---

Sunset
To
Sunrise
To
Sunset

After all that’s said
Your words still bleed into me

Rage and war
Rising inside
I was your whore
How I want to die

Tears fall
I hear the screams
Inside myself
Down a hollow hall
I go down this road again
Through a clotted rotted hell

I was your prize
Your sacrifice
At the altar of your greed
I would have given anything for you
To you

You took me apart
Purged me of myself
Put me together again
Wrong
Different
Empty
You only gave me
The nothingness of lies

I lay with them
For that’s the only thing I know
I bled for them
I have given them my soul
Piece by piece
Little tears fall silently off my face
They kiss the ground with each drop

Your deceitful words dressed up like lace
I search for love from your lips
But what did it cost you?
You see nothing wrong, your mind is free
Even though you know
They took everything from me

---

Link to some great ideas (besides losing weight😁)

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/healthy-new-years-resolutions_n_583da7c7e4b0860d61167b8e

I gave

(Everything)

You took

(Everything)

(almost?)

You left me The Nothing

Maybe I am more

Then you took from me

Because you took and took

Everything

(almost)

Maybe something left behind

A grain of sand

A drop of water

The last sliver of myself to give

Will this be enough?

To turn

The Nothing you left me

And build into Something

The power of being just me

Lately, I have been having a hard time sleeping. I have always struggled with sleep; falling asleep and staying asleep are both difficult. Once it starts getting dark, I start getting anxious. I watch the windows and am too aware that it’s dark outside and dark = sleep (eventually). I look into the dark outside and see things that I don’t want to-faces, places, memories, images. And somehow, when it’s dark, these things seems brighter, more easily defined by my eyes and brain. I try to keep busy. I feel tired after a day of pretending to be normal, of trying to keep up the rhythm of a normal life, and taking care of everyone around me. Being tired, even exhausted, both physically and mentally aren’t the problem when it comes to sleep.  I am tired, exhausted, spent (whatever term you’d like to use) by the end of the day and I desperately want to sleep. My brain is so very very tired. But each night, the same cycle repeats itself. It gets dark, it gets closer to bedtime, and I get anxious. It’s as though there’s a switch in my brain that goes from ON (because my brain is always running at full speed) to REALLY ON which is like my brain in hyperdrive. All of the thoughts and emotions I’ve suppressed all day long to ‘function’ and ‘be normal’ bubble up and I can barely stand the idea that I’ll have to tolerate one more night of twisting and turning, sweaty and panicky while everyone else in my house sleeps. I envy them. I listen to my husband breathe, I sometimes go and watch my children sleep, almost choked up with jealousy of how easy it is for them to fall asleep and stay asleep.

After much internally fighting with myself, I do fall asleep. It’s usually after a few hours of wrestling with my thoughts and fears and I finally drift off. After that, I normally wake up after about an hour. I have nightmares that I’m being choked, I can’t breathe, I can’t move, someone is touching me, I’m trapped. I startle awake and every nerve in my body is screaming that I’m in danger, that I have to escape. I’ve soaked my sheets with sweat and my heart is racing so hard, I swear others would be able to hear it if they were awake. But they aren’t and I’m alone.

I get out of bed and pace, try to shake off that old echo from childhood that there is danger in every minute of the day. If I’m very lucky, I will be able to settle myself down with the hour. If I’m just lucky, it’s a few hours. If I’m unlucky, those feelings will turn into a flashback and there will be almost no sleep left for the night. If I am lucky enough to fall back to sleep, it begins again with another nightmare, more sensations of being in danger, more likely to have a flashback. Each time, I look at the clock and calculate how much sleep I can get if I go to sleep RIGHT NOW. But I never do and time marches forward until around 4 or 5am when I can finally drift off feeling safe enough to sleep. I wake for good around 7am groggy and my thoughts like mud. It takes most of the morning to shake off the night before.

I have read every article about how to improve sleep: no screen time, limit caffeine, change the appearance of your room, meditate before bed, tea, medications, mindfulness, tapping, and journaling just to name a few. I have a weighted blanket. I have my room at a warmer temperature because being cold is a trigger for me. I have my lavender right at my bedside so I can smell it all night long. I have done nightmare re-scripting, drawing of my nightmares to externalize it, creating a ‘hero’ image of myself that can act as a protector when I’m asleep. So far, no luck. I’ve gotten into the bad habit lately of going to bed later and later but honestly, why would any sane person want to go through this night after night? It’s torture and my own brain is the tormentor. It’s not as if you can escape your own brain, your own thoughts, your own memories. And that is ultimately the kicker, the final karmic bitch slap to being a trauma survivor, is that you can do everything that is asked of you. You can take your medications, go to therapy, take good care of yourself, and try everything possible to reduce your symptoms but sometimes, most times actually, the brain is an asshole. Because in the end, I can’t change what happened to me. I can’t write it away or color it away or distract away from the fact that I had a shitty childhood and adolescence. I practice acceptance but the inside piece of me that is little is just so hurt and so scared and needs so much care and she won’t let this go. She will be heard. She doesn’t want to forget that this happened and howls with the thought that this pain will be forgotten, tucked away in a corner somewhere. I honor that piece, or at least I’m starting too because she went through some bad shit. At the same time, I could really use some sleep. My therapist tells me this is a way for survivors to stay hypervigilant or hyper alert. When I start to relax my brains says, Hell no!, and triggers me so I stay alert to any danger. When I wake up now, I am supposed to tell myself that I don’t need this protection and that we are safe. She says if I can improve 2% week to week, she will be pleased and this will be progress. She may be pleased but I’m not, I want this to go faster. If I’m honest with myself, really and truly, underneath it all, I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel like my guard should be down and this was a revelation to me because I hadn’t thought about it that way before but it’s true. The world seems like a dark and dangerous place to me and I have to be ready.

What does that mean? It means the foundation work has not been done. I need to go way back, back to basics, and work on feeling safe because for a survivor if there’s no sense of safety, there is no progress. I guess I skipped that part. This I know about myself, I want a shortcut, I want to get better yesterday and I hate that healing isn’t a straight line and almost never continues forward. There are regressions and side trails to this journey that can never be prepped for. It’s maddeningly frustrating for me as a control freak. But I need to work on that too.

I write this because a lot of people take sleep for granted. Only those who had experienced insomnia either short term of long term will understand the fear and anxiety that comes when you watch the clock keep going forward and realize your window for sleep is almost gone and there won’t be any chance for rest for a long time. There’s also that tiny voice that nags at you, quietly, that maybe sleep will never come again. My very first therapist said lack of sleep never killed anyone and this is one of the reasons she is not my therapist anymore. Because lack of sleep can kill people, but the reason is listed as heart attack or alcoholism or suicide. It’s an insidious thing that doesn’t get enough attention. So, if you can’t sleep and like me feel hopelessly locked in this vicious cycle, talk to someone, get some help, reach out. Just like me, even in the midst of the dark, the hopelessness, the nothingness of insomnia there is always room for progress.

“Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing.

It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.

It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.

A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.

It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.

It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.

It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.

It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.”

-Brianna Wiest

For a lot of us, the holidays are a struggle. From isolation, too much stimulation, too much stress, trauma anniversaries, or being triggered, this is not the happiest time of year. I include myself in this category.

Know that you’re not alone.

Ive put a link below with a lot of helpful hints & articles all in one place. My best advice is know your limits & boundaries & stick to them the best you can.

Sending out peace on a day like today that can be so tough.

https://psychcentral.com/holidays/

On that day I wore my favorite purple underwear

for the sole purpose of knowing I was wearing them.

And underneath that?

I was naked.

The only barrier was that thin cotton

And under

And under I’ve got skin.

Miles and miles of skin

I’ve got skin to cover all my secrets like plastic

that you can see through to what leftovers are inside from the time before.

And despite what you thought,

my skin is not rough, nor is it bullet proof.

My skin is soft smooth easily scarred.

But that didn’t matter

You didn’t care about how soft my skin was

You just use your hands and fingers

You just want to tear into me

with your fingers

And mouth and teeth

Prying me open

Relentless. Pushing. Violating.

Lifting my chin (please save me)

Why?

So I can see lightning through the clouds?

What if all I crave is to swing high as a bird for a taste of fresher air?

What if all I reach for is a notebook to write in, not a hand to hold?

But that’s not the story you want.

You are licking your lips and baring your teeth.

Gleam in your eyes. Possession.

Just once I would like to go in the direction everyone else is

I don’t want to be the water in the well.

I don’t want to be the well.

I’d like to not be the ground anymore

I’d like not to be the thing people dig their hands in

Something they can own

Trigger warning: discussion of suicide

I wrote this a few years ago while I was on an inpatient unit. I share this so that others who experience this won’t feel so alone & give others a view into what a major depressive episode is like:

I am sitting in an inpatient psychiatric unit. The doors are locked and there’s no escape. They check on us all day & night, invading my room with their intrusive bright lights to make sure I haven’t hung myself with contraband dental floss. There is a woman screaming somewhere on the unit, about what I don’t know and I’m not sure she does either. We are not allowed anything that’s considered Sharp so I write this with a crayon. How did I get here? How did things get so bad? The color has been bled from the world and what is left is monochromatic, full of nothing but various shades of gray. I always thought it would be worse when there was full darkness but now I know that isn’t true because if it was dark I wouldn’t be able to see anything at all. The gray has sucked all the joy out of my world, food tastes like dust, there is no happiness, no desires to be had.This is the death of joy and has been replaced with an unending numbness. I am tired of this mask that I wear to make others happy. I am tired of pretending and I have no more energy for it. I want to die. I don’t want this life that is full of pain and horrors that jump at me unendingly. People will say my death by suicide is selfish but they don’t understand That the pain, unseen, invisible, is just as potent as a terminal illness. Suicidal thoughts are a terminal illness, a disease, Rust on the soul. People say words like ‘commit suicide’ as if it’s a crime and maybe it is But I have to ask how long do I have to be punished with this life? When do I get The relief of darkness? People will say that I have a great life, looking from the outside and base their judgments of me on that. No one wants to look below the mask, the skin that covers my life because the horrors that are under are unspeakable. Instead, when I am gone they’ll cluck their tongues & say ‘what a waste, such a selfish girl’ or ‘how could I have not seen this coming?’. Useless statements and feelings said to make the person feel better because people who are suicidal always give the signals that we are drowning. It’s just that No one cares enough to throw us a life vest. In group they asked what our favorite animal is, as though we are preschoolers sitting on brightly colored squares of rug but in reality are placed in utility gray chairs. ‘An octopus’ I say ‘because they’re clever’ but really it’s because I’ve only seen them enclosed in a tank always searching for a way out with their long tentacles. They are clever but they’ll never escape. Like me. I am trapped and as many times as I reach out, I only touch emptiness. The thought of death is seductive, full dark. No moon or stars. Quiet. Peace. The shrinks can’t sell me on any medication that’ll give me that relief. But they try. They peddle their currency which is hope but I have none of that left & dont care to borrow from anyone anymore. I’m sitting in an inpatient psychiatric unit. There is a woman screaming somewhere on the unit, about what I don’t know and I’m not sure she does either. The staff turn away from her howling despair with blank smiles as they discuss banal subjects like the weather with each other. The analogy to real life is almost unbearably painful.