I could do was just sit there and cry. Not the wracking, heaving, gut-wrenching crying, but the kind where my face stays blank and the tears simply fall from my eyes like drops of water leaking from a sink.

I was stuck in this mode of trying to reconcile how I would be able to stay in this town, and the only thing I could come up with was getting a gun and killing my mom and her rapist, pedophiliac, enabling neighbors. That was the only solution I could come up with that made me feel calmer.

It was a lot like right before I went into the hospital (almost exactly five years ago! Time flies when you’re painstakingly reconstructing your own sense of reality), when all I could do to keep my mind from breaking completely was plan how I was going to kill my dad.

I started out writing about killing my dad – this was also when I was still drinking (a LOT), and I would journal the graphic details of what my dad’s blood would look like spreading in a puddle around his head after I bashed his skull in with a baseball bat. It is a very fuzzy time, and I have never re-read those journals, but I do remember focusing on the stain his blood would leave on my cement driveway, and how it would have to be pressure-washed to get rid of it, and how I was never going to pressure-wash it because I wanted it to help me remember he was gone.

This obsessing about how I was going to kill my dad went on and on and on, and eventually grew into a solid plan to kill my dad, and I couldn’t help from actually planning to do it, because it was the only way my mind would stop screaming. I mean, I was really, really drunk most of that time period, but alcohol is no match for the screaming my mind can dole out.

So I kept obsessing and planning to go kill my dad.

I feel very fortunate that I was able to go to the hospital instead of actually killing my dad, and he ended up kicking his own self off a few years after that when his evil heart exploded. I am truly grateful that I have a pic of my dead dad to remind me he is gone, instead of a blood stain on my driveway…and hatch marks on my prison cell wall.

Needless to say, the obsessing about killing my dad was ongoing and very intense and very real to me. This “episode” I experienced last week, however, only lasted about an hour, and then I went into my super-stressed-out-sleep mode, and when I woke up, I felt better.

The thing about this “episode” last week is that my brain did not stay fixated on how I was going to kill these assholes, and how peaceful it would feel once they were dead. My mind kept going back to my husband and my kids, and how shitty it would be if I went on a murder spree to make myself feel better, and then left them behind in the wake of madness and violence. Seriously – that would be a tremendously shitty thing for me to do, as a mom, a partner, and a person.

So I never got to the point in this latest episode when killing people was going to become a real thing for me – it stayed on the side of fantasy, and the reason I was just dripping tears out the whole time was because the rest of me remained in reality, thinking about how shitty it would be to bail on my husband and my kids by getting sent to prison for however long.

I didn’t recognize this until after I had my stress-overload-relief nap, when my head was cleared up again. When I did realize it, I felt a lot more confident (and relief) in my ability to reason in a manner that is most conducive to my own health, and to the welfare of my husband and kids.

With my dad, I didn’t have that. At all. Hence, the mental hospital, and the awesomeness of him dying on his own without my interference.

Side note: I had a hard time deciding whether or not I would even write about this – I mean, the shit’s crazy. End side note.

I look back at the things that have changed, and the factors in my life that are very different now than when I went in the hospital, and I realized that I am probably going to be dealing with the effects of my experiences for the rest of my life, but that those experiences can’t dictate my actions any more, as long as I keep working to find a place I can feel safe, physically and mentally.

I have reached a point where I am afraid I can no longer compensate for my fears associated with this town. I have maintained a kind of plateau for a while, where I have been able to work at getting my feet on the ground while using coping techniques I learned in the hospital and in therapy and from other people, but I have run out of time trying to move forward in my recovery while still being here, where it all happened.

This trapped feeling is not good. When I am trapped, I check out in my mind – I dissociate. Completely. The scariest part of completely dissociating is that my body keeps on functioning separately from my brain, and I am so scared of whatever evil is still a part of me would do if I have no way of defending myself (or anyone else) against it.

That has always been one of my biggest fears, and I do get kind of nervous about it still – about the idea that I could just snap and do all kinds of weird and fucked up shit to all kinds of people without being consciously aware of what was happening.

The thing is, I’ve never attacked anyone or stolen anything or walked off a cliff or wandered down the street completely naked, while in a complete state of dissociation. These are things I have always been worried that I would do, but I haven’t done them.

Most of my dissociative states are not so completely removed from what is happening around me than an actual complete dissociative state. I am usually still with myself, though there are varying degrees of the level of being “present” at those times. I don’t know of a time when I was dealing with something life-threatening while completely dissociated.

My typical states of complete dissociation involve my simply spacing out – this actually happens a lot, but not for any extended amount of time (maybe ten minutes, at most). If I am driving, I will keep driving on autopilot, and just keep going and going until I snap out of it. This typically happens when I am on the interstate, or great lengths of highways or roads that don’t have any stop signs or traffic lights.

Stop signs and traffic lights, for some reason, usually bring me right back, but I have to look all around me and figure out where I am. This is not such a problem when I stay in areas I am VERY familiar with. At worst, I will come to a stop sign or traffic light, and have some sense that I am supposed to turn or something, and I can’t remember if I’ve already turned or not while I was totally zoned, and then I have to remember where it is that I am going, and I can “re-route,” just like the GPS on my phone.

The GPS on my phone is SO much better at re-routing, though, so I use it a lot when I am traveling more than a few miles from home, or to places I haven’t driven to hundreds of times.

Anyway, total dissociation episodes have typically involved things like sideswiping mailboxes, and coming to in the middle of a conversation and I have no idea what I’ve been talking about (once I was actually screaming at a group of my friends – scary), or I find myself putting a box of cereal in the refrigerator or throwing out real dishes and other things that are not trash.

I haven’t ever had a complete state of dissociation in which I snapped and started killing people. Even planning to kill my dad involved part of my conscious, present mind, which is why I was able to go to the hospital instead of going to actually kill him. That was a close one, though.

I think what happened when I had my “episode” last week was that I felt completely trapped, and tried to go back to my previous methods of dealing with it in my mind. While it was really nice to imagine that all of these horrendous people were dead, I felt much more burdened by the idea that I would have to kill them myself in order to achieve that. Thinking about killing them myself – as an independent thought – is not terribly disturbing – I am pretty sure that this is something that all people think about sometimes. When it gets entangled in my feeling trapped, though, it starts to feel more like a necessity of survival, and that’s when it gets kind of fucked up.

I don’t know – I have been surviving in this shit hole for my whole life. While the idea of having to remain here forever is devastating, I know I can survive being here. It’s just what I do. I survive.

I want so much to LIVE, though, and that just isn’t going to happen in this town.