Tonight I wrote about foster care.

I know. I’m as shocked as you if you know me well enough. I didn’t think I was ready, didn’t think I could do it and escape without the usual mental drainage and flashbacks- but I did. There were a few times I’d found myself starring off into space for some twenty minutes or more, my mind hazy with memories like smoke in a stoners attic.

But I still did it.

I wrote of abandonment, runaway, being taken away, misplaced, hunted like a feral cat by social service workers and nights not knowing what lurked in the dark as I slept cold and lonely- wondering if/when she would return. Certain in my heart she would but just as certain in my head that she would not.

I opened my own book with the stroke of a pen beneath candlelight. Writing about days when that was the only light. My stories and the stories of others- stories that left me gasping as they resonating with the sting of my own. Beautiful and broken like bloody glass under the sunset.

I wrote them.

I wrote them and my stitches didn’t rip. Scars held with the forever reminder of pain buried deep within my marrow. They held and though I knew what it felt like to bleed, though I remembered how they trickled, I did not.

I just remembered.

I didn’t relive.

Thank you, goddess keeper of sacred inks, provider of convenient paper, walls, napkins, and skin for my stories. Thank you.

You’d think they could have given me a call or something, eh? Nope. Not a single call, letter, smoke signal. Nothing. What a rip. I only absolutely needed it for one thing and now it’s not even good for that. *sigh*

To top it off the wonderful system that runs things in the mental health industry may have just decided I’m not broken enough to need help. Next week I have to go through a review/assessment to see if I still ‘need’ therapy. I’m not entirely sure what I think of that but it leaves a hollow feeling in my gut.

I kind of feel like my training wheels are being taken off too soon. I like going to therapy, I find it very helpful and a lot of the time it’s the only place I can talk about certain things. Things I’d never write about here…

Things I can’t talk about with friends and family and I don’t say that for lack of trying. I have tried with mixed results that leave me feeling worse despite their best efforts. I’ve tried getting these things out in an online chat group for people with the same problem… but it wasn’t the same. It didn’t leave me feeling any better, only distracted.

The worst part is that all these decisions- the cutting of my useless insurance, the dropping me from therapy are all related to money. It isn’t related to whether I need help or not. It’s related to if they can afford to pay people to deal with my paperwork, if they can pay someone to file my case, or if someone else (in my place) could pay them more than I can (difficult to explain). More so it’s also because the system (still both of them) is overloaded. There are too many people who need these resources simply because no one is helping them in the first place.

If we could help people when they need it instead of making them file three months worth of paperwork… that was me and I can’t tell you how bad certain things got in that time period not to mention with the stress of trying so futilely to get what I needed.

*sigh* I don’t want to type about this anymore. It all comes down to money in the end and that’s just sad.

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Nope. I’m lying.

I could sleep. It’d take me a couple of hours but I’d eventually get there.

The truth?

I’m afraid to go to sleep.

Sounds almost silly, doesn’t it? But it’s true. I had a few nightmares when I was younger but few were truly bad. Usually involving crocodiles and snakes or people I know being put into foster care. Now though, it seems as an adult my nightmares have grown along with me.

Pets, friends, and family dying. The smell of burning flesh. The boom in my ears as a car crashes and the leaden feeling in my limbs as I try to stop us from falling further back. Great towers all aflame falling onto people, the heat on my face. People happily allowing themselves to be electrocuted. Waking up to find my beloved unbreathing or my cat still on the floor. Finding myself trapped, alone, or being hunted.

I wake up wanting to cry and vomit. Often both.

So vivid. Always with just enough truth to pull the acid up from my stomach, sometimes revealing things I had forgotten, sometimes forcing my focus to thoughts I can’t think in the waking world, and always playing on my deepest fears:

I’m going to be alone. I’ll be betrayed. They’re leave. They’ll be taken. I have no control. I can’t feel love. My soul is dying.

It rips me apart and while I know I can survive it- have survived it for so long, I’m awfully tired of it being normal for me.

I’m tired of waking up every four hours or so- a compulsion I can’t control, to make sure everyone is still there and breathing, that I haven’t been left alone. I’m tired of having to make myself go to bed. I’m tired of laying there, unwilling to let my mind shut off even when I want it to because I know what comes next. I’m tired of finding myself caught up in another world far too real to my senses. I’m tired of feeling dread. I’m tired of jerking awake and forcing the contents of my stomach to still. I’m tired of laying there with a pounding heart afterwards and boycotting any form of sleep or idle thought for the rest of the day.

I’m tired of repeating it all the next night.

And the next.

I’m tired.

So, my therapist asked me to write a timeline of my life- just to outline those greater events that stick out in my memory. I said sure, it sounded like a perfectly easy project to me.

Holy crap. I could not have been more wrong.

Without details my ‘timeline’ is roughly four pges long and as I look over it… hell, as I wrote it, I had to pause for a moment to really appreciate what’s been going on in my head lately.

A therapist once told me, some four or five years ago, that she was amazed there wasn’t more wrong with me. Looking at my list I find myself more and more inclined to agree.

There are times I don’t feel like an abused kid. I don’t focus on it every moment of my life and when I do I always have this perfectly logical voice in the back of my head saying it was nothing big, you survived it and others have been through worse. When I tell people about the things in my past I speak with that same voice- it happened, it’s over, and here I am today.

But all things are a coin.

Sometimes when I get caught up in one really strong memory or another I feel… so much. I’m small, the event big, and the universe suddenly has a lot to answer for. Then the memory ends and I’m at peace with it again.

Looking at my timeline though, it’s like I can see both sides at once. I can see that compared to others it wasn’t so bad, but more so- I can see how truly screwed up my whole life has been. It’s a frustrating feeling to know I’ve survived it but I don’t feel like I have either because I’m too far away from it mentally (dissociation) or because I’m trapped in the moment again (flash backs).

It’s unfair that my perception is so screwed up.

There are people I love… and I look at this list of events and can’t help noticing how many horrible things have been done to me. There are people I don’t like- at all… and I can’t help noticing how much it’s justified. There are categories of ‘wow, that sucks’ that I never put myself into… but I could very well fit if I tried.

I’m not explaining myself right. I’m already going through a little bit of eye opener on certain things and I’m really wishing this list didn’t help because it eats away at my heart. Overall though, despite the tears and brain junk going on I’m happy. I want the world to be clear to me, my world at least, no matter how brutal it is.