The long May nights

Every time I open the window in these sunny early summer days, the birds sing.

Every time, it makes my stomach turn over, my heart pump faster, my breath catch and my muscles tense.

I love the sound of birdsong, the brush of an evening breeze, but my body still doesn't. It's not as bad as it used to be; I don't cry, and most times I can tolerate leaving the window open or staying outside to finish hanging the washing on the line. I don't spend the next few hours or days stuck in inescapable memories and emotions. 

At 4am the village church clock chimes for the thousandth time tonight. The birds are in full morning chorus and I can't help but be transported back four years to those other sleepless nights. 

So different and so distant, and yet so close and familiar. It's not distress that keeps me up now, it's my second child, who's just decided she'll take after her brother after all and drag me into the mire of full on sleep deprivation. I should be thankful, and I am. Thankful that my life looks so different now. Thankful for the undeserved gift of these two precious lives that I didn't dare hope for. Thankful for less distress.

And (not but) I wish I wasn't awake right now, and I wish those memories didn't trigger such emotions and thoughts. 

Both of these things can be true. 

And I wish I could appreciate this second child for all she is, our long-awaited and even longer-hoped-for baby. It might just help me through the long nights and sometimes long days. But I think that's a post for another day. She's gone to bed so I'd better seize the chance for a few minutes' kip.

Two Years

As I lie in bed trying to sleep, knowing I will be wakened in a few hours, I can't help my mind taking me back to another night two years ago today. I've kept busy all day but there's nothing between me and the memories now.

The hard mattress and yucky polyester sheets. The knowledge that I would be wakened in four hours, my lights turned on, my blood pressure, pulse, sats and temperature taken and my finger pricked. The terror of realising each and every time I regained consciousness that I was in this unknown place and I had to face the thing I was most scared of four times a day. Traumatic as the general hospital was, I had come to understand it and therefore feel some level of safety but now everything was new and overwhelming all over again. 

That morning as I stepped over the threshold with fear and hope, I had taken some of the most important steps towards my new life. Of course it's not actually clear cut like that, there is no line between old life and new life, I have not "arrived" anywhere and am very much just continuing to take steps every day, in varying directions.

But there are some things that were left at that door that I am endlessly grateful to be rid of. They had no place in my life and I never want them back. Others I have picked up to help me since, and many many more I still carry, for better or for worse.

It's always a difficult time of year for me: my brain works by making links and finding patterns, and so it is great at highlighting similarities and differences between experiences while it tries to organise and categorise everything in order to understand life and inform itself on what might happen next and how to deal with it.

And so it reminds me in my thoughts about events that happened on certain days (like today), and it reminds me in my body of experiences I sensed or emotions I felt (like the leaves turning orange and falling from the trees, or the cold morning air or a particular timbre of beeping). The two often become entangled or the one prompts the other as well. The trouble is, my poor old Brian can't decide whether to categorise these things as good or bad (they were of course a mixture) and how they should inform my future actions. I don't know what I feel about them and my brain is so intent on trying to make a logical map from them that they just keep swilling around because they can't be filed.

Life is very different now from how it was two years ago. I've been trying to write this post for two weeks - this is the end of about six weeks of annual date-specific memories - and could never find quite the right words. My life is better. I am more independent. I am happier. I have more freedom. I share more about my wellbeing with Mr Peggy. I have better support. I am much more able to ask for help when I need it. I have better coping strategies. I live a more authentic life. I have Baby Peggy. 

That time was probably the hardest in my life. I certainly had most of the most traumatic single moments of my life so far (and hopefully ever!) during that time. My stress levels were permanently so high that meltdowns were routine. But I also found hope. I met some of my closest friends. I reclaimed parts of my life I thought were lost. I found out a bit of who I am when I'm not trying to hide (because there was nowhere to hide). I let people in and I let people help. It hurt and it helped. And so I don't know how I feel about it and I don't know how to write about it. 

A therapist I saw recently helped me make a little sense when I explained that I wasn't even sure whether it was even trauma I was dealing with: because the events, experiences and feelings all happened in one time span and space that definitely had some traumatic events, it all gets lumped together by my brain, and so even parts that I wouldn't think should be traumatic still inspire some of those feelings. The emotional response is so complex because all of the different emotions are related to things that happened at that time, and so whenever I am reminded of any part of it, I just get a big ball of unidentified emotional mash. (She didn't quite phrase it like that!) I wonder if it can also work the other way - that because some wonderful things came from it I can feel mistakenly positive about the bad bits.

So I don't know how I feel about it. And still the memories swill. Hopefully one day they'll just trickle by harmlessly. 

Until then? Just keep swimming...

And be grateful for what I have right now, which is more than I would have dared to hope for through my tears on the hard mattress in the middle of the night.

Still Remembering

I need to write something, but I don't know what.

I feel funny at the moment. I think I feel sad. As well as overwhelmed and excited and discombobulated by all the change in life right now, of course.

I have spoken before about memories and how reminders of situations and events from the last couple of years can cause me difficulty. While I was in hospital and for about the first six months afterwards these memories would often come suddenly and bring incredibly intense emotions that I found difficult to cope with and that lingered with me throughout the day. 

Over the last six months I have felt they have relented a little in their frequency and intensity. I am less often triggered beyond my ability to concentrate on the present moment. The intense effects of a memory last less long. I can talk about some things that I couldn't talk about before without becoming completely overwhelmed. 

And yet. 

They haunt me still. The barely-staved-off panic attacks when I have to go to the general hospital. The lingering emotion all day reminding me of the dream I had last night. It's an emotion I still can't place a year on, and the dream hangover ignites further thoughts and memories to make it worse. The same emotion hits me like a wall when things are too similar to previous days, trapping me in my house because I'm too scared of the feelings I'll have if I go outside in the spring sunshine. The colder dull weather this week has been a relief. My camera reel was full of spring photos and blooming life last year but this year there are three. 

The tears I push away and avoid spring up on me less often, but they are all the more vicious because I've hidden from them.

It doesn't go away, and it doesn't become less confusing. There are times when the triggers are further apart, or avoidable or I can box things up and squash them away while I do what I need to do. But this stuff seems to be with me to stay and I don't even know what it is. I think if I'm going to have any luck in managing it I need to understand it, and I need some help with that because I clearly haven't got far on my own in a year! I need someone to help me unpack the boxes, look at the confusing things and work out what to do with them. And maybe I'm ready for that now, which I wasn't a year ago.

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!)!