Detached again

I haven’t been around much.

Sleep has been hard, which means I haven’t been awake at the time I usually blog. I could blog after Kat is in bed, but my brain is so fried by that time, I can hardly think straight, so I’m afraid my writing wouldn’t make much sense.

Things were hard, after the dinner debacle where I cried over wine and behaved like a 15 year old. But that was the beginning of something. I was feeling my feelings, even if I didn’t know exactly what they were. And it wasn’t all bad; I felt like I was more connected to Hubby and Kat. It was an odd feeling, one I don’t have the words to explain completely. It was like realizing that things my favorite authors have described in their novels are real— that thread that connects us to other people, that allows us to feel with them, and not just to intellectually understand what or why they are feeling the way they do actually existed.

That very feeling though, the closeness with others, the emotions, all of it was overwhelming at times, like being smashed into. I’m not equipped to deal with those things. For all the good, there were negatives, too. It was too much.

I started pulling back, trying to be back in my head, trying not to feel so much, trying not to care. I can’t be sure of an exact time, because time just smooshes together for me, maybe two weeks ago, Kat told me something that happened with the little girl who assaulted my friend’s daughter. For my daughter’s privacy, I’m not going to share the details, but it’s not a situation that is being hidden. It’s being dealt with, Kat is processing it in therapy, and Hubby and I allow her to talk or play it through she whenever she needs.

That admission was my breaking point, though. I needed to be “perfect me”. And so, the cutting and the restricting began again.

This week, I’ve talked to Bea about it. Which is different. I would never before admit that I am cutting, or restricting in order to maintain some control, to shut off the feelings, to be back in my head. I would never before admit that I’m pretending to be okay on the outside, but inside I’m falling apart and panicking.

So that’s where I’ve been. Stuck somewhere between feeling and not feeling, self harming, and trying to stop.