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I'm feeling down about medication. Like, rationally I understand that the double handful of pills I take daily help me through life. Intuitively I cannot help but feel that I'm doing something very, very wrong, and I should stop
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And, of course, there are still things I'm not addressing, or not addressing properly, or don't really have the right medication for. There's probably a standing asthma med I could be taking that would help, but it's expensive and I don't have insurance, so there we are. And so on. And so forth.
Times like this make me remember the time I spent in a therapy session talking about my step-brother who, like me, is a geek (graduate degree in bio-mathematics from MIT, used to be into anime, etc.) and, like me, likes martial arts and, like me, has ADD and had some oppositional and (I think) anxiety-induced semi-hysterical refusal to meet expectations when he was young, and, not like me at all, is out-going, makes friends easily, is independent and adventurous and self-confident. He was 19 at the time and had taken a trip with friends into Europe for some purpose, but halfway through got tired of their agenda and struck out on his own, on a train happened to meet a group of (I think French?) martial arts students of an art he didn't know who were on their way to (maybe?) Portugal for a demonstration, so he joined them and went with them, learned some of how they do things, got invited to come back and join their school, but eventually split off from them, and--
And I was talking about all this, and about how I identify with him, except I could never have done anything like that, at 19 or any age, how despite having a lot of the same personality features that led him to do things like that, I'd just been working on making it from one day to the next at that age, and--
And my therapist listened to all this for a while, and finally intercepted me, saying, dryly, "Nice not to have been abused, huh?"
Kinda stopped me there.
And I know that what you're talking about is different, but for me, it's related, I guess because that was the moment at which it really *clicked* for me, what I had known for a long time, which was that I would always be affected by what had happened to me. With work and help and luck, I could get to the point where the negative impact on my life was small enough to be manageable and was not the defining feature of things. But I almost certainly would never reach a point where there was no negative impact any more. Because that's what trauma does. It screws things up, in a way you can't just go back and fix.
It's so very hard to accept. It's so very annoying.
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(I don't mean to minimize anything by saying "trauma" instead of "abuse". I am just trying to internalize it more lately as, say, I got run over by a bus or something. Wrong place, wrong time.)
I used to be a lot more adventurous and outgoing, but once my health started sliding downhill I lost all confidence in being able to take care of myself in adventurous situations, and that pretty much stopped that. Although I am pretty sure I would have never randomly joined a group of martial artists and toured around with them. :)
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