Posted by finelinebob on August 16, 2006, at 23:44:44
It's always best to run somewhere safe and friendly when the monsters start coming out.
I must have had some nightmares last night, because I woke up this morning and immediately realized how close it is to September 11th. I mean, I expected I'd have some sort of reaction and I was already planning on taking a few sick days around it ... but it's still too far away for it to be so close.
The rage and the fragility and the alienation are all slowly creeping back into my life, but I can see signs of them in my journal, and I'm aware of them now. Particularly the rage -- negotiating NYC subway platforms and stairways are aggravating enough on their own; I don't need my PTSD helping out.
Thank god it's on a Monday, not a Tuesday, this year. I'd be so happy if it snowed ... I want it to be overcast and wet and windy and cold and miserable because all of that would be so much easier to tolerate than a cloudless, perfectly blue sky on a perfect late-summer day.
Once you get out of the canyons of Midtown and down in Chelsea, where the buildings aren't so tall, if you're standing on 6th Avenue and know where to look you can see this big hole in the sky. I remember being down in the Village, drinking beers and chatting with one of my best friends here in the City, sitting at a sidewalk table of one of the bars along 6th Ave. If you've never been in a big city at night and taken a look, then you don't know how starless it can be. Too much streetlight, too little starlight. But in that inky blackness there were these two beautiful silver towers that just jumped above everything in sight.
Great. Tonight's fortune from my cookie I got with the General Tso's I had delivered? "A dose of adversity is often as needful as a dose of medicine."
I beg to differ. I'll have a double dose of clonazepam instead, thankyouverymuch.
I'm very lucky. I've got a therapist with whom I must have shared three lifetimes worth of experiences in the last ten years. I've got one of the best PDocs in the City. I've got Babble, especially Babble-2000 (but I ain't got Noa ... where r u, baaaaaybee?). I've got the loveliest about-to-be-5-years-old German Shepherd named Leyna who knows my pains because she's lived through them with me and bears some of my wounds for me. I got a new guitar. I've got a wonderful job with a great company and the most understanding boss you could ever want -- he knows where I'm at because he had the guts and the integrity to say he could take it if I told him my truth, and he has the experience to understand ... don't know about him personally, but he has a brother who is bipolar. And he has the heart to care.
So yes, I have lots of support; far more beyond what I just listed. And yes, when you go on a Babble like this things intensify.
But somewhere in my head, a switch has been flipped. Or, maybe, a circuit breaker has been tripped. And I see the load getting heavier and more breakers tripping.
And I already don't see any reason why I would need any sleep until Sunday or so. Oh, I'm also lucky enough that in my job I have to work so hard my body just can't go along with my mind's preferred method of using one pain to distract me from another.
I think my mind might win the fight tonight, tho ... I see my T tomorrow -- this morning -- at 9:30am and I've got about 8.5 hours (make that 8 now) before I need to be on the subway, minus the time it will take me to walk Leyna when she needs it and make myself look and smell presentable for the rest of the day. And I still have work to do because a mail server that is the bane of my existence decided to act up today, taking up 7 hours of perfectly good normal business hours to diagnose and fix. No point in getting 3 hours or less of sleep ... I just can't wake up that fast once my body gets to take over.
Any Springsteen fans out there?
"The Rising" was an album of 15 songs, all about September 11th. There's one in particular that always jumps into my mind in times like these -- "Into the Fire" -- written from the point of view of a husband or wife who lost their partner as one of those firefighters or police officers who died that day doing their duty, trying to save lives. The verses are for that bereaved one, but the chorus is for us all:
May your strength give us strength
May your faith give us faith
May your hope give us hope
May your love bring us loveOne day, maybe those words will finally hit home, become true for me and bring me some comfort, some solace.
But not today.
poster:finelinebob
thread:677313
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/2000/20050828/msgs/677313.html