Hello darkness

Depression has hit me like a sledgehammer this week. I truly feel like I’ve been beaten up. It took all my effort to stand yesterday then I managed to get out into the Sun at about 9.30 am but I just got hit with a huge wave of my PTSD symptoms it was three hours to eat a mandarin and a croissant before feeling like I was being pulled to the ground then fighting to get free. I collapsed into bed exhausted at 4 pm and wove up about an hour later around 5 pm totally disoriented, my life just seemed unreal, and I did not know how I was going to manage to live it..

The background is we went into lock down on Friday and I am on a therapy break., Monday was okay as Simon comes to walk Jasper, but Tuesday was a struggle and yesterday was like a horror movie..I was reliving so much of what went on with Mum after my last relationship broke down and she tried to help me and then we fought and I ran off to Sydney for 6 months and ended up staying with a guy who got abusive after a short while, I was only renting a room but he got angry about so many things.. Some honey dripping down the shelf one day and the fact he said I closed the front door too loudly among other things, he was a drinker anyway..

It was a very dark time, I eventually came back to Canberra in June 2011 and lived on Mum’s couch as my sister was here too but there was a big fight they had and then after I got pushed into my house here, my sister was committed to a pysche facility in Melbourne after the family ganged up on her behind her back and then in 2013 she made that attempt on her life. My older sister died the following year never knowing what Sue tried to do.. at that point my mother was being hospitalized fairly frequently too.. At one point there were three members of my family in care or hospital I was running back and forward to visit.

When i think of what I have lived through from then as well as all the other trauma and seeing how the shock treatment damaged my sister and then all of the palavar with Scott it all just seems so mixed up and messy, I see I had no strong ego center at all and next to no psychological cohesion..

Therapy over past years has begun to open up the can of worms on my emotional neglect and all the traumatic injuries as well as showing all of my wounds.. But yesterday it just all hit me, who know, maybe it was the critic beating me up again in the face of Kat being on a break and this lock down.. I managed to overcome my fear of not being able to breathe with a mask on to don one on Tuesday to do groceries but I had a panic attack while wearing it…in the past I have called on my mental health issue as a reason not to wear one but at times it feels wrong but to be honest wearing a mask at times feels even worse but I am trying to work on not rebelling in negative ways at the moment so I made the attempt even though wearing a mask is very very tough for me.. it just triggers the memory of having my mouth covered with a mask when I was trapped in the car in 1979 after being so cut up and struggling to breathe.

It seemed my body went into lock down too, yesterday, I got a call after waking at 5 from my sister’s friend but she only seemed to want to put my sister down for not feeling good at the moment and gave her a lecture and then when I said my own depression was back I got a lecture on what I should do, I actually called my sister after it and there are some positive signs, she is getting out on her own to walk and her ECT is mercifully being cancelled due to this lockdown here so that is a plus. I broke down on the phone with her and said how much I am honestly struggling right now. . she never tells me she loves me much but at the end of the chat she said those words..

I made myself walk Jasper today I then went and got a coffee and went down by the lake and sat on the grass and did some yoga and watched some children playing with the swans and seagulls.. That felt better, to hold my hands up to feel the sun and take in the wind and touch base with the grass. I am upset too that Scott convinced me to no longer talk to Daniel. I woke last night crying and remembering that one the songs I used to listen to a lot on those lonely afternoons I was left on my own after school was from Elton John’s album Dont Shoot Me I’m Only The Piano Player.. its the song Daniel and its lyrics resonated with a goodbye.. and pain over that loss and the longing for someone you loved who had their own ‘scars that would not heal’.. My Daniel lost his wife to terminal cancer in 2015.. That said we only connected for a few weeks but he seemed to be a very empathic person but for him to say that Scott was lying just did not seem right to me.. Why cant I have two male friends, it just doesnt seem fair..Scott is so controlling at times..

Anyway my loneliness is back at the moment but I feel it less when I can open up the laptop and put my feelings and thoughts into words.. I had the thought yesterday that I should stop writing my blog that is self centered and immature.. but the truth is it gives me comfort.. But it is only my life story told from my perspective and when I look at what I sometimes put others through I often feel ashamed.. it makes me feel sick and like crying even to write those words..

The truth is I struggled a lot in my life.. I broke down in tears with my sister yesterday I can share with her my sadness over Jonathan and how when he came into my life from 1993 onwards things became far brighter and more connected even in my family.. but then it all tore apart again and this isolation theme overpowered me almost like a trance.. At easter 2002 I withdrew from the house where we lived at the coast to the family beach house and wanted to be alone… I look back now and see that possibly all makes sense.. It was built in the years before I had the crash, I went there for the first holidays in 1978 after I met my first boyfriend, Robert.. He went to Bali for Easter as he was a tradie and I was still in the second last year of High School.. The next year we split and I crashed and it was to the coast house we all went a few weeks after they finally let me out of hospital in late December 1979 although now a lot of my memory of those first few months out of traction are vague due to PTSD.

I got sucked back into a regression, I see that now.. I am still not totally out of it, but my family is so changed now, the nieces and nephews have all moved onto their own independent lives but in many ways I see now that I aborted mine in 2001.. There were good opportunities in the UK for me but I could not take them and the illness and aloneness of my aging Mum weighed heavily on me.. I WAS THERE FOR HER FOR ALL OF THE SIX OR SO HOSPITALISATIONS FROM 2011 TO 2017 when she finally died.. now the truth is both my sister and I struggle in different ways.. As I take the risk to stay close I see my part and that I also needed a more demonstrative engaged family to really blossom..

The issue of lack of affection came up in a conversation yesterday with my sister.. Mum and Dad never got that so they never hugged us much, as I have shared before we were more likely to be hit than cuddled, apart from that time Dad and I nearly died on the Clyde mountain, that following morning I remember climbing onto the bed with him to give him a hug.. at 12 or so I was finally aware of his mortality.. That hug would be repeated on the day he told me he had operable cancer in 1984.. We did not know then he only had two more months to live.. so that would be one of the last.. It may not be good to remember all of this. . at least that is what society says.. to just get on despite any grief, but what happens when you live with it unresolved for over 20 years, little realising that like a phantom it actually haunts you unconsciously and stops you really reaching forward to embrace new life?

The truth is I need to allow this.. Its okay to talk about it, when it all happened I could not express any of the pain from those years of multiple trauma that stretched from 1979 to 1993 when I met Jonathan.. And in my marriage when the sadness burst through he did not like it .. He didnt want me doing therapy or maybe he just did not know how to support me.

Anyway lockdown should maybe not be affecting me so much but it seems to be.. Today I have a lot of body pain. I am glad I got that extra hour’s sleep yesterday afternoon as I woke at 3 am and did not get back to sleep until about 6 am this morning… my eating is all up shit creek too, so I better go make a salad for lunch.. its 2 pm now.. its not been possible to write or even log onto any device for two days, maybe its been good to have a technology break, and right now I need to make sure I get myself out into nature as much as I can.. Right now with the devastation of Covid its one of the few things along with my blog, Jasper and music that might help with this heavy heavy weight of thsi blanket of depression that seems to have descended over me during this past week.