Church

I have a lot more drafts lately.
That is reflective of the insecurities that come with "sanity"
hah
I like the image of me walking across a no trespassing marked snow-covered field in my skirt and slightly heeled knee-high boots and then walking through the neighborhood with my jacket hanging half-down and my right-foot now calked sideways as I awkwardly limp home better than I like the image of me sitting in church with a constant stream of tears running down my cheeks.
It took a bit of courage to leave, as I knew this would draw some attention, but I could not get the tears to stop, no matter my thoughts of the good people I loved there.
I tried to go to church today to be a supportive member of my family. Maybe I also had some thoughts of returning to "normalcy."
But as I entered the chapel the tears came without my consent. Not even sure why. I did not want to grapple with the why so I tried to just let it be whatever it was, without paying it much mind, but they just came more.
I don't want to be a god.
I don't want to feel like my value only lies in my being a wife and mother.
But those weren't what seemed to be causing these tears.
These good people were reflective of the good people that put me in a sled and bounced me across the snow covered field back to a car parked in the middle of a nice neighborhood, with plenty of nice people, with phones. Then drove me home. They likely did more damage.
These good people are reflective of my parents that had so much going on with our large family and their own personal plights, that wanted to believe in miraculous recoveries so much that head injury was the overlooked element in my own struggles, though they were the units who held all of the power to get me medically guided help me and to help me understand how this may have been a contributing factor to my own struggles.
I see that they didn't understand. That they were both very broken in their own ways. And I have no malice.
But ...this place of worship causes me confusion and pain.

These were not my thoughts there. I was trying to focus on the good there, to live in the moment, to do the things that would stop the tears. but they just kept coming

I feel the need to listen to my body
to my intuition
and to forces outside of myself that are greater than I am
I am trying to find that balance
I am not finding it there (at church)
It is not a safe place for me right now
Maybe I needed that confirmed. I am okay to not go.

The tears stopped and I was able to even laugh about my plight as I walked home, limping on my ankle that was injured in the same car accident that caused the concussion which has brought so much of this past life to light again.
The ankle is getting progressively worse as I try to return more and more to my valued ways of living.
It was an injury that was overlooked due to the more pressing matters of my head. It is now the injury that is holding me back from some of the things I need most; Structure, routine exercise, a regular job, my snowboarding job and even sleep on occasions...
It is holding me back because to be rid of the pain it will require surgery or me settling for a different lifestyle and the irony or paradox of it is, had the injury been addressed initially it very well could have healed with minimal intervention -without surgery.
So many connections
and so many parallels

Projection and Reflection... And maybe some deflection

so hold on tight you might be in for a long ride as I try to explain
all that is in my brain
right now.
Just so you know. I did actually sleep pretty well last night. I only woke once around the 3 am mark and my head was full but I was able to go back to sleep and not wake again until after 6 am so I am really happy with the progress of sleep I am making. I am starting to feel more "normal."
Which is nice in many ways but also a bit sad because the euphoric states of being become harder to access and I settle too easily into repeat patterns that over so many years had buried me so deep.
Yet as I look back I am embarrassed at much of my "irrational" and "fantastic" behaviors. This time not as much because I understand it better but there are some things I said that I am like "What the hell, you know better, people don't speak that language and of course they are going to take it the wrong way."
In anger I can be real weird, though my anger was not so intense in feeling this time, just the weirdly worded and out of character thoughtless-ness of it.
Another way I speak different is
I get real generous with my love and use the word a bit to casually.
That is a confession.
I honestly wish that my use and understanding of it in my euphoric states of survival were the more universally accepted form, but it is not, and I am powerless to change those perceptions.
With that bit of understanding lets tackle the hard stuff.
Projection and Reflection
I have been thinking on this for awhile. How others have projected their insecurities onto me and I have reflected them back only to be avoided because it was likely that confused reflecting that was feeding their insecurity or frightening them in some other way.
I have thought about how I also project my insecurities on other people and then when they reflect them back I take it as confirmation of my short coming.
 It is an easy thing to see looking back and I am very aware of how I have sabotaged myself many times through this process.
But it also can be a positive.
I am trying to figure out how to capitalize on that.
Okay not capitalize but how to change my directions so I am projecting and reflecting the positives.
Now we move to the really tricky nitty gritty of the reality of my situation with the therapist I fell in love with (remember that term has different meaning to me. I fall in love all the time, it's not a sexual thing or a romantic sort of a thing -okay maybe a bit romantic but, again, not in the sense that we are so used to; not to say that it couldn't be but that is not where my mind wanders by itself and it is only a possibility if I am open to it, which I rarely, RARELY am)
Sometimes I think the intensity of me coupled with some of these projections and reflections is a bit overwhelming for people. Add to that my intuitions and sage observations and... well... people often find I am not sitting well within their boundaries of conformity so they deflect.
It doesn't always happen.
But it happens enough that I have tried to bury that and conform and be more of what people want or expect.
What is it they say about to thine own self be true?
Oh I digress
It's avoidance you know
I am here to get out the truly painful stuff and I am myself deflecting and avoiding my own plight.
or fight... its flight
I can go on like this forever you know. and it makes me laugh at myself
but it does not get to the bottom of it
so though I have visited this before I am now processing from the more rational emotionally stable and safer place, hopefully safely out of defensive cycles. So I think I shall wander into and try to keep redirecting my random thoughts back to the task on hand of facing it, admitting it, and confronting it... with my lonely little self. And I'll take that path because that is what I am already doing ;)
... I warned you this would be long. And I am still doing it, avoiding, as I type out every single thought as it comes into my head.. shush-redirect my friend- oh that was nice self talk- good job me!
I think I am funny by-the-way
But I have had a hard time believing I am attractive enough to be a threat to anyone. Why? don't know don't care right now. -Not entirely true, a lot of it has to do with mainstream media messages and my determination to be "real" and "honest" with myself amidst rather critical family dynamics ...and some deeper more painful reasons that I care not to address or re-address at this point in my life or ever if I don't need to- but no matter, that firm held belief would keep me from believing that dear therapist could really develop any kind of therapy compromising feelings for me.
The strange thing is though, that somehow he is a wizard. For the last two months I have looked different to myself. I actually would look in the mirror and look and feel actually physically beautiful. It is starting to fade and it makes me a bit sad. I actually saw a movie that made so much sense to me in this regard; "I Feel Pretty" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVx9EFK3DWE. It doesn't have the best reviews but I found it pretty honest and funny. Maybe it was more funny to me flying home from Italy, a bit run down and, though out of the full blown manic survival phase, aware of how I was still somewhat under the spell of a very powerful wizard.
As I tell myself "I am beautiful when I believe I am" I hope at least that part and other parts of his magic might stick more permanently but it is hard to loose access to that kind of magic and the farther we get from the source the more easy it is to become lost, or distorted.
am I digressing or entirely on track? ...probably somewhere in the middle. which is probably where I need to be anyway.
I have explored recently the idea of masterminded manipulation, a diabolical dabbling in the dark arts of psychology . And really that picture is not hard to paint. He is extremely intelligent and I struggle to believe
that he could be so naive.
I don't like the idea of it (diabolical mastermind) and if it is true then I'd need to reprocess from a new place. a new kind of pain. But to be perfectly honest, that is the easier answer to me. It makes more sense and is strangely less painful. To me it makes more sense from a logical perspective especially since I struggle to believe that I am, myself, powerful enough to trip up such a wizard...
But alas. In reality, I am not, had he not been in a fragile state himself it'd have likely turned out very differently I am sure.
It is a matter of bad timing and coincidence maybe. and maybe my karma is off enough to have deserved the branding and abandoning. The confusion and the pain. Maybe that is my safe less painful place to process from. I don't know it is all very painful really. No matter what route my head chooses to take.
and I am derailed again as I try to let bygones be bygones and move on.
The tricky thing is (the thing that people don't understand) is that I liked the progress I was making. I liked the me he was helping me find and guiding me into. Before he got spooked and dumped me I cried one night as I explained to my husband that it was hard because it felt like he authentically cared and he was helping me so much but I knew it was going to have to end. My husband knew before I had, that I was getting attached. It was then that I recognized that I was and I tried to rush the finish, but then somehow he did, which broke me to into bits and pieces and empowered me at the same time.
We hear of people having super human strength in the face of danger, lifting cars off of people, that sort of thing. That was me for two weeks. Super human strength to keep my confused mind and breaking heart together. Super human strength  and heightened senses. I enjoyed snowboarding being almost orgasmic and  other the worldly floating in a pool at night under a full moon. I liked the signs and symbols that were appearing regularly. The clarity of thought and temper. I could be somewhere else and entirely present in the moment at the same time.  My energy was fantastic and running was a thrill again.
...But it was all just to hold my breaking heart  and mind together.
For the first time I had found someone who understood well enough how my brain worked to help me manage myself. Though on occasion I sensed a very subtle frustration with me he always managed to redirect constructively and he seemed to genuinely care. We connected. And though I did not and could not admit it to myself I sensed some attraction but I always steered away from this and avoided myself talking on subjects that I sensed might draw him into me.  But that very act of resistance is what may have been the nail in the coffin. It was for me. The fact that he could stay grounded in his values, in spite of the intensity of emotion both impressed me and killed me. If he had not, then I'd have been turned off to him immediately, yet  his holding to what he felt was most important, what he needed to do for his family and his livelihood took him from casually attractive to irresistable to me. But it was forbidden.
... and he did not feel the same way. He confessed that he "could" potentially feel more deeply for me but he also let me know more that I was not worth the risk or his time. That is not exactly how he said it but that is what he meant and though I get it, I understand, it hurts so deeply.
so deeply that I had to fight for myself even if it wasn't productive. I had to fight to wake up my survival instincts or it would have destroyed me.
That compounded with his professional help that, remember, had and has helped me more than I  anticipated when I sought out his particular expertise. And I know that I would still authentically, physically and mentally, benefit greatly from his guidance and experience. And based on his own researched philosophies of treatment I know that he stopped short with me. These things make it very difficult to simply move on.
Not to mention the very things that give me strength right now are the things he taught and the strengths helped me establish and re-establish... the transference that happened, and needed to happen, was me learning to love myself. I was able to love myself through him because of what I saw in him that was reflective of me. If you are not starting to see how complicated this really is to try and separate yourself from, on a dime mind you, than you are the crazy one and not I.
So
I am at a crossroads. I can go back (to old me), but I do not wish to. The thought of it makes me cry. And I cannot move forward because that path was barred, so after having been built up and then abandoned for all the reasons that brought me there in the first place, I am left looking for an entirely new path in the middle of some very wild, neglected and overgrown woods. I am not sure how to proceed. I have tools but they are not trued.
Maybe they are.
I suppose I blaze my own trail now and push through the briars that I have once again fallen into. (true story, I very literally once did, alone on an exploratory jaunt while on backpacking trip, blazing my own trail, fell right into thorny bushes, in my running shorts and a tank, came out with scratches and gashes criss-crossing over every inch of my exposed appendages)
In the briars. Not sure how to get out, knowing its going to be painful no matter what way I go and I am just not dressed for the occasion. Silly girl. When will you ever learn?

...Never.
I will never learn to stop exploring
Even if it means I might get hurt.
That is something I like about myself
SO though this blog entry still went light on the heavy and I trailed off into directions I did not anticipate I will let it be what it is and leave it with my story.

my scarlet letter

Today I got a letter to inform me that I have been discharged as a patient from Dr. Cherri. (name changed).
Umm... Okay
why the games?
I don't understand this.
Do you remember the movie Zootopia?
It's about stereotyping and the damages of it. It's also about the futile battle that many of us have in attempting to live outside of what we are being pigeonholed as. Unfortunately when you are in that place, anything you do will count against you as confirmation that you are what they suspected.
It is sad and exhausting and most people just give up and live within the confines of what they are being told they are.
I thought I'd had found the help I needed to find my way out. I thought I was making progress.
But suddenly it was decided that I was too much of a liability.
I don't think I was or am.
But I see how in my tired and frustrated moments I proved them right.
I see how in my intensity of concern I sabotaged myself yet again.

It would be nice if life were like the movies and we all had a happy ending.
Or even like all the true success stories we are so keen to eat up.
But rarely is there a success story that comes from a person who really had all the odds stacked against them. Rarely do our big box heroes come from the odds of most of us and if they do we only know about them because someone of higher status or wealth is exploiting them.

It is a strange world we live in and sometimes I would like to leave it.

...Which is why I choose to laugh instead.
To laugh at the craziness of humans and their silly egos
To laugh at my own plight and stupidity
To laugh at the sad things that break my heart in such beautiful ways.

My scarlet letter is an L
and this is funny because I need not be a liability
but I likely will be if you treat me as such
because this fire is wild and free and will maintain the forest ecosystems if you allow it and work with it
but it will burn down the world if you think to control it by ignoring it or demanding it to conform to the rules that are ethical only for squirrels.

And I think that analogy is really stupid
so it makes me laugh
and I'll leave it
because why the hell not

Dad

I went skiing with my dad today. Well, actually, he skied and I stuck with my trusty snowboard. My therapy board.
On the way up we were talking. He only has an inkling of an idea of what is going on in my world. Lately I have attempted to talk with my parents about the brain injury from my youth but they seemed to have blocked a lot out and I sense that they are not prepared to feel my pain in reprocessing since it was a traumatic event for them as well. They handled as best they could. They have their own variables that effect their responses to pain and healing.
It is not easy for me
I feel the neglect in a new way and sometimes the occasional joking comments about me having brain damage sting a little more deeply than I will let on.
Today I told my dad that I had a lot of reprocessing of my life I needed to do within the context of brain injury. I asked what he remembered about the extent of damage. "It was bad, really bad" he said.
I asked my dad if he remembered seeing the CT scan. He did not. He said that he wasn't sure if they had showed it to him at all. He said I should ask my mom because she remembers more.
That was really about the extent of it.
But with my dad, the tough guy that I cannot keep up with on anything even still, that worked from sun up to sun down even as he starts to stumble when helping me build my shed, that will call you a pansy or something similar if you complain or can't keep up, that downplays pain and injury so much that you know if he says it was really bad, then it was bad. Especially if he blocks it and has a hard time talking about it.
"You weren't the same, but you were doing good and getting better."
I end the conversation. I don't think he needs to feel my pain. I don't think he needs to know how hard it really has been for me. He suffered too. Maybe still more than I know. He was the one who slept in the hospital the night they moved me from the ICU to the regular unit. The 1st night I remember.
It was a comfort all the times I woke in the night confused about where I was to look over and see my dad. That is how I knew I was safe and that I knew I would be okay.
He was there and he is now. He may not know how to help me but he is there to remind me that I am okay.

the 80-20 split and snowboarding therapy

On the golden map that I was abandoned with he left instructions on how to continue to care for myself.
The 80-20 split really seems to be the critical component to my mood stability.
On the days that I can leave 20% reserves, meaning I only expend 80% of my physical and mental energy, and take breaks or call it a day before I have spent the last 20%, I do so much better.
I don't cry
I don't get confused
I can keep my focus where it needs to be
My patience is solid

...The problem I am having is that it is too easy to spend too much.
I just don't seem to have the same mental stamina.
I thought my past 2 nights good sleep would get me closer to back on track... but I was spent after a half day snowboard training clinic and lunch with the friends there. Then I had to come home and try to help my daughter figure out her school stuff and by the time I got home I was in tears and my mind wandered to it's confused and hurt place, trying once again to fix what I cannot fix. To solve what I don't understand. It just wants to sleep when this happens, so I let if I can. It is the best way I have been able to figure out to reset. It usually works on some level. But sometimes I still feel sad and confused as to why I am spent so easily.  Especially when I am eating better, exercising regularly, and taking care of myself.
Mourn the loss of that?
...and really you want me to mourn the loss of that at the same time?
sometimes life is more than we can handle.
Even if we look fine
and act fine
Sometimes the seemingly little losses can nickel and dime us to death.
And sometimes little losses are not so little when you were already working with less.

...writing has also been a helpful reset and it somehow relaxes my brain.
I have been writing a lot lately. A LOT, much more than you see here.
I'll share a snippet that helped me relax as I wrote:
The other day I was working with a girl who just kept dropping the opposite edge after turn initiation. This is a very unsafe thing to do in snowboarding and I was trying everything I could think of to help her hold the correct edge through her turn. She was getting frustrated, not to mention those types of falls do not feel good. She was taking a break and thinking she was just not laid back enough for snowboarding, starting to believe that she could not do it. 
I explained that for a lot of us snowboarding is what helps us to get to that laid back place. It helps us let go and feel relaxed and carefree. “It is my therapy,” I told her. She said she could see that in my riding and she wished for that. I told her about how the physics of snowboarding can transfer philosophically to many aspects of life; like how often in snowboarding “your intellect has to override your instinct.” This led me to consider the reverse as I tried to think of someway we could connect the snowboarding concept she was struggling with to what she does or has experience with in everyday life. 
She talked about how she loved cheer. That is not one area I have any experience in and I will admit I have had my bias not in her favor. But I don’t like to hold onto bias so I asked questions and listened as she explained how she was a flyer, which meant she is the one that would be launched into the air. She said, as a flyer, it is always about being up, floating and light and when I was asking her to turn I kept telling her to pressure and be heavy into her feet to hold the edge which she just couldn’t seem to get. She felt like maybe her muscles memory was causing problems. 
It was an epiphany for both of us. 
I was totally excited when I exclaimed “that is exactly what you are doing.” Every time she turned she would push to turn then up-unweight almost immediately after. It was a launch, not a snowboarding turn. We talked about what happens before she up-unweights when she is being a flyer; how she would have to press down with that perfect balance between her and the person launching her just before she launched. I told her to hold that launch pressure to complete her turn on the snowboard. She wasn’t sure she could do it because of her muscle memory that was fully conditioned to be light and float.  Fortunately she also likes yoga, so we turned it into a yoga pose to hold. It was awesome to see her go down and tackle those turns with that new self awareness. It was a night and day difference. 
She was now cognizant of her muscle memory and by being aware of it she was able to adapt more easily to perform a new task.  Therapy.

Master Manipulators or Flawed Policies

I am happy to say that I have finally started to get better sleep.
It is amazing what good sleep will do for a person.
With TBI sleep is especially important as "you are more susceptible to that"
But when you are being groomed that lack of sleep due to precisely timed isolation is the turning point.
The mastermind will know to either catch or release.
Catch, I don't know what that looks like. I was released. Why, because he got spooked. On paper I may look like the perfect target but statistics fail to take into account individuals and I am far too intuitive.
"Don't try to solve this" "I told you not to try and solve this"
"You don't understand, that is what I have been doing since I was 12, I can't just stop trying to solve things. It's a matter of how I try to solve, what direction I take."
It became clear that I was going to be extra trouble. It's my talent.
So shift blame, play on vulnerabilities, take advantage of the manic state and pleadings for help, plant ideas and feed her crazy and then write it off as, treatments done, she's a crazy delusional patient who is obsessed with or pursuing the practitioner. It was all in her head.

He's been covering his tracks.
The shaming from 3rd (2nd try at new) therapist confirmed that.

Sadly, despite my belief in humanity and this man, I know from previous experiences that the best liars hide their lies in the truth and though I am naive and trusting, I am not naive enough to believe that I am special and that I am the only one.

I sincerely hope this is not the case, but as I wake up to my reality and apply what I know, (ironically form caring for others and putting their needs first) to the situation I am finding a lot of evidence of this and I am not exactly sure what to do about it. I have no malice, I do not feel vindictive. Yet I know better than to think I am "special" so I do want him scared if this is the case. If this is a game he plays I want him to know that his cover is blown. I don't want to hurt him, but I also don't want him hurting other people. In that regard, I am special so the dilemma is what to do now. What direction do I take?
Maybe all the directions, that is my strength.
I may just write a book about it (I already have a very good start) and let the reader decide.
...or do I have a responsibility to take it to the "authorities."
I don't like that idea... and I am still clinging to hope in humanity.
...and maybe some of the fantasy of a deeper connection that he implied but neither confirmed nor denied.
And if it were merely an emotionally compromised practitioner who was spooked by policies against the forbidden emotions that humans, including human psychologists, will feel on rare occasions, then there is an unethical problem within the institution that needs to be addressed.

Yes, I have brain damage

I don't like that so much of the information I find about brain injuries and personality problems after the brain injury come from the family members or "caretakers." Very little comes from the person themselves unless it is a dramatic success story usually from someone with immense emotional support and that obtained their injury after they had established themselves as a successful adult. There also seems to be a lack of information on less dramatic events that leave people with brain damage but not so severe that is immediately visible. My intelligence is both a blessing and curse in that regard. The fact that I was 12 and in school means that some cognitive rehabilitation was automatically happening but with out the appropriate guidance and understanding. No one seemed to question my mood instability since I was a teenager and "that just happens with teens, especially teen girls."
Though the injury happened in January and track was in spring I was not allowed to run that year. I had been looking forward to joining the track team since the previous year when I had run at the track with my older sister who was on her high school track team so I expressed anger and annoyance about it. But at the same time I was secretly relieved because I was still so tired and really didn't have the mental energy for it.
That summer I don't remember feeling so much mental fatigue anymore but that is when I started to have fallouts with friends. or maybe it was the next year. I am not entirely sure and I don't remember much of 8th grade. It was rough. Ninth was better but still friendships were always a struggle. It wasn't that I fought or was angry, though at times I was, I just seemed to take things very personally. I don't really want to reanalyze all that as I don't feel that reliving the pain of those years is all that beneficial and it is so difficult to understand because teens years are just rough anyway. I watch my kids going through their teen years and I am sure I am making overcompensation mistakes so I suppose it is good to be aware of what was really happening
...and this what has lead me to reanalyze my life with a more full acceptance of the fact that I have brain damage.
I have never fully accepted that and it is something that is very hard to admit. It is shameful and the stigmas attached are... undefinable. I have not been able to accept diagnoses of mental illness either, because I am not that but I also do not like feeling like I am the burden of a TBI caregiver which seems to be the vast majority of the information out there.
 I want to understand what is wrong with my brain, how to adapt and how to mover forward. Only this time I'd rather it not take a lifetime like it did before.
There is so much more to me and, yes, there are many other variables that have led to my current state of ...interesting, but I need to reframe my life with the understanding of how that traumatic brain altering occasion effected it.
It is not an easy task. I've already burned down one therapist and after 3 appointments know that this 3rd therapist in not quite equipped to handle me. I still have a 3rd appointment to attend to with the 2nd therapist and he may just work since he can relate to the brain injury component... But then there is the part of me that just wants to step away from all of their crazy and just breath for a moment. Just breath and allow myself to recenter in my own thoughts and see where I end up as I write this all out.

It is funny, I found a college level psychology text book on our living room floor this morning and as I picked it up I wondered which child of mine took it off the shelf and why. I wondered if this had been my text book from college, my husbands, or just a random book I had picked up somewhere years ago because I am kind of a nerd like that. It has no highlighter marks or notes on pages so it is not likely my book from college. It is a curious time to find it.
As I look through it I find information about"Neuroscience and encoding," the processes of encoding, and of memory storage. This snippet is interesting to me: "The processes of encoding are also affected by preconceived biases people have; humans tend to notice and encode information that confirms beliefs that they already hold-a tendency called confirmation bias. This tendency to 'see what you expect to see' is a powerful force in allowing people to retain inaccurate beliefs."
It is also interesting that the left frontal cortex is said to be used more in the encoding of new information. This was an area I exhibited problems on the neuropsychological test taken this last year. It also happens to be where my brain bleed was when I was 12. I can analyze my thinking and see how I have used different parts of my brain and different strategies to help me with this function. I do have a hard time paying attention to new information and I find that writing it down helps encode it even if I never look at the written down information again. I also repeat. Parrot. I try to connect new information with something I already know and often I will respond with comments that make it seem like I understand the new information better than I do. Sometimes the act of allowing an off the cuff or intuitive response is what starts the processing of information. It is an interesting phenomena to me as I am just now becoming aware of these tendencies that may be or have been the sources of some relationship troubles for me. It also explains the reprocessing that, to others, may seem counter-productive. At times it very much is and I do need to be careful of that but it is a way that I believe my brain learned to compensate for a missing piece. It can also lead me to pick up on deeper level understanding and connections that are often missed.
I am finding my brain to be a fascinating place and I am enjoying learning more about it.
People will not easily understand what they perceive as me being "stuck" on my old therapist, but I get that he is only one component of a very complicated puzzle and he was the one who woke me up to how I was "stuck" in my reality.
So in our out, it seems I am or have been "stuck."
Trying to figure out the way out is tricky
But I am and I will.