Wow, you know I haven’t really had this type of night in a while — where its 2AM and I’m not even remotely tired because I’m up and triggered. So I thought that I’d type here a bit and maybe sort it out. Or maybe just get it out. I’m trying my drinking warm milk and journaling about the problem remedy. And if that doesn’t work I’ll try sleeping with the light on, breathing techniques, yada, yada. I don’t feel scared per say to the point to where I’m shaky and edgy. I just have this dread and this waiting of feeling like I’m going to open my eyes to him standing over me. So thats where the sleeping with the light on option comes in. I’ve been reading through my journal as a teenager, highlighting points to give me some insight into a book of my memoirs I’ve been working on. It helps jog the memory and such, and also helps to give me clues into where I was exactly back then.

I’ve found an occurrence in the book - a memory - of my uncle’s abuse that I feel comfortable with sharing with the public, friends and family included. Not that its comfortable, but I feel its not too disturbing — just honest. Its not horrific — just enough to help people reading to understand, if that makes sense? My family knows about my writing this book, and they know about what my uncle did to me as a child, so I can’t leave it out considering it has a lot to do with my development growing up. So, there’s a decision I’ve made that’s no longer looming over the project, of “Oh God, what am I going to say? Whats safe that I can I tell them? Is writing this whole thing a mistake?” So yeah…sorry. Rambling.

So, reading about all of it in my journal though still triggered me. Reading about my suffering through my teenage years regarding the constant PTSD symptoms just brought tears to my eyes. I was just a kid but I was so hurt? It felt weird to cry for this girl that I used to be. To read through her words and hurt for her in a way that she couldn’t hurt for herself at the time — hurting for her almost a decade later. She was so very tormented. And its mind boggling that she was ever really me … that poor, confused girl.

Her words were so desperate:

(Jan. 3, 2000 ~ 3:30AM) “Can sleep now that I’m playing TooL. Please sing me to sleep. Please…my dreams…take away all this that hurts me so much…it makes me hurt me. I know its gone far, far too far. Please help me…Please, please, please help it stop. Numb it anyway you can. Just make it let go…”

In that excerpt I’d gone about a week with 2 to 3 hours of sleep a night. I was only 17 years old. I just wanted to go to sleep without having a nightmare or another flashback at the time that I wrote this.  I just was calling out on page for some peace. I come back at 6:46AM to report that I’d only gotten an hours sleep.

On the next page it reads:

“Every night I close my eyes, paranoid that when I open them I’ll be greeted with one of my past monsters standing above me. When I wake up and take my shower my mind always wonders back to [memories of abuse explained in further detail] … I can’t sleep for 1,000 different reasons and I can’t eat for 1,000 more. Its always something day after day after day. I know that no one has any idea of how much energy I put into hiding this from them.”

Its so strange to read that and look at how far I’ve come. It makes me stop and think and look back and question if I needed that experience - that suffering - to lead me into helping others with the same problems some day. To make it a passion because now, looking back, it didn’t have to be that way. I have so many more coping skills now and its so much easier for me to detach from the abreaction and remember “hey…these feelings and fears, they’re not real anymore”. To know that I need to put them back there where they belong because I’m not that child being abused anymore now than I was 7 years ago, at the time that I wrote these words into my journal. Back then that was ALL I had, the journaling. While its still a good coping technique, one of my main ones, I have dozens more today.

So, all of it, no matter how hard and no matter how much pain that girl was in back then, today I can give it purpose and meaning. And that is a comfort. It seems to me to make her suffering not all in complete vain. And I feel so blessed in that sense - to be able to find meaning in any of it.

Good Night to All.

Hope Sent,
~ Ani