Sorry for the silence

My step-mother got really sick last year and I to0k a couple of months off to take care of her. It kind of put everything else in my life on hold, but of course now “everything” is back with a vengeance.

You know I had almost convinced myself that “everything” was over.

But it’s not over. It never will be over. And so I make this promise to any readers that I have left: this blog will exist as long as I do, because that is how long the abuse will affect me. There may be months and years when I don’t post, but I have finally come to realise that my Post Traumatic Stress Disorder isn’t going anywhere, and neither is this blog.

I’ve just been through a PTSD relapse.  I cannot describe how painful it was. Within days I was suicidal. I couldn’t sleep. When I did sleep I would have nightmares. Nightmares that I was physically trying to escape from my step-father and the standard nightmare of being stuck living with my mother and step-father.

What scared me the most about this relapse is that it didn’t respond to Dexamethasone – it always has before. This time around it was switching to Seroquel that finally put me to sleep (for two days) and snapped me out of it.

However I have realised that I am always going to be vulnerable in this area. I will always have a wound, and it is easily re-opened. And my step-father is living his nice middle-class life with his wife and two children that love him. There are no consequences for him. Sure he had to talk to the police twice (once twenty years ago and again in 2009) about the abuse, but that’s not justice for the crimes he has perpetrated.

I also live a nice middle-class life, albeit with this blackness that occasionally overwhelms me. I can fight. I have the brains, the skills, the contacts and the money to fight. So I am reneging on my decision not to file a civil suit.

I feel better when I am fighting.

The meaning of life

I’ve been feeling strange lately. I watched The Departed and I can’t get Leonardo Di Caprio’s character out of my head. His vulnerability really affected me.

I can’t attribute it to just the movie- I’ve seen it before, and it never had this effect. But this time it really got to me. It reminds me of when I was in my teens reading David Eddings and being so addicted the characters, their trials, their tribulations… They seemed to mean so much more than my own life – they had meaning where I felt I didn’t.

It reminds me of my early twenties when I went to raves and took drugs and hung out with drug dealers. I wanted my life to have excitement, to mean something. All the people around me seemed to have meaning in their life, whereas I felt I didn’t.

And now I feel that way again.

I feel like I’ve turned into a teenager fantasising about some celebrity, except the fantasy is of being someone else, not being with someone else.

So all this has been quite concerning. I feel like I’m going backwards. Turns out the antibiotics I’m taking interact with my antidepressant- making it less effective.

At least now I have a reason for feeling weird.

Nightmares again

I woke up at 4am screaming. Lucky hotel walls tend to be thick. I haven’t had such a lucid nightmare in about a month (which is a long time, as these things go), so it did shake me. I called down to reception and asked them to restock the minibar – with chocolate, not with alcohol. I was thinking this was the opportune time to try and break my chocolate/nightmare habit, but I just didn’t have the energy. The nightmare took it all from me.

My mum was driving me home. I was begging her not to, as I knew Robert was angry and that he was going to get violent. I was crying in the car, and she was just ignoring me (she did a lot of that in real life too). As we got out of the car I managed to escape to my cousin Andie’s house. This would be the place that I would try to escape to in real life, also. Although it always ended with my mother marching me back to the car and screaming abuse at me all the way home. Andie is younger than me, so I knew she couldn’t do anything to help me, but I was clutching at straws.

A feature of these nightmares is that I am stuck living with my parents. So when I got to Andie’s house I asked if I could live with her. She said No. I asked if I could stay two weeks, and she said yes, so at least I had a reprieve. Then a few dream like things happened, (which often repeat themselves in my dreams) – getting lost in the house that has so many bedrooms, ending up at the beach (water features a lot in my dreams), and then the two weeks were up and I had to go home.

My parents, in real life, never let me have a key to the house. Even though I was always the first to get home, I would often pick up my little sister from after school care and I’d use her key (which had pretty elephants on it). On the days that I didn’t pick her up I had to wade through the garden and under the house to find the hidden spare key. In this nightmare the spare key wasn’t there. I was desperate to get into the house before my stepfather got home so I could hide in my room. Hoping maybe that he would leave me alone. But I had to wait for him to come home to let me into the house.

In the dream I don’t know what happened next. I know I just woke screaming.

Tonight I went to a friend’s thirtieth. She used to be my best friend. She used to call me every night when I was down just to check that I was okay. She listened to my problems, and there were many.

I knew that for awhile our relationship had been one-sided. I knew that but I was in such a dark place that I was just coping on getting through. And anyway, I thought, it won’t always be like this. And isn’t that what friends are for?

Looking back it was obvious what was happening. I shouldn’t have been surprised at her outburst, at the horrible things she said to me, and that she wanted no more of our friendship.

And then she was gone.

Six months later she sent me a christmas card. A month or so later we went to the same movie and chatted outside. Then she invited me to her thirtieth. I was so sad to think of the friendship we had lost and confused as to whether I really wanted her as a friend.

During my last depressive event my doctor asked me if I had any close friends who I could perhaps talk to or maybe stay over. And I answered no, not really. Since that friendship ended I have been wary of relying on my friends too much, just incase one day they are not there.

The witches

They stood surrounding the bed screaming; their anger turning their faces a witch’s red. She cowered against the wall, sobbing. If she could have said anything, she would have said Sorry, and she certainly learnt to say that a lot afterwards. Though it took her a long time to realise she had nothing to be sorry for.

One of them; the head witch, slapped her. “You murderer!” the witch screeched. The girl sobbed even harder.

The facts were thus; the girl’s mother had been pregnant. Due to iron deficiencies she miscarried; it was certainly not the first time. Unfortunately it was during the time that the girl had first spoken of the sexual abuse by her step-father.

For fifteen years that girl believed she was a murderer.

That girl was me.

Physical illness vs mental illness

Well I have had the flu the last week and a half. I’ve hardly spoken to anyone (well I did lose my voice for awhile there), and generally felt miserable. However I was surprised this didn’t affect my mental health. Mentally I am very healthy. This is confusing to me. Why should I be mentally miserable one week and not the next? No change in medications. No change in circumstances. The nightmares stopped a few days ago, which I’m sure has a lot to do with my mental stability. But why did they stop?

In any case, I am grateful. And, given a choice between physical and mental illness – although they are equally debilitating – I’d choose physical illness any day.

Nightmares again

Note: sexual abuse content below

I’ve come down with a cold and am sleeping most of the day. Unfortunately that gives my subconscious plenty of opportunity to attack me with nightmares, and I’ve had some doozies.

The worst one so far has been my step-father fellating me while I scream at my mother “Watch!!”. Others have been normal in comparison; stuck living with them, stuck in a holiday house with them. And my step-father always making an appearance, either as a lead role or cameo.

My psychologist says I should try and write about them, but I don’t see the point. I don’t have anything to say. They are horrific. It takes me hours, and sometimes the whole day to recover from them. And I know I’ll just have another one when I go to sleep again.

Very very sleepy

So I’m back at home. Once again I am really really tired. I have slept the whole day away. I even was so tired that I didn’t go to pick up my dog and cat- I slept instead. I don’t feel I can give them the emotional energy they deserve. So they will get another day of pampering at the kennels. I’ll pick them up before work tomorrow.

Thank God they are pets and not children.

I had terrible nightmares. Once again I dreamt that I was living with my mother and step-father and was trying to escape. The second nightmare was worse and the third nightmare was much worse. I don’t want to remember them.

I dealt with the first one by eating oat and raisin cookies, the second one by eating a bag of Malteasers, the third by eating liquer chocolates. I need to find a better way of dealing with them.

So now it’s 6pm and I am drinking coke and eating chips, sitting in bed in the loungeroom. My house is a mess. I am thinking of ordering pizza for dinner.

I want to be the kind of person that has a clean house. I want to be the kind of person who cooks dinner every night. I want to be the kind of person who has a full life and doesn’t spend entire days in bed. I want to be the kind of person who spends their time responsibly – I feel like I am irresponsible with my time. I feel like I could achieve so much if I didn’t have these down days. Imagine what I could do!

Hating sleep

Note: sexual abuse content below

I hate going to sleep.

I thought being in the hotel room would improve things but it doesn’t. I lie awake so anxious that I won’t get to sleep. I just want to be asleep as fast as possible.

It’s not like insomnia – which I have had before. With insomnia you’re not afraid of not being able to get to sleep, you’re afraid of not getting enough sleep. It doesn’t matter if I go to bed at 9.30pm or 12.30pm, my anxiety is still the same. I can’t stand lying in bed waiting to fall asleep.

I have been leaving the TV on, so I go to sleep listening to the news, but even then I am anxious about how long I will have to lie there going to sleep. The other strange thing is that this anxiety is quite new too – it only started about a month or two ago (when the flashback occurred).

My step-father would come into my room while I was in bed reading or trying to get to sleep, and that is when he raped me. So I understand the psychology behind it. He always did this on a Monday because that was the night my mother was at gym. I was always terrified that he would come in (once I specifically went up to his bedroom to say goodnight so he wouldn’t have a reason to come to my room, and he was lying on the bed naked and asked me to give him a kiss, then told me that he and mum enjoyed sex and that I should too). I was ten at the time. I didn’t know what he was doing, but I know I didn’t like it.

So now, at the age of thirty, I abhor lying in bed trying to get to sleep. I wish I could just click my fingers and be out like a light. Even with the sleeping tablets I take, it takes ten to fifteen minutes for me to fall asleep and they are the worst ten to fifteen minutes of my day (except when the PTSD has been triggered – then my whole day is really bad).

I don’t know what else to do. I sleep with both my cat and dog, who would wake me up if anything happened. But I’m not afraid of being asleep. I’m afraid of getting to sleep.

Of course I have no problems with sleeping during the daytime. I can fall asleep at the drop of a hat in the most crowded place you could think of (I’ve fallen asleep at a rave). I fall asleep in cafes, bars, clubs, movie theatres, lectures, training sessions, meetings, telephone calls, you name it.

I have no problem with the daytime nap, and for awhile there I was sleeping from 5- 8pm every day. No problem with getting to sleep.

But I can’t (and don’t want to) live my life at night. I used to be a night owl, but I don’t really like night any more.

Yesterday I caught up with an old friend. He freelances and he’s a week behind his work because he was sick over the weekend. And you know what I realised? I was sick over the weekend too. It may “just” have been my post traumatic stress disorder, but it laid me as flat on my back as any flu would. I’d prefer the flu actually. Most of the time you don’t think you’re going to die from the flu.

I think I could deal with the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder more easily if they didn’t come coupled with suicidal ideation (that’s a fancy way of saying fantasising about suicide). Because when you start fantasising about suicide then it’s much more likely you’ll commit suicide. And I have poor impulse control at the best of times!

Getting out of the depressive part of PTSD is also a very dangerous time. Often people who are depressed become numb and emotionless. Anti-depressants bring back some of that feeling and suddenly they are overwhelmingly depressed. That’s when they think suicide is a good idea – to escape the pain. Often people don’t commit suicide when they are numb because they cannot be bothered.

What concerns me is still the quickness of my depression. Was it caused by coming home from Dad’s? Was it caused by being alone? Well if that is what happens when I have a few days alone then I think I better be around people ALL the time.

I’m in Sydney, sitting in a pub, writing my blog, waiting for a friend to meet me for drinks. I ran a workshop this morning – it went well. I did some retail therapy this afternoon. I am less stressed about work (I got a lot done yesterday). I’m feeling normal again, but the thing to remember is that this is not normal – I am in a hotel room in another state. How will I be when I go home?

I am afraid of the answer to that question.