I have PTSD. That is a fact that I wish I could change about my life.
I no longer feel normal, nor do I look normal, and I long ago forgot what normal is.
I'm also at the point where I wonder if I need a service dog just to be inside the house.
This is why...
This morning (like any other morning) I woke up around four, that has always been the norm for me since I left home at 18 years old, so I grabbed my little praying mat and my little devotional book and sat on my desk trying to read. My husband saw me, he asked me if I was ok and what I was doing.
After a few pages I heard him rolling around under his weighted blanket (the thing has beads), simultaneously I heard someone walking slowly and heavily towards me. I was so focused on my reading (because concentration is a major task these days) that I didn't bother to turn around. However, I wanted to ask him if he could hear the elephant walking.
That is when, out of the corner of my eye I caught a very tall figure dressed in all white, standing over my shoulder.
I FLIPPED THE F OUT.
...It was my husband, who I thought was still in bed.
I cried. I panicked, then I felt angry with myself for not being able to control my reactions. You see, my brain is at war, it thinks everyone and everything is trying to attack and I don't know how to tell it to calm down, to feel safe, to disconnect from violence...
My brain does not feel safe even in my own home and I don't know how to change that.
I wish that was all that happened, but moments later, as I was still blowing my nose into a paper towel in the kitchen my ten year old son walks in telling me my daughter is no where to be found and that she has dissappeared from within the house. AT FOUR IN THE MORNING...
I found her, she was in the bathroom.
No, not everyday is this stupid in my house but little things that others are able to laugh off completely discombabulate me and then I'm destroyed for a few hours; trying to calm down, retracing my steps and figuring out how to "act normal"
Out the window went reading the devotional book, I just cried and told God what feeling broken is like, and the pain of being able to remember who I was before, how I was able to laugh and make friends, how I didn't have to explain myself and left the house in joy, not anguish.
