nervosa30751:

There is so much about myself and my memories that I want to discover, but that I am not sure I am equipped to greet. I have always been obsessed with this. I have always chased my own non consciously recalled memory, but now I am coming closer to unearthing portions that I had underestimated. The moment will hit when a memory comes filtering in and it knocks the wind from me. It takes the air straight from my lungs and leaves me incapacitated, reeling, choked, bewildered, vicariously re-experiencing what isn’t necessarily remembered. Maybe these are emotional flashbacks, implicitly stored memory, body recollections, I am sure there is some sort of psychoanalytical jargon for it. It feels like I am beginning to remember something very dear and very painful and I know it is coming so I begin to be overwhelmed emotionally by this immense longing and sadness and traces of rage. It dissipates to loneliness as I draw nearer, but then some autonomous protective defenses are enacted and I begin to recoil, I begin to emotionally numb myself and internally kick and scream to not go any further so I don’t, I can’t. My mind puts its barriers back up and seals the memory away again. I very rarely really sit in the moment and let the memory come. I have come close to seeing its face, but every time I come near enough to almost be able to identify distinguishing features, I turn around and close my eyes. The me inside, the subconscious primal me, the inner-child me that lurks inside my skull overseeing the many levers and pulleys that operate my reeling brain. Its only need is survival, and part of survival for an injured animal is vigilance. 

I want to look it all in the face and maybe become completely crippled by it, because I think that if I finally know everything, its power over me will be diminished. I feel like the demons of memory feed off of darkness and neglect, the longer they are allowed to hide away and go unnoticed, the stronger they can become and the more wild too, like a feral creature. It feels as if my memory is permanently eclipsed, though. I wonder sometimes if I will maybe never know the truth about my past, and that thought discourages me because then I might have to cope not with overcoming PTSD, but managing a life with PTSD. What if I was simply too young at the time of the initial trauma to ever really understand myself as thoroughly as I would like? My memory is so incomplete as it is. I can hardly remember what I did at this time last week, let alone what scared me sufficiently enough as a toddler to leave me scarred all of these years later. 

You see, I have been diagnosed with PTSD by six different doctors in five years, and one diagnoses of CPTSD. It’s one of those diagnoses that when a clinician meets me, they scoff a little bit when I question them. “It’s obvious”, I was told pretty consistently. I can recognize myself rather well in the criteria and purported symptoms. I don’t recall any one shattering event, though or I can’t recall any trauma that was “bad enough”. I think this is why later down the line, it was suggested that I have CPTSD, or complex PTSD which is not yet in the DSM. It observes PTSD symptoms on the dissociative scale rather than the anxiety scale alone, and is caused by repeated or long-term trauma. Supposedly, sufferers of CPTSD also frequently struggle with memory recall because of all of the psychic splintering that their traumas caused. 

I still have trouble really looking at myself as a PTSD-sufferer. In treatment I was good friends with another woman that had PTSD and we really bonded because we had an understanding of one another. She was a military vet who witnessed her friends die, was brutally gang-raped, and even survived an explosion. I can understand why she has PTSD. My mother and many of my aunts have been diagnosed with PTSD as well. Although I do not know everything, I have had brief glimpses into the sorts of hell my mother and her siblings experienced as children, and I understand why they have PTSD now. I can observe how it still terrorizes my mother. She and I have a lot of similarities, really. Whatever defenses my mother and I built as children, has become faulty with age and finally turned against us. I just can’t look down at myself and understand how I could be in the same class as these people, though. My experiences could not have been that harrowing, I cant have PTSD. My father himself agrees. He has some legal control over me still and he is the guarantor of my medical finances. When he heard that a therapist had diagnosed me with PTSD, he had me stop going to them and called them an “idiot”. He rather staunchly denies even the suggestion that I was traumatized. He is always looking for a reason to justify why I ended up with an eating disorder, and he only wants to look in a direction that liberates him from responsibility or guilt. He blames schools and boyfriends and the media, but he won’t investigate himself or the role of home environment. His eagerness to dismiss me fuels the shame, though. It manifests as shame because I have not yet eliminated the possibility of him being right. 

I have really vivid memory sometimes. I have memory that occurs incredibly young, as well. Supposedly adults don’t have memory recall for the ages of birth to 3 years-old. I have memory from a pre-verbal age though. I remember breastfeeding, I remember being in the stroller, I remember crawling, I remember a lot of innocuous moments in infancy. I remember being scared of a movie I saw with my parents that was released in 1993, making me only 2 years-old. Yet, I vividly remember that movie and even the scene that scared me so much. The movie was The Body Snatchers by Abel Ferrera and the scene was a teenage girl walking into a gas station bathroom and being held at knife point by a deranged attacker. I remember other things, very tactile things, like the way certain toys felt or the inside of cabinets felt. I was very tactile, putting things in my mouth and rubbing them. I would also look at the world microscopically, investigating the tiny details because that was what I was level with as a child. I was very very small, so my entire view of the world was different. which makes it even more difficult to identify with my memories…they are from a different world.

I have plenty of scattered memories of household objects and smells, but not the setting. I think it was this constant surveying of my surroundings that allowed me to have early memories, because I was constantly exercising and reinforcing the neural pathways that the memory was formed by. I have also always been obsessed with the past. I am very nostalgic. Most of my conversations throughout my life have been about reminiscing. As a child I had a box of family photographs that I carried with me everywhere and I looked over them daily. Even that activity reinforced memory, but only certain parts. I would paint some things so vividly that others would become obscured and eventually lost. I could be selective with what I remembered in this way. If I did not want to remember something, usually because it was shameful, I could omit it. Looking through those pictures now, people that I did not like were scribbled out. Sure enough, I couldn’t tell you why those people are scribble out now. I don’t remember.

I can’t remember whole chunks of my life, and not just in childhood. I can’t remember events that happened only a few years ago. I might remember the general feeling of the event, but I will have complete amnesia of the rest. For example, my mother was physically abusive. I do not know when the abuse began because frankly, it feels like I came out of the womb in a fist. Anyway, my mother kicked me out of the house when I was 15 and I went to live with my dad. Over time, I began to forget about what it was like to live with my mom. I missed her. I loved her. I began to idolize her, and even to this day I still do. I forgot all of the terrible things that she did, and did not even pause to investigate this fact until I was 19. I was in treatment at this time and reading though my high school diaries. I was startled by how much I had completely forgotten. I had almost successfully eclipsed the memory of being physically abused at all by my mother, despite having scars to boast. I eliminated it from my memory as soon as I left the environment. As soon as I had the opportunity to forget, my mind did. 

There are other examples of this too in my life. There are a lot of moments that I do not remember, but that I know happened because people told me. I forgot swimming lessons at the YMCA, a facility that is still shrouded in mystery because while I was going there a girl drowned and a sexual predator/child molester was arrested. I completely wiped the YMCA from my mind, to the point where I can’t remember the interior despite going there daily for years. My mother worked 12 hours a day at the Y and I usually had to accompany her to work. I don’t remember it, though. I don’t remember the little girls at my elementary school that used to beat me up either. The ones who, according to my mother, choked me until I blacked out. Maybe for good reason, I don’t remember this. I actually remember elementary school to have been a relatively good time. I don’t remember locking myself indoors for days after seeing my grandfather die on vacation, either. Completely omitted from my memory until someone suggested it.

Some memories remain obliterated, while others come flooding back as soon as they are implied. A little spark and the whole thing lights up in illuminating flame. More often than that though, that tiny spark begins to create a firestorm so powerful that the flames obscure the image and i still cannot fully recall it. That is where I am. Burning. Half-remembered things that I want to be relieved of either by remembering or forgetting again. 

I don’t know what to do. I don’t think a person can force memory recall, or if they can, it probably is not advisable since those things have been tucked away for a reason. The body unveils itself only when you are ready to receive it. I must not be ready, but more ready than I have been before because I have gone two decades with one eye closed and adapted so well that I did not even realize the difference.

Little mundane memories flit past my mind all day now. Things that don’t have much importance or do not seem to be important, but that I had forgotten and that I can now use to better flesh out the setting of other memories. I am frustrated by how slow the process is. I remember what a single room looks like but over a six-month period. It starts with a singular object and bleeds from there like an ink stain on a napkin. Its incomplete though, and I am impatient. There are certain rooms that I have amnesia of but that I have managed to scrounge up minute information about. The YMCA is one of such buildings. For years I could not stand to look at a gym swimming pool or showers or those dirty sandy green tiles. I couldn’t stand the buzzing of basement equipment and of old lights. I couldn’t stand the little things that I associated with my memory of the YMCA. Those things, mostly sensory, are incredibly vivid to the point that I might be triggered to dissociate when I think of them, yet I can’t describe the building. I don’t know what the interior of the building looked like or what I did there. My parents were such distant people that they could not help me either. They don’t even remember how old I was. My dad remembers the building being really old and dirty and that it was later closed down due to safety violations. My mother remembers me demanding repeatedly “and in many different ways” not to ever go back to the YMCA again. It was a sudden change that my mother only abided by because I was so insistent. I am unnerved by this thought because…well…I was never insistent. For the most part I was a very obedient child and I knew that I had to go to work with my mom. So for me to one day object seems out of character.  Anywho, I digress, the other building that I have vividly forgotten is the house of my childhood best friend. We eventually had a mysterious “falling out” sometime around 8 years-old. I still don’t fully know the interior of the house, but I found photographs on a real estate website and it helped to confirm many of my memories that I had previously shrugged off as being confabulations. I have always had a strong reaction against that house. Always. Other than the YMCA, it is the only place that remembering might trigger a flashback of. I can’t forget, once again, the smell and the feelings. Mostly basement smells and feelings and the sight of a spring suspended wonder horse that fills me with terror. I have been afraid of that horse since I was 10 years-old when I went back to Ohio, had an unpleasant encounter with an incestuous family member, and had my second flashback. I wish I knew why I am so afraid of that horse. What is it about that thing that makes me scared and nervous and sad all at once? I see it and I just want to start hyperventilating and running away, I just want to slink away before something bad happens.

i dont know what else to write, other than you should publish a book one day. looking through your blog, i read some of your posts and you sound so intelligent and eloquent. im sorry you are struggling. i hope that things start looking up for you.

im so unbelievably fat. i hate myself. 

i have gained 10 pounds. 10 pounds. i dont feel anything right now. i am numb. i will not eat over 500 calories a day until i lose those 10 pounds again. no more eating out. no more binging. no more alcohol. no more fat.