Raw and struggling

I am really struggling at the moment. I am usually able to pull myself together and function in some semblance of the word even if I endure a constant fight or storm in my body over certain periods of the day but at the moment I just feel so goddam raw and as though I have no skin at all. I just called my sister to tell her I am not in the best place today, I was still happy to take her out for afternoon tea but she didn’t want me to push myself which was kind but I also struggled because I cried pretty much all through the call and a lot of it was about the Tex Perkins show I saw last night on the life and trauma of Johnny Cash, that warrants another post entirely of its own but it touched on the early loss of his brother in a saw mill accident and the ensuing years of addiction and struggle with what I don’t like to call ‘demons’ and what Cash in one haunting ballad called his ‘beast’. As Perkins said in the show it wasn’t until 1984 when Cash finally entered the Betty Ford Clinic that he realised the entire therapy he had to do was grief therapy. Add to this complex cocktail of inner trauma the words spoken to and sparked in Johnny by his father, following his brother’s death that it should of been him who was taken around the time he was only 12 years old.

I guess it was the sibling trauma that resonated with me last night but at the moment I am feeling so raw and unformed and young. I seem to be seeing all my ‘character defects’ in glaring technicolour. I think of some of my rages with my Mum and sister that were often warranted and oh in the foyer last night we ran into the caretaker of my Mum’s building who was like a surrogate son to my mother and he made an off hand comment to my friend supposedly joking about the fact she had stayed friend with me for so long? WTF?? He has done this kind of thing to me before and I don’t know what my mother told him behind my back over all of those years they knew each other. I really wanted to call him today and just ask him about it and tell him the effect it has on me, maybe I am taking it too seriously that said I woke up about 4 am with this anger at him deeply entrenched in my body it was the weirdest thing like two aspects of my self torn apart and trying to come back together. I also think I am a bit pissed at my therapist taking such a long break then blowing off how easy its going to be for me to keep it together in her absence, then I think I am just a fucking malingerer who has been stewing in her own pain and using all kinds of excuses not to get out into the world and participate, instead hiding like a scared little rabbit in my own cocoon, that said its often a brutal world out there at times and you never know what someone is going to try and project upon you and whether its going to stick like Velcro coated schrapnel on our psychic skin.

I wanted to make the OA meeting today but I couldn’t. I stuffed half a chocolate bar down my throat after leaving The Playhouse last night after the performance, it brought up so much emotion in me I cried so deeply in several of the songs. Tex showed such an insight into the forces of pain that drove Johnny Cash throughout his life, I wondered in particular what it was about JC’s story that resonated for him so deeply It was such a moving account of a performer’s life and I looked up JC’s astrology last night as well as that of his soulmate/partner June Carter, its so hard for an addict to find someone who will love them through thick and thin as June loved Johnny, in the end they died within 3 months of each other.

My body has settled down a little after the ‘storm’ of this morning again. At least I called my sister and was honest about where I am at, but it really hurts when I cry and tell her I love her and she never says it back. She told my ex partner once that I was ‘difficult’, my stand in therapist thinks that is the role my family projected onto me, as Kat says I was always the kid who stood up and said the Emperor had no clothes on and as such I was not welcome in a lot of places, and most definitely not in my family after Dad and my sister Judith died. Maybe my sister and brother don’t really love me at all. I don’t know. I just don’t know. But my sister wanted me to take care of myself today and that at least shows love for me. I found myself apologising for being so emotional today and that was not right, I just feel things very very deeply and trauma does resonate with me maybe because it echoes similar themes in my own life. I just managed to eat some scrambled eggs and I will make it as gentle a day today as I can. I know I carry so much under my skin that I cannot clearly articulate and I am still not fully disentangled from all the trauma in my family of origin, if I ever will be. Today I need to honour that, there sore spots and voids and psychic injuries I will probably always carry and never be able to fully name, just like so many others of us on this crazy mixed up beautiful planet.