Emergent

I woke in the night, high on NyQuil, and the whole dark room was solid, solid with noise and memory, crystalline and I crawled into it, crawled and burrowed, was cold and forgiven. Into dreams of such specific, such full rooms. Dreams of rooms already burned, rooms always hidden behind vein and ventricle and always, deeply, known. 

This morning, 70 degrees; skin shocked, still thinks it’s huddling in winter’s blade of a house.

But on our walk instead, in the soil, half-formed wounds from blades of bud. H stops to touch the pavement next to a bed of bluebells raw as new skin. Both hands planted, squatting. “Hot”. He points to his shadow, which he calls “daddy”. 

Lately I am trying to let my own wounds re-form, re-open, re-emerge. I have to so that I can tend to them. It is a difficult thing, when I have attended to merely hiding them for so many years. 

This morning, I was so angry at a business owner who had pushed a glossy flier through our mail slot like a bright vector of virus that I wrote him a flaming-arrow email. Ten minutes later I wrote him an apology email, explaining how scared I was. This is where I am right now. Honor every impulse. 

Where I want to be is—honor every impulse without necessarily acting on it. But I figure you have to let the impulses actually show themselves first. 

And this should not be too hard, theoretically. My adult, functioning life—the front part of my brain that generally operates at a generally acceptable level for our society—is just plastered on top of the old rot that still festers in the back rooms. 

Or, to use another metaphor, to get through my days is to tiptoe on the edge of ruts worn by trauma. It’s hard, walking on these old roads. I’m white-knuckling it pretty much always. Meds have helped. I remember when I started one trusty mood stabilizer thinking that it kind of…added space between thoughts that usually hurtled. Turns out, it gave me space to function, but not quite to heal. In this quietest emergency, safe at home, I am trying to give myself that space.

It’s easy to think that the band-aid is more important than the wounds. The wounds are inconvenient, truly. I think after 8 or so years of living with me, my husband finally gets how hard I have to work to keep up a basic level of household cleanliness. Gets that it takes actual real energy to remember, plan for, and execute. What I’m only belatedly willing to admit is that this applies to nearly every part of my life. Emotional regulation, impulse control, general executive functioning, moderating compulsive/addictive behaviors…everything. 

It’s only worse right now. My sister wrote a facebook post recently discussing how, for people with C-PTSD, or AHDH, or similar illnesses that create problems with executive functioning, the somewhat complex processes we need to follow right now (pick the mail up, no put gloves on first, no wash hands first, or after, and should the coat go in the closet or stay outside) are deeply difficult and stressful in and of themselves. 

Like, my weekly goals really, and long before social distancing made this kind of muddled existence a meme, do include “take showers daily”. I battle uphill and with real seriousness against mountains of clothes I can’t seem to reliably put away. Is it any fucking wonder I am stressed about someone pushing a flier through my mail slot? (For that matter, any wonder that I’m still chasing that first book publication?)

Anyway this: I’m in a perpetual state of overload. And I’m just… I’m laying that bare now. Here. In this little room-blog. 

I still, after all of these years, have a hard time coping day to day. I hope it will be less tiring to stop hiding it.

 I’ve also been sick for two weeks, and H was sick too, and this only bares me further—I can’t be the only one who cries more when sick.

The telehealth doctor who barely listened to me didn’t think it was covid, it’s probably bronchitis, but it doesn’t really matter, does it? I’m staying at home anyway, I’m not an essential worker, I’m not sick enough to need attention. Illinois has no tests. So really, it doesn’t matter. Really. But of course it does. Of course there’s extra emergency threaded through my days.

It was not this morning, but these days repeat don’t they, aren’t those the memes, it’s blursday maypril 40th, and anyway don’t some of us already live in every past day, daily pace every past room. 

This morning then. Or the one last week. The small emergency of a toddler's tiny, confused face just before he projectile-vomits; the small emergency of my husband taking my temperature when I woke short of breath. Now the small eruptions of spring, too; all starker against this actual, particular morning. The thunderstorm literally brewing, coming for us this afternoon, throws our little rooms into relief. 

But here I am, inside, staving it off in spring’s emerging violence. And here I am too, I’m trying to listen, kind doctor to the part of me that is sounding the alarm.