Memories

When I'm driving along or walking and autumn washes over me, I feel all scrunchy, and not in a good way.

When I first came out of hospital I was constantly assailed by completely overwhelming and uninvited memories. The slightest thing would trigger them and the emotions would take over me. It was exhausting, upsetting, and draining.

They come in ebbs and flows now; weeks where I'm much more here and now and weeks where I am being taken back in time throughout every day. New triggers pop up that I haven't met before and I'm back at day one, struggling to see the road through my tears as I remember somebody saying something a certain way, or filled with anxiety as I simply realise that something I am going to have to do may trigger memories. 

I can cope with the little ones that pop up a few times a day, snapshots of a time that seems so far away now, the odd turning over of the stomach. The unexpected ones and the new ones and the ones where the unidentified emotions just take you over or you've been dreaming about it all night and the feeling won't leave you are harder to deal with. 

It was a completely separate life. It doesn't fit into or link with my life outside. Nobody in my daily life has the same points of reference. That thing where people reminisce when something reminds them of a previous experience doesn't work, because none of my experiences from the last year are common to the people I spend my days with. You can't say "ah, remember that time when...?" If you want to share what's in your head (which is a big way most people communicate and build relationships, and occasionally it occurs to me to do so even though I am uncomfortable inviting attention by talking at the best of times, especially talking about myself) you have to tell them the whole story and they are still unlikely to really understand. It's not relatable, you'd just be the weirdo that's constantly talking about when they were in the loony bin... I also feel like that's somehow taboo, that I shouldn't talk about that time and that place in everyday "savoury" conversation, though I know this is probably just my own judgment. Over time I will build more recent experiences that do relate to my daily life and daily interactions and normal things that aren't about bonkers brains, but it seems that for the minute most of my recent frame of reference lies in that realm.

I don't know if I want to remember or not. It hurts, which is off-putting. Am I feeling like I am there again? Am I in the same emotional state as I was in at the time? Or am I having emotions about what it was like at the time? Do I feel like I want to be there again? Is my brain trying to experience it again because I have not finished processing overwhelming experiences? If I write about it in as much detail as possible will it help me to process? Sometimes I feel as though I need to go through everything in the minutest of detail with somebody safe and helpful, examining it all - what happened and how I felt about it and how I feel about it now. Being careful not to miss anything, until I am satisfied I have dealt with it all. I feel like the memories might become normal memories then with a normal level of emotion attached, just a part of the story.

I think not being able to share them stops me from integrating these memories into my story. They don't belong anywhere; they are in a separate box, largely to be got out only with my fellow loonies, then put back in again as I go back to real life. Except that my brain is telling me that they are important to me by refusing to let them stay in the box. They run riot because they need to be attended to, seen, heard, understood, given a place in my story and then somehow to become as unremarkable as everything else that happens. Maybe that's why I'm writing so much about that time at the moment. I'm sorry if it's boring or repetitive or weird, but as always, I write this for me, not for anyone else. When I can't talk about it (and it's isolating too, not being able to relate to others about a huge amount of what your brain is doing), I can see if writing helps a bit.

*DISCLAIMER* I use loony and bonkers as terms of endearment and humorous way of describing myself and my friends and celebrating our positive differences. We are all most excellent people, very capable and responsible and intelligent and interesting and, you guessed it, normal people (whatever that is!). Sometimes our brains do things that other people find unusual or that cause us problems if we or our culture are not equipped to deal with them. But that doesn't take away anything from our personalities and normal human qualities. Please don't think I am in any way demeaning people with quirky brains (yay to neurodiversity!)!