I’m back underwater

My ptsd brain is back online. What caused it? I can’t say for sure. Probably grandma’s death. Probably being around his family again. Probably all of it, combined. It’s a little bit of everything, always. In the middle of the night, I woke with the looming feeling that someone was in my house. That is a sure sign of my trauma brain having been switched on. I was reading a book, Swamplandia!, but I’ve decided to pause because it has me looking over my shoulder for ghosts. Instead, I began reading No One Belongs Here More Than You, but last night I had to put it down because the story contained the word “rape.”

I dreamt of a lot of things last night. In one dream, I was at the beach with my mom’s family. I ran into the ocean, expecting the water to be of a predictable depth. Unknowingly, I had actually leapt right where a drop-off began. I sunk so deep in the murky brown water that my feet touched the bottom and no light was visible from the top. I kept trying to push off to swim back up but the weight of the water was keeping me down. Somehow, I made it back to the surface but got caught in the riptide. Swimming parallel to shore, I thought I could make it, but then the shoreline disappeared and the waves got bigger. I began to yell for help but all I could see was water, waves, water. I woke up.

I am trying to stay present with whatever is coming up. The thoughts, physical sensations, emotions. I have such a tendency to try to find the cure, to find the quickest way through the discomfort that I disregard the catharsis of simply acknowledging the truth of how I feel. So right now, I will say I am tired, my heart is palpitating, my head and shoulders hurt and I feel sad, slightly hollow, and certainly anxious. Hand over my heart, I tell myself (notably, those young scared parts): this is overwhelming and scary and a lot. And, I love you.