Meursault's Journal

[sanmagic7]

meursault, from what i've gotten to know of you, you are a very kind and caring person.  i wish i could wave my magic wand and make all this awfulness just disappear for you.  i wish i could give you an earth mother hug and tell you you're going to be ok, everything's going to be ok.  i wish, i wish, i wish . . .but all i can really do is let you know that i'm with you in spirit, that we are all on this journey together.  hang tough, my friend.  we'll get through this. 

[meursault]

Thanks for all the support.  I read this right before I went in to see lawyer.  It was pretty bad.  I don't know what to do...  I was a wreck.  I guess I made it through, though, and haven't gone into crisis, so that's a victory.

Meursault

[Three Roses]

 

[sanmagic7]

let's hear it for another victory!  yay!!!  one foot in front of the other on this journey.  big hug!

[meursault]

Triggers!

Just barely holding on.  My whole life has been a nightmare.  I wish this legal stuff would just go away so I could at least START to heal. 

I went to the doctor's today.  My doctor is across the city and it's a big ordeal getting there, but I went and was in a pretty reasonable mood.  Over an hour of travelling in total to get there.  I am always panicky at doctor's offices, ever since I developed really bad social phobia and agoraphobia when I was around 20, and had been trying to get help through my family doctor.

The waiting room was mostly empty, but there was a young woman who came in, probably only 18-20.  She was obviously really impatient and was listening to music and constantly tapping her feet and drumming on the chair and stuff like that.  Really moving suddenly.  I was consciously unaware of her, but the aggressiveness of her movements must have been working on me sub-consciously.  Without even recognizing how it happened, I was in a full blown state of terror.  Then it became obvious how her movements and tapping and hitting things was affecting me.  I had already started shaking badly , and a couple of hard stomps with her foot had me LITERALLY jump out of my seat and cry out.  I was hyperventilating, and finally got up and said to the receptionists as I was leaving "I can't be here any more!  Too much anxiety."  and fled.

I give up on going to doctors any more.  I was supposed to get a prscription for Prazosin.  I'm almost out, but I can't bear going to a doctor's again. 

Everything I am is just garbage, and I hate life.  I just wish it was over.  I'm just a broken animal, too traumatized to be part of the human race.  I can't see how it's possible to even GO to my trial.  I'm still in shock about the whole thing and it was six years ago.  Just constant states of flashbacks.  I hate myself so much.

Anyhow, every day is now just dissociative terror and hopelessness.  I don't know what to do.  I was trapped under my Dad's body for about an hour, and the cops and then legal system have been trapping me ever since, now they want to put me in jail and pin me in again!  My brain is breaking from all this trauma.  It's just constant.  My body isn't even working right any more.  I have a hard time walking and grabbing things even.  Still a month and a half before the trial.  They're willing to make a "deal" of a year in jail.  This world is insane.  Kept for six years in a * by this threat, and somehow their "deal" is as much or more time than pretty well anybody gets for a sexual assault, or half the manslaughter cases.  I do something trying to help my Dad so he doesn't kill himself in an accident, and they want to hurt me more than people who act out of malice.  I'm just not supposed to be in this world.  I don't understand why I have to suffer any more!

Sorry for the negativity.  I'm not suicidal, but I'm disintegrating from how utterly unendurable every moment has become.

Meursault

[Three Roses]

Meursault, if there was only something I could do for you! Just hang on a little longer, you'll be through this soon. Do you have someone who would go with you to the doctor's? Can you get hold of a doctor via Skype and get your necessary meds that way? There has got to be some help for you.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to be pushy but I hate the idea of you hurting like this, so my mind is searching for fixes.

to you! We're with you, Meursault.

[movementforthebetter]

I don't know that this helps right now, but I was thinking of you today. We're always here for you.

If you can make it through this moment... Just one breath, do that. Then another, and another. It's all I could do for a long time because thinking of the future at all sent me into a panic. Eventually enough single moments will get you to someplace else, though.

I can't imagine all the hells you are going through. Do you have anyone who can help you pass some time? Even a game of cards and a short chat might be the kind of distraction you need and deserve.

Good luck, I'm pulling for you.

[meursault]

I guess I'm lucky, too, in a way.  There are several friends, probably at least ten, who are pretty supportive of me.  Two different friends texted me and offered to go to the doctor's with me after I posted of my difficulties on FB.  I just don't see myslef as able to do that any more.  My best friend and her husband are coming tomorrow to help me do some stuff on my house.  (I have to move in in two weeks and I don't even have it insulated yet!)  Then I'm meeting a good friend for food, then having coffee with a buddy I made a couple of years ago while in the crisis unit.  He's a military vet who just lost his service dog.

Then Monday I'm paying a friend to help me all day insulate and vapour barrier my place...

I'm so busy, but I am needing to keep my supports around a lot right now.  I feel so scared and alone, and all this trauma has just left me so damaged, I don't even think I'm a human any more.

The terror and dissociation is definitely very bad.  Reality is sort of "strobing" for me, and I feel like I'm saturated in terror.  Thinking is extreme and very negative.  I am somehow still functioning, but I'm not sure HOW, really, I can barely remember what I did all day.  I got lots done on my house, I put in eight windows, and finished insulating the main floor, but I only vaguely remember being there.  Just like the doctor's.  Everything about it all seems so far away, like it happened ten years ago.  Except that girl who scared the crap out of me...

Just an unrelenting hammering of emotional flashback...  arg.

My therapist (the good one!) has been saying our focus is entirely on stabilization right now until after the trial.  She is wanting me to write out what I like about myself and stuff like that, but I'm mostly drawing a blank.  Only a couple of things are really sticking out:  that I'm nice to people, and I'm pretty intelligent.

I suppose there's something else too.  I have gone on solo canoe/kayak trips, generally 30-40 days every year in Northern Canada (REALLY remote, hundreds of miles away from towns and roads and reserves).  The last couple of years I've had to go to court to get permission, since I have a curfew, but they have let me.  I met a guy who wrote a book about a canoe trip he took a few years ago, and he said this of me:  "There's probably only a thousand people in Canada who could do what you do, and only a hundred who would actually try."  It's the only time I feel like myself, and it's such a profound, lonesome, connected thing to be hundreds of miles from other people in the middle of the Canadian north.  This year I figured it was going to be about 45 days, but I was back after 16.  On day eight, I was woken up by a bear, a fairly large male.

So, I was standing there, in the pre-dawn in my underwear in front of my tent banging away with my axe for half an hour, while the bear was never further than 8-10 feet away, circling me.  Every time I stopped banging her turned and came toward me, so I went back to yelling and banging, and he'd go back to circling.  It was kind of neat.  Grey, early morning, lots of dew and a heavy fog.  I was in a deep green valley, and every sound echoed clearly off the hills. 

I asked myself "Am I afraid?" while it was happening, and I wasn't at all.  I debated going on the offensive and atatcking him with my axe, but thought I better not escalate yet.  I had bear spray in my hand with the axe but wasn't at the last resort point.  So weird, the bear just circling back and forth so close I could have touched him in less than three steps.  He wasn't at all afraid, and didn't even flinch from my banging or yelling.  I think he was just testing and figuring out if I could possibly be a threat, since I wasn't being sensible and running away.

Finally he started to wander away, and I discovered he had already taken half my food so I wouldn't be able to complete my trip.  Turns out he wasn't leaving.  He wandered about forty feet and then stood up, turned toward me, and rubbed his back on a tree.  Clearly saying "this is my territory, human!"  He then dropped onto all fours and bee lined at a fast walk right toward me.  When he was about three feet away, I blasted him in the face with half the can of bear spray.  He shook his head and took another step toward me, so, with the can only a few inches from his face, I emptied the rest, and he slowly walked away shaking his head.  As he walked away, he kept turning to come back, but the bear spray was confusing him.  It was right at the start of a 1-1.5  mile portage through thick bush, and I didn't think it was safe without more bear spray, so I quickly packed my gear and hopped in my boat to return, which took another 8/9 days.

I had no problem with any of that.  I didn't even have any adrenaline dump afterward or anything.  I was just very calm and matter of fact.  I think I'm pretty brave and strong in lots of ways, but trauma is an entirely different thing.  I have no defences with this stuff.  That girl at the doctor's office today just wrecked me.  Every bang of her hand or slap of the sole of her shoe on the ground was like a gunshot.  I'm so weak in some ways.  I involuntarily leaped out of my chair while crying out, for god's sake!  In retrospect, I bet my behaviour was pretty worrying to her, since she wouldn't know how badly her movements were messing with me.  I might have appeared like a "crazy person"!

Anyhow, I was pretty proud of myself with the bear encounter, and have always been proud of myself for the trips I take, so thought I'd post about it here.  Everything is completely falling apart, I have a hard time seeing anything human left in me.

Meursault

[sanmagic7]

meursault, the fact that you could write about that undertaking with the bear, your bravery in the face of danger, your presence of mind, determination, processing the situation as to which was your best option at any given time, making the safest, most intelligent choices over and over again . . . and on and on shows what a strong human being you are.

then, there's the traumatization, which is a beast of a different color, something we don't know very much about because it continually twists and turns, backtracks on us, jumps out at us when we least expect it, and most of all, makes us believe that we are so much less than we really are in so many ways and on  so many levels - is it really any wonder that we continually feel like the rug is being pulled out from under us, that we have no legs to stand on, that our senses are screwed up and distorted from one minute to the next, that we are less than human?

keep your friends close, meursault, because right now you probably need them more than ever.  they are letting you know, through their support, their willingness to help, that they indeed see you as human, and even more, as someone valuable in their lives.  those horrid thoughts are the dank, musty breath of the trauma beast, fogging your brain, and making it seem like everything about you stinks.  in fact, it's quite the opposite.  hang tough, dear meursault - i'm hangin' right beside you!

[meursault]

Thank you Sanmagic.  Your comments are always a pick me up. 

Kind of dumb of me, but I just remembered what I did in therapy last week.  I've had a very elaborate fantasy life mostly centred in Tolkien's Middle Earth since I was about 11-12 ish.  It was my escape, and what made me feel good about myself.  I have a very complete storyline of what happens, and could draw many scenes, have vivid colours, smells etc for all sorts of parts of the plot.  I'm basically a Super-Mary-Sue in it, ridiculously heroic, unflappable, loving, respected and loved.  The plot has remained fixed since I was in my late teens, and a lot of my romantic fantasies fit into it as well.  In it, I'm basically the "ideal" me, and it's that ME I try to be when I have trouble and feel overwhelmed, at least when I remember it. 

I wrote out the whole story, just as a summary, without much descriptiveness, and it's a dense 12 pages.  It's really important and personal to me, sort of my inner secret.  I saw my good therapist last week, and asked her if she would be willing to read it.  I'm paying her for her time.  So, she's going to read it the day before our next session.  I really feel a lot of love for this therapist, and I feel like I'm sharing such a huge fundamental part of me.  It actually makes me feel more vulnerable with ehr than when I finally trusted her enough to tell about my mom and sisters.  In a way, that wasn't ME, it was what happened to me, although I spent months terrified she would laugh at me about it, or fly into a rage for me complaining about it since I deserved it.  I don't know though.  This stuff is ME, and she is so important to me, I am actually pretty excited to share it with her, but also worried about how pathetic or needy or childish I'll seem.

Mostly, this feels like I'm showing my deepest ME to someone for the first time.  I'm nervous and excited.

I'm not doing at all well lately, and I guess I'm kind of hoping with this that she will truly SEE ME and still care about me and think I'm not garbage and am lovable and all that sort of thing...  I really feel like I'm scrambling so hard to keep things together, and I hope this is going to help me feel like I'm not just some hideous thing.  Everything in my life is feeling so huge right now.  I'm not sure what I need from her for a response, but I hope she sees it and can give it.

Meursault

[sanmagic7]

i hope so, too.  pretty brave of you, meursault.  pretty brave.  it sounds like you escaped into fantasy to stay sane.  that's pretty brave, in my book, as well.  i'm just glad you had a place to go, a place to be the real you.  what a great mind and imagination.  i've never had that.  i would escape into books, other peoples' imaginations/stories.  i always wanted to go down the rabbit hole with alice.  she represented my spunky spirit.  so, it'll be interesting to get the feedback from your t.  best to you with that.  i hope it goes just the way you want it to.

[meursault]

I've been awfully busy.  I've done enough on this house that it's liveable.  I'm only a month away from the trial and I'm so scared of all this trauma being relived.  I'm having VERY intense flashbacks.  Crying out, convulsing, falling, just horrible mental anguish and terror amd mental chaos.

I just moved into my house two days ago.  I bought a teddy bear this spring, thinking I'd just have it around as a totem for my inner child.  Turns out I needed it more than that.  I sleep with it and talk to it actually.  My first night here, I walked through the house with my teddy bear giving it a "tour" and said "this is a place we are allowed to be happy.  We don't have to hate ourselves here." Then I broke down and had a big cry.  I have my teddy bear on my lap now.

It makes me full of this weird big-as-the-world sadness when I think how much my teddy bears meant to me as a little kid, and it wasn't until I got this one that I realized it.  I wish I still had those bears! Feel kind of guilty for abandoning them!  Thinking about how little five year old me used to take my sisters barbies and use my bears to re-enact the stuff that happened with my sisters, teaching the bears how to do it and stuff.  That seemed like it was just normal until this last year.  It's like I was trying to process what was happening to me by teaching my bears to do what I was doing.

Wow does that make me sad.

I tried for the hundredth time to get a straight answer from my lawyer about why my case hasn't been thrown out, but he's completely evasive.  The supreme court ruled this summer that for provincial cases 18 months is the maximum allowable from charges to trial, and 30 months for supreme court cases.  Mine has gone on 78 months.   I don't understand how this isn't a human rights violation, and my lawyer is ignoring my complaints.   I think I should have been going to the media, human rights commission, justice minister etc long ago.  I feel like my lawyer has made some deal with the prosecutor to destroy me.  I'm just a basket case with reliving this trauma all the time.  That night never ended, and I don't ubdrstand how it is even legal for the justice system to keep the traumatic event from ending.

Anyhow,  I'm struggling.   Haven't been reading here much until today.  Life is just a battle, and I feel so alone right now.  But I have my bear, and for now I'm going to sit with hI'm in my house and not feel like I'm some disgusting unlovable monster!

I just wish this would all go away so I can start to heal.

Meursault 

[movementforthebetter]

All over the world, we have legal systems but not justice systems. I hope in your case that statement proves false, and that you do find some justice.

I'm glad you're being kind to your inner child and yourself with your bear. Good for you, getting so much done while also finding time to nurture yourself. Makes sense you haven't been here as much.

Wishing you more peace and healing. 

[Three Roses]

I've been thinking about you, hoping you are getting thru the days with a minimum of trouble. Mftb is right, there's not enough justice in the world. Why not go to the media now? Maybe a story in the news paper would tip things in your favor....

[radical]

 

You are an inspiration to me, Meursault.  I don't say that lightly.
Something about your irrepressible spirit.

The Human Rights commission (or whatever it is called in your country) sounds like a good idea.  Also, do you have a law commission or similar) there?

Stay staunch!