Tuesday night

The Feast of the Annunciation (new calendar).

I was a bit late to vesper's I confess! Today was a very intense day! 

So PT went really well.  Like night and day difference well.  But it was also exhausting.  Because I had to cover so much ground so quickly.  

I had been to this PT place before. Long story why I couldn't go initially.  Last time I was there was 2023 August. I had forgotten when I sprained my right ankle which now has the fracture.  That alone was kind of like whiplash.  Because that was a few months before I knew I had PTSD.  I had already lost my memory and recovered.  As in recovered my memory.  But that whole summer I was so up and down.  My emotions were way more up and down than normal.  I kept feeling like something was wrong but didn't know what.  I remember so many times googling emotional shock and feeling what I'm going through is not fully described here.  

Then tonight I met a very young lovely priest couple who I had met before. The priest was ordained as a priest after I met him in 2022.  That was before my memory loss. 

If you can't tell my memory loss is like a before/after event in my life.  

Considering I would have died if my husband hadn't been with me because I was no longer eating or drinking, it's very much traumatic event.  

Anyway, that was rather astounding.  Meeting someone who I remembered as a seminary family who were visiting the church in 2022 when they were new to seminary.  And I met them when I would say in my words I was still normal.  Before my memory loss, before the mental illness that began because I was given meds at a severely wrong dose.  Before I was mentally ill with C-PTSD.  

So that was a big deal. 

  

Xenia, thank you so much for your comment! 

Yes I'm growing. But actually I would use a different word. I'm healing.  

I think I've mentioned here before that my memory loss and subsequent Complex PTSD was like a green beautiful field with flowers that experienced a huge devastating fire and the entire field of flowers and grass was utterly destroyed. So destroyed that the very soil had to be replaced. But then when you were replacing the soil and planting the new grass then would come a flood and everything would be washed away. Fix things again. Put new soil and plant again. And then more storms and floods would come and everything would be destroyed again and again and again.  That's what healing from Complex PTSD is like.  

Complex-PTSD is something that lasts a long time.  

I'm basically rebuilding my entire life.  I think I mentioned here that I didn't even remember that when you come in from the cold and you're in a warm room and your glasses that you're wearing steam up.... I didn't remember that was a thing.  I literally went to tea and sympathy this past fall almost 3 years after my memory loss, and told the very kind waitress there. I said to her, I think your heat is too high because my glass are steamed up.  I was so confused and surprised about not being able to see through my glasses.   She was very kind and just said right,  We'll put turn up the AC.  That was very kind because she didn't point out that it was normal for glasses to steam up when you come out from the cold or make me feel bad.  She treated me as if my confusion was normal.  Later I realized what was going on and that it's normal for glasses to steam up when you were in the cold and then in a warm room.  

It's difficult to explain how many things I've had to relearn.  

Stephanie Foo has a great website and on it is this ~  reddit on what complex PTSD is.

I remember someone I admired on Instagram talking about mental illness up front. I didn't yet have mental illness like that, but now that I do, I understand how one can be comfortable writing about it and feel that it's important to do so. 

So not everything exactly in the following screenshot (from the link I just mentioned) fits what I've struggled with as I've healed, but I can relate to so much of this very much.  Of course my complex PTSD is from the two months of descending into an awful hell which was January and February 2023. I lost my memory completely on February 20th 2023.  So I'm mentioning that because it's ironic that this list of what symptoms can be like with complex PTSD includes memory problems. 

I don't know if I'll ever be able to fully describe the hell that I was in for those two weeks of my actual memory loss and initial recovery.  It was extreme pain.  

So I'm still recovering and sometimes I write so that I can eventually understand not only the world better but what I think and experience.  

I've learned so much about myself in the last few years.  I didn't even understand my childhood or any of it being painful like I've described either today or yesterday, because I had no idea that I basically was observing life.  That I was looking at it and not involved in it in ways.

And you wouldn't know that if you knew me in person today.  I'm not like that in person.  I'm actually very good at talking to people.  Especially at church usually.  Because I know that structure well and I feel comfortable. But even at stores I can talk to people who are full out strangers very easily.  

I did a major self-care session for myself after that PT session. I made sure I ate really well and the bath I enjoyed with salts was wonderful. As were the snacks!

I remember how sick I was when I was on those steroids in January 2023.  I remember taking cashews to church and a water bottle.  I think Smart Water.  And right after communion I would go to the back and sit and have some nuts and water right away.  Because I was so shaky and so sick.  And I was totally manic.  And I couldn't get outside it.  It was the most painful thing.  And it only got worse, culminating in my memory loss. 

Just to clarify what that can mean, having the food after communion right away is because I wasn't having anything to eat or drink before Communion.  It's a normal practice in the Orthodox Church. Though I know people because of health reasons can't do that.  And their reasons are utterly legitimate and they have the blessings of their spiritual father and/or parish priest. 

Anyway, if you looked at my blog, In year 2024 I only blogged 11 times.   That was a very difficult year.  The one year anniversary of my memory loss was a time of great pain.  And I was in great internal pain for a long time.

The fact that I can talk about it so freely now is a sign of my healing.  

It's that the poor burnt field has grass growing in it now. The storms of life don't wipe everything out.  Healing is beginning to take hold.  And I pray that I will be able to continue to heal.  

May God have mercy on us!