post match analysis

[jamesG.1]

Well, what a strange new phase.

Head clearing of work-induced angst but still a sort of jet lag doziness that holds me back from letting rip. I've been told to rest, and I'm trying, I'm really trying, but here I am struggling to balance the lack of momentum forward that rest implies and fighting the whole 'fiddling while Rome' burns sensation that it creates.

I was badly burned out, for sure. I was being told to slow down, but my contracted work said speed up, think harder, make no mistakes and that then fried my circuits. And all for less than the minimum wage. !@£$%^&!

Ok, well it's done, and I have to rest, but then life throws me an enormous curved ball. A woman. Was totally not expecting any romances right now, I'd even forgotten I'd had a dating site still active, but up pops this woman and we talk, and she gets it all and well, away we go.

Then I begin to worry. I have C-PTSD, of course I worry. I worry that I'm a disaster. My Money is a mess, my career is a mess, my head is a mess. End it now, says my prefrontal cortex, argghhhhhhhh says my Amygdala. But, roll with it says my half recovered hormones, enjoy it even if it doesn't last long.

But my head is still a swine to work around. Get tired, and the damn thing crash dives. And when that happens, all bets are off, I get over sensitive, I can't think in a straight line, and the world seems to race away like the last bus home. But when it picks up, that all goes again and I can't see what I was worried about. Quite surreal really. I find it so weird that people wander about thinking of themselves as the masters of their own perception, when in fact, it takes so little to flip the switches and feel 100% different, simply because the brain chemistry turns a corner or two. But there is also comfort in that because you can look at your C-PTSD troubles and say.. hey, that's not really me, that' just brain chemistry and is simply not the world shifting beneath the feet. There is no last bus home is there? Not really.

But this new romantic event is going to be a challenge. She's pretty abrupt. There's not going to be any kid gloves, but she very soft under a protective shell and she can be very tactile and affectionate. There are political differences which worries me slightly, tho I can see her angles and why she thinks what she thinks.

I dunno, I'm not going to hang my future on this just yet. I think I have under control, but I'm mindful of the dangers of having some unexpected angle over my condition become an issue. So, I'm trying to be as upfront about what I am dealing with and where I'm at with work and money. So far, she's unphased. But yeah. Caution. We've all been mangled so casually by others, haven't we? My trust is wafer thin. But you have to live and love don't you? I don't want to hide away, I want to get out and about and grab my life back.

Complex feelings.

It's been very affirming so far tho. For all my issues, there are lots of things about me that are strong, or interesting and she's been hugely complimentary about them. I'm getting far better about that. I have been so used to any compliment or success triggering a wave of retribution, or my money being grabbed back off me the moment It arrives in my account that it's been deep programmed. I learned to hide success, hand over my money and dampen my talents. I lost track of all the things about me that this woman is saying she likes and I just find it so odd to be complimented or desired like this, especially while I'm desperately trying to signal her that I have very specific flaws. And I don't want to smother her with my story either.

It's a tough balance.

Tying into all this is my need to decide on my work and money options. Right now my head is still like mashed potato, and I'm really struggling to see past this fog to assess what my options will be in say, a month. Yesterday I had a crash but am not at all sure why. I'm at a stage where environmental or physical forces can make me dip, just as much as an emotional trigger. It's hot here, my sleep has been a bit disrupted and there's dehydration but there is also the stuff I've been explaining above.

There was also a memory that had been suppressed that I had been sitting on that came out in discussion with my new GF. It all circled around a strange phantom pregnancy that my ex-partner had that was traumatic is ways that are hard to express. In it's simplest form, we were suddenly thrust into a bizarre three-day panic in which one minute she was talking a baby, the next an abortion, this all in 30 mins bursts. It all became so intense and I felt so impotent and out of touch with events that I just rode the clown car as if I wasn't even there. I dug it deep and forgot. The discussion with the GF may have triggered a deep emotional flashback, making me feel the worst of it again. In fact, as I type, I am certain that's what it was. I'm now also certain that the whole three-day flap about the pregnancy was almost certainly driven by her fear of being rumbled and judged by the doctors over her secret drinking. How I didn't see all that is beyond me. But for those three days, I was in no way considered as a factor in whether there were kids or not, whether if there was we should abort or was even considered as a participant. I blocked the emotion, but was in turns, terrified, excited, angry, and above all isolated from my own future. I was deeply scarred by that. I wanted to be a team, a partner, a lover and a friend, for better or for worse, but this felt so ghastly and futile and seen far away through fog that it pushed me into a dissociative state to cope and carry it and I think I'm still there really. And now, because I didn't choose to see it then, I realise that the alcohol was a huge element in how it all played out. She knew her hormones were going crazy because her liver and her endocrine system were going bananas and she was terrified she had the same degenerative illness her mother had. She realised that if she went to this specific clinic she could get her system checked out no questions asked without demonstrating the full range of her alcoholic system to the normal doc. This clinic had a confidential mandate. Holy cow, as I type It's all clicking into place. She was hardly having periods at all at the time and out love life had calcified. The odds against it were vast. She never left the house, so unless a lover was tunnelling in, it couldn't be another guy. This is one very smart woman, her job required a lot of scientific research and she would always try and do her own diagnosis of any health issues using online resources to avoid Doctor's visits. Suddenly I am 90% sure she used the thing as a way of obliquely trying to find out if she'd damaged her liver. Not all of what I'm thinking fits this hypothesis, but the thing is that nothing about the story makes sense. Her reactions, her emotions, her course of action and the choices she made, none of it fits the existing narrative. I was too raw and confused to see it at the time, but something was very not right there. If that is true, then that is a major abuse of my feelings and dignity.

So much of my story is the sheer powerlessness of the thing, wave upon wave of bizarre choices and stupid decisions I had no ability to control and mitigate. Every day, the drip drip attrition of the thing got worse, the trap got tighter. Looking back there were few if any obvious moments where I could have drawn a line. It was a slow-motion car crash, a pile-up of issue upon issue over 7 years if not a lifetime and it didn't stop until finally, I walked. Then it hit me. And it kept on hitting me. It's still hitting me.

Sometimes, I feel I'm winning, like I'm streaking ahead like a rocket, other times I feel like I'm stuck in a ditch, wheels slowly turning, steam rising, doomed to feel rubbish forever. It's so ambiguous, so variable and so non-linear.

It's good to write these things down, but boy. I wish I didn't have to.