I Can Finally Stand the Silence, even relish in it

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(This post needs one more edit)

In 1995 I was diagnosed with PTSD for forty years.  They said I’d been traumatized as a child and reacting to it since I was five to seven years old, or forty years, which at University of California San Francisco Medical Center is called Prolonged Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

It may sound like a crazy San Francisco thing, until you hear my story.  For me, finding out I’d had PTSD for 40 years, was a blessed explanation for things that had plagued me all my life.  By age 45, I was as shocked by my own behavior as everyone else had been all my life once they got to know me.  At 45 I was alone in a small Northern California town where I knew almost nobody, with a five year old child, trying to figure out how my life had gone so wrong and landed me there. 

Trying to figure out how I could have made all the stupid mistakes I’d made that led me to end up this broke desperate bloated unhealthy weepy female in her forties with NOTHING to show for my life but a child I needed to support. 

So for me the diagnosis made perfect sense.

PTSD since age five explained everything. 

***

Then since I realized what caused the crazy behavior, I stopped it, and turned into a completely different person.  Completely.  I stopped being the mania driven whore whose life was a nonstop response to something I was not going to slow down long enough to look at.  I slowed down and stopped, then looked at it, then all of a sudden I was able to remain in a comfortable position on a couch. 

At least now sometimes I can hold still. 

***

Today (November 2011) living in a weird space. 

I can’t tell anyone what I'm writing about.  I don't want to go into the whole thing, explanations, referring people to bishop accountability to prove indeed there have been six thousand pedophile priests found in the USA alone, that's priests with allegations against them legal enough that their names can be published by a corporate nonprofit.  

I'm writing this thing, trying to finish it by 2015. 

NOTES for upcoming stories:

1.  Joys of doing your own medical care in the insurance free so no health care at all world I live in.  First, become a vegan.

2.  Call Troy Gray in Colorado and ask about this note I found from 2008:

"Troy says he may have DVD or at least transcript of testimony before Colorado state legislature that included a 92 year old lady who came forward for the first time that day to say she was a pedophile priest victim. 

"And there was also a local politician guy who stood up and came out as a survivor in the middle of that hearing."

************

FROM A FILE CALLED

JOURNALING FINALLY JOURNALING

Still November 2011, 

Now that I've been abandoned in West Virginia, I am dying of loneliness. 

I have to find a way to get out of this town.  

How did I ever end up in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia? 

A guy from the pedophile priest movement dropped me off here in March, and I was supposed to be picked up in April by another guy in the “pedophile priest survivor movement” but he never showed up, and  the woman from the "survivor movement" who invited me turned out to  not have any room for me, so I got stranded in this town known as "the country's first spa." 

So I rented an apartment and made the best of it.

Now West Virginia has served its purpose. And a good purpose it's been. 

I've learned to live with myself, and I can even turn the TV and radio and everything off sometimes and just sit in the quiet.  The previous decades before coming here, in fact pretty much since the damn recovered memory came in around 1994, I was not able to tolerate silence for more than a few seconds.  The horrible thoughts would pour in. 

Those uncontrollable images have finally stopped.

I should not say “damned recovered memory” but blessed recovered memory. 

Without it I’d never have understood why my behavior was so bad.  At least now I get to live the life of a little old lady as a different person than the slut I was from about age 12 or puberty on.    

Meanwhile I keep trying to use the space station fantasy to counteract the isolation.  I pretend, this is what life is like in the future when individual humans can be astronauts living in space long periods of time in isolated settlements. 

To my isolation I have the added element of not being the same person I used to be twenty years ago.  So I don't even really know myself. 

I get to live with this new person.  I also get to live with knowing all the screw-ups in my life that shocked me as well as just about every person I encountered, all that behavior, the shameful way I lived, can all be explained away with the fact I had PTSD for forty years. 

I could have been successful, in fact, sometimes I almost was successful, but I always sabotaged it. 

If only I’d been able to keep my job at NASA back in the 1980s and become what I could have become. 

Instead I have this cheap furnished room and I earn just a little over the poverty line in income, so since I'm so rich, I get no help from the government with anything.  Plus what few friends I do have are all as poor as I am and able to live on government grants for which I somehow never qualify.  So I have to watch them get free medical care, subsidized rent, and food stamps, while I self medicate in a high-priced slum living on rice the last two weeks each month. 

****

But food and medicine are not the main basic human need that for me is never met.  It's been more than 24 years since I felt arms around me.  Even now thinking of it, my eyes glaze, I exhale.  I have an inkling of what it would be like to feel love.  I know a couple of the men I was with early on, in my early twenties, late teens, would have been wonderful life partners. 

Imagine if I’d married Tim Young, who was my high school passion.  Instead I threw him off my front porch when he came back to see me in my senior year, me age 17(?), just beginning to discover the power I had over men, and the rage I’d feel for them after. 

I was so mean to him as I threw Tim Young out of my life.  

Then I repeated that pattern all the way through adulthood.  Fuck men then throw them out in as mean a way as possible.

**************

Joy of life without access to health care in the USA.

This is the second one of these pussy globules that's formed under my skin and grown into a pulsing, mucous filled white head 20 times the size of a pimple.  They appear underneath my arm, in the armpit.  

The first time it happened was when Lizzie and I lived in a homeless shelter in 2004. I must have picked something up there....

***********************

November 21, 2011, I am dying of loneliness. 

I'm actually kind of liking this lifestyle I landed in, where I'm on my own alone almost all the time.  I mean, I just had a phone conversation and emailed a couple people, so I'm not totally cut off. 

Just living on a space station in the Appalachians.  

Where Finally I Can Stand Silence.

For the first time in years I'm able to sit in silence and just enjoy it.  Finally.  FINALLY.  Finally the chatter has slowed down to a stop in my head.  I can actually turn the TV off before I go to bed and lie down in a different room, close the door even, and go to sleep. 

I still take a handful of Benadryl at night to get to sleep but I'm getting better. 

In fact it's become like an exercise or an experiment. 

Turn off all the media, turn off the TV and don't immediately turn on the radio, just listen to the silence.

Finally I can do that, at least for a little while.

Finally the shit doesn't boil up from the bottom and immediately take over the conversation in my head. 

Finally. 

NOTE:  I'm not saying I heard voices, just that the rage has been forming sentences and paragraphs in my head for years now, and I’d stop everything and write them down, or run them in my head until I could.  That's the chatter that's finally coming to a stop.

More to come

-By Kay Ebeling, 
Producer of City of Angels Blog 
since January 2007.

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Art is from Resonance Network 

http://resonancenetwork.wordpress.com/tag/berlin/

Berlin

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