Reclaim my spirit from each and every place I have ever left it

while i put this “down on paper”

1. new milford
2. bergenfield (a)
3. closter

4. fair lawn (a)
5. toms river
6. wyckoff (a)

7. portland, me
8. wyckoff (b)
9. jersey city
10. cresskill
11. bergenfield (b)
12. tompkins, ny
13. msu

14. belleville
15. saddle river
16. clifton/mntclr pt.1

17. fair lawn (b)
18. little falls
19. midland park
20. clifton/mntclr pt.2

21. caldwell
22. edgewater
23. home

~these are all the places i’ve moved. the early ones are the split homes of relatives. from 7 on, i was on my own. obviously, i have had a problem with staying still. more often than not, i moved from a frying pan into a fire because of my impulsive nature and/or rash decisions. where we are now isn’t going to last long either.
some of these places are good places. good memories. i wish i could go back in time. others not so good.
i think of this goal as a physical one. i’ve not grown roots anywhere and i think that has had a bad effect on me. i have left bits of me all over.

i spent a great amount of my life running.
i have referred to so many places (off-handedly) as “home” and yet so few ever were—so few safe—and off i’d go again, anxious, sometimes desperate to find the sanctuary i really lost years before.

i have been driven by self-preservation, sometimes genuine opportunity, and most often by my impulsive, cyclothymic nature. the last is a very recent discovery and one that is forcing me to change my behavior (this is good).

i am not sure how i will “recapture.” i am thinking photos tho, some of these places are gone. what bothers me most is that sometimes people stole pieces of my spirit—people i will never see again. i wish i could find them and rip it right out of them, taking it back and leave them to bleed to death, if need be.
but i guess this is the best opportunity i’ve got to go hunting for the ghosts of myself.

i’ve always been about the tabula rasa: but you never completely erase your memory do you? and lately little fragments, some good, mostly bad, have been seeping in, like flashbacks and disrupting me something terrible. so i’m adopting this goal thinking maybe if i stop ignoring them, and take ownership, they will stop damaging me.

This is one of the hardest goals I have to make entries about. The more I know people here on 43T the harder it is, because I feel less anonymous.

Anyway, this came up a while ago when answering a question that had been posted about near death experiences. So, here is the story. ^{It is a long story, so maybe that will deter people from reading it, which would be ok with me!} My dad was a member of US Army Intelligence, and his job was to debrief POWs to make sure they hadn’t been brainwashed. It seems he used a lot of what he learned in the army as his guidebook for parenting.

Also, I grew up in Arizona, where it’s hot and lots of people have swimming pools. Our family had one. One day, I was in the swimming pool. Then my dad came into the pool too, with his big glass of beer. He always drank beer starting in the afternoon. He drank it in a big plastic cup, because he liked to put ice in it, and he liked to drink in the pool. Mustn’t take glass into the pool. Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. I was just swimming. I went under the water, and when I tried to come back up, I couldn’t. This was very shocking. Then I realized my dad was putting his hand on my head so I couldn’t come up for air. I tried to swim away, but when I tried to come up again, it was the same thing. This kept happening and I was panicking, but then finally I just thought, “This is it. I am going to die now.”

When I surrendered to the idea that my dad was going to kill me and gave up trying, that was when he let me come up for air. He didn’t say anything at all. He was just sort of smirking. I didn’t feel anything at all. Everything around me seemed bigger, sounds and so on, and yet also far away from me, and I remember being aware of how easy it would be to die while the whole world just went on doing what it was doing and not noticing at all.

I am pretty sure something in me got lost at that moment. Even now, I can’t connect with any emotions around this event. It’s only very recently that I feel like I’m really getting it that this was not an okay thing for my dad to do.

I would like to be able to get that lost piece of me back. It seems like an impossible task. So I thought I would write about it under this goal because it seems like it might be a step in the right direction.

there are too many pieces of me, special important pieces, that I have abandoned in hurtful places. Like I am still stuck in those eras of my life in some way. I think I have been vaguely aware of this for some time now, but it was only when I saw it in words on Wren’s 43 list that it really came to the fore of my mind. Thanks Wren!

A lot of work to do here…but I have started, there is a method called “re-cappiture-taking” it is an Indian method of meditation. Very powerful and very affective. It involves breath work and really looking back on your life and how you have spent your energy/spirit.
The Indians believe if you do this you can clam back your life force and that will add years to you,not only in body but mind and spirit as well.
It is very calming after you have done the process of the meditation.
I learnt it from a Shamanic Healer in Bali….Great results.

It’s been 10 days since I started the Big Amino Acid/Vitamin Programme for Brain Renewal. In addition to all the supplements (and it is A LOT!), I am also focusing on consuming at least 20 grams of protein in every meal and increasing my fat consumption (which typically had been only about 10-15% of my daily intake). Before starting, I was rapidly sinking into serious depression, which had frankly progressed to the suicidal ideation point. I did feel much better after just 24 hours, and that has been consistent over the past 10 days. I just saw my therapist, and he felt that my thinking was much more balanced and clear. I also am rarely experiencing food cravings, and when I do, it is for protein.

So, my plan is to continue on with this supplement/eating program and see what happens next!

I am really struggling lately with depression. The big kind, the kind that feels like it weighs 1000 pounds and you are dragging it on your back through every thing you try to do.

This depression has been with me my whole life. As far back as I can remember, back to toddler years, it’s been here. Sometimes it recedes into background noise, and other times, like now, it takes over.

My therapist gave me a book called The Mood Cure. This book talks about different ways that brain chemistry can get messed up and how to reset it using amino acid supplements. I am willing to try, but I am afraid to hope.

The events of last week definitely point out a huge hole in my spirit.

I can look back on that woman’s verbal attack and be fairly certain in my intellect that she was wrong, but still…there is a part of my mind that sides with her, even as I know that the tendency to do this is called “identifying with the aggressor,” and it is a predictable result of child abuse.

And then emotionally…well, emotionally, I just feel very bruised and sad. I talked to my therapist about it. There is just a lot of work for me to do. I need a way to protect myself when things like this occur. Because the world is not a warm, fuzzy place, but I am not going to hide from it any more…

I have no idea how to do this. I think these skills of self protection are ideally learned in childhood, and, of course, when you are battered repeatedly you learn the opposite, you learn to shut down and take it. Still, I believe it can be done, and I am going to find out how.

I started telling people about the things that were going on at home, behind closed doors. I tried to get someone to see behind the facade of normalcy and tried to get some help. I tried to get removed from my parent’s house, too. No one who heard (teachers, doctors, other kids’ parents) helped.

The response to this was that my parents took me to a succession of psychiatrists until they found someone who didn’t ask questions about what was happening at home and instead proclaimed that I was psychotic. Then he put me on huge doses of various medications and the next three years of my life were spent in a stupor, with my parents dragging me out of bed to sit between them while they drank each night so that they still had my body to triangulate through and frequent talk about how this was how I would be for the rest of my life.

There is still so much pain attached to having an adolescence that didn’t happen. So many lessons learned that need to be unlearned, lessons like “the world is a dangerous, uncaring place,” “trust no one,” and “there is something deeply wrong with me.”

I am really feeling the loss just lately. I want so much to find that girl and listen to her and give her a chance to learn the things about life that teenagers are supposed to learn. Wish I knew how to do it. I want to reclaim the spirit of that girl before she was pummeled into silence.

I am not a bad person if I lose patience with someone who is being unreasonable.

Last week, I lost patience at work with a woman who was being unreasonable. I ended up ending the discussion by saying, well, “we need to stop talking about this now because I’m getting too angry to discuss it any further.” Ever since that happened, my anxiety level has been high, and I have felt drenched in shame, too.

But today I am starting to see that I don’t have to be eternally patient with everyone all the time, especially people who are being unreasonable. I can say, “enough!” I am allowed to do that. This truth is exactly the opposite of what I learned as a child.

It’s just like what dogs do. When a dog has had enough, she growls or snaps or snarls, makes sure you know that this is it, and then moves on. The dog doesn’t sit and torment herself with worries over whether or not she is not a good enough dog to be alive on the earth because she set a boundary. A dog has a sense of what is enough. It is an essential part of her being. I can’t pinpoint when I lost that part of my spirit. Maybe it was lost at birth.

Regardless, I’m trying now to get it back.