I am very lucky. I am very unlucky.
And now I'm old.
“People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
These last few weeks, I can’t write. I can write some sentences, but I feel they are wrong; they don’t feel like they have energy; they don’t feel like they are expressing whatever truth I need to express at the moment. Maybe they’re last year’s truth.
I’m not sure, but I’m thinking the problem may be that I’ve uncovered/acknowledged sex in my adult life that I still need to process. I wrote about having sex with my brother and his friend, August, 1978. Though that came up in a ketamine journey three years ago, I hadn’t integrated the knowledge. Now it looks like sexual abuse continued into my 20s. (I was also beginning to have sex which I didn’t dissociate and which I don’t consider abuse.) So writing about this time and the troubles I was having at the university—writing blocks!—at the moment, it seems to be too much.
I shouldn’t call this a problem; this is part of why I write: to uncover and integrate the parts of my life which are the parts of my self.
Maybe it’s something else. Like this discouragement when I investigate how I was when I was young and realize that the same problems still beset me—writing blocks today echoing the writing blocks of the past. And now I’m old. My brain is less plastic; my brain is in fact deteriorating. This is frightening.
I also have some great advantages. You might be envious of my life viewing it from the outside. I have a husband, I have a dog, I’m in good physical health, and I have financial security (because of my husband.) We own a car and a house.
So I am very lucky. Because of all this I’m able to write; otherwise I couldn’t; I might be homeless or dead—at the least, unable to afford therapy. Instead, I am privileged to continue to try to find help. I found a good therapist several months ago and therapy is going better than it ever has, I think. We plan to do a psychedelic journey soon.
Maybe it’s this therapy that’s disrupting me? Maybe I’m changing and therefore my writing needs to change. Maybe some part of me is calling for a period of reading and rest.
At the moment I am sitting at a picnic table in a lovely park. My dog is lying beside me in the grass, content except she wonders when we’re going to go for a walk. This is so good, I hardly know what to feel. A little of the toxicity relaxes, dissolves.
Luck. I tend to think life is almost entirely about luck, that even how much will and drive and initiative we have depends more on our childhood and genes than on anything we can come up with on our own. So it behooves me to remind myself that I have had some very good luck.
What I write about is mostly the bad luck. My family, especially my paternal parent. Abuse growing up is maybe the worst luck of all. And then the blindness of society—the outsiders—to what was happening to me—really bad luck. Then as an adult the blindness of psychologists to abuse and dissociation. Bad bad luck.
Some would argue that writing about all this bad luck is not good for me. That I should focus on the good. But I think it’s important to do both. I wonder what the point of my life is if I don’t at least try to change things, even if only some infinitesimal amount. I want people to see what is happening to children, hidden behind the walls of their homes. I want people to see dissociative amnesia and learn to understand and to work with people who dissociate as I do.
So I will keep coming back to the writing if I can.
🔸🦎🔸
See my Resources page for links to more information about dissociative amnesia.
“I can write some sentences, but I feel they are wrong; they don’t feel like they have energy; they don’t feel like they are expressing whatever truth I need to express at the moment. Maybe they’re last year’s truth.”
I can relate to this feeling. What I understand about myself and my relationship to my past has changed a lot over the years of therapy work. You found an eloquent way to express how I feel about it. The truth is hard to anchor as the ship keeps drifting.
“Luck. I tend to think life is almost entirely about luck, that even how much will and drive and initiative we have depends more on our childhood and genes than on anything we can come up with on our own. So it behooves me to remind myself that I have had some very good luck.”
Sheer damn bad luck or good luck (depending on how you want to frame it) may be part of the equation. I don’t think it explains everything. There’s actually a pretty high suicide rate associated with complex PTSD. The outcomes aren’t always so great. Many people don’t even pursue therapy. They simply give up or remain in denial. I’m okay attributing some of my positive success to myself — my resilience, my strength, my resourcefulness, my tenacious nature. I’ve decided it’s okay for me to own it. It’s okay for you to own your strengths because your success has been hard earned. It’s not just sheer luck or the fact that you had the financial means. You took the initiative. You found the resources. You did the work. You made it happen. You are a shining star 🌟 of resilience and courage. Love the Emerson quote as it speaks to the unsettled nature of us that we can choose to embrace or ignore. Recognizing our unsettled aspects does offer the opportunity for movement and potential growth because it means were still alive and not laying dead in a ditch.
“Maybe some part of me is calling for a period of reading and rest.”
I encourage you to trust your intuition here. That happened last time in my ketamine journey. I saw a woman lying down in a coffin in quiet repose — a little creepy and I think it was a message to me that I need some time to rest in quiet repose before doing more work. Sometimes the warrior needs to rest. We’re moving into the fall when the leaves fall from the trees and bears hibernate. I’m trying to learn to attune to the seasons. What do the trees, the birds, the air and the sun say? Just a thought.
“I want people to see dissociative amnesia and learn to understand and to work with people who dissociate as I do.”
I think you have a good heart and you mean well. You’re already providing a great service and contributing a lot to the Substack community. I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it work for you.
I also wanted to say, I’m amazed you’ve been doing ketamine for three years. I didn’t even know it existed as a therapy until a year ago! I feel like you’re a bit of a trailblazer! That’s also pretty impressive especially working with complex PTSD. Maybe you’ve already written about it — but my first ketamine experience was scary! Wonder what your first experience was like. Take care.