I suppose that when you are making progress and swimming against the tide, it does inevitably push back from time to time and this was exactly how it was for me last night. Over recent weeks I really do feel like I have been making progress, and not just that but significant progress. I'd even moved back to less personal territory with my posts - remember yesterday's post about my frustrations with my computer.
Then last night, I was awoken for completely unrelated reasons, but as a lay there awake a flashback took hold and it was the strongest one I have had for a little while. Please notice I am not saying the only one, just the strongest one.
And flashbacks are a b***h!
They take you back, they trap you, they engulf you, and if you are not careful they consume you. You fight, you try to maintain lucidity - to keep some sense of control - and yet you relent as once more you endure.
History cannot be changed.
As I am writing - and it is a theme in my fiction that has just jumped into my head - is that while history cannot be rewritten, its interpretation is subjective and therefore it can be analysed in such a way that it no longer affects the present nor the future.
Listen to me, read that last paragraph again. That is me, that is the analyst; that is the Crypto_Rah who you have come to know since I started blogging on here some time back in 2020 (wow more than six years!). You have seen and been very familar with my analytical style for years, but in recent times you've seen something else...
Somebody less sure, threatened, insecure and vulnerable and the worse thing about it is that my brain buys it all. The analyst is RIGHT, and yet there is a massive difference between then analyst's TRUTH and the acceptance. I don't know if it is a kind of grief. Apparently, there are five stages and I don't necessarily remember them all (for example I know anger is one - maybe second and acceptance is fifth), but I do feel strongly that I am stuck at number one.
Denial.
Not denial that the trauma happened, but denial of what the analyst (my brain) is telling me about how to interpret what happened and that is what is so damn frustrating.
I get it, but I can't get it, if you get what I mean?
I am sorry I couldn't resist that. At least my sense of humour is still present.
The truth is that the mind is a battlefield, or maybe more appropriately it is a site where a war is raging and as with victories there are losses to. What I do need to accept (acceptance being the opposite of denial), is that while l lost a battle last night and have for most of my life been losing these battles, the tide is turning and each passing week sees me claiming victory.
The flag is waving over guilt, although the summit is still being challenged. Fear is threatening, anger is swirling underneath and while I an increasingly less overwhelmed the fact is that there a moments when the sense that I could be pulled under again.
But I will persist. My failure was to not resist and to quote Evanescence "I won't be broken again". It has always resonated with me when Amy Lee screams that line and it is not uncommon for me to go back a few seconds just to repeat in an attempt to reprogramme my brain (call it primitive NLP if you like).
Screaming "I won't be broken again" doesn't necessarily mean I am fixed, but it does represent an attempt to draw a line in the sand.
As always stay safe and well my friends
