journey not recovery

There is a funeral for myself in my head. I'm not dead yet but they've brought wreathes and flowers and their prayers. It's too soon but also too late. My nightmares are my unconscious telling me over and over what I try to suppress, what I don't want to admit. They are clear as day and haunt me in my waking hours. Trauma is your body being taken over by someone else. They continue to live on there after it's over, making you feel culpable because your body unwillingly took part. I don't want to be my abuse, I don't want to live it every day. And I don't want to admit to myself what happened I won't say it aloud in therapy still. We talk around it. Body memories and flashbacks. I need a kind of exorcism of what took place, expell it from my physical self and my mind. Crosses and holy water, my body laid out, watch my head spin.

I've been hospitalized more times than years than I've been alive and many of those times were because I tried to die. Popped pills and frantic forearm artery spurts, and atrocities against myself I can't speak of in detail. But I have yet to have forgiven my survival, the sense of failure upon waking upnin Intensive care units, or the taste of choked- down charcoal on my cracked lips. The crushing disappointment of failing at the one thing I thought I was good at: dying. I am a suicide survivor in both my own attempt at taking my life and of my little sister's hanging in the basement. I understand the ramifications of suicide. But I also understand the desire. And I am not one of those who die to escape the pain while wishing they could love, not completely. I genuinely most of the time seek death itself. imagine getting high snorting suicide off the slit veins of your wrists. I keep running closer to the edge. Sometimes it feels as though I live for dying...

I believe forgiveness has its merits in healing for some, but I do not wish to forgive or forget. My body is a monument to hurt, to what was done to me, scarred and starved in revenge for His transgressions and Her not protecting me. The denial and hiding and making my truths sound like I am just a mental patient no one cared enough to ever visit. My skin weeps red, my bones hold the sorrow I want to be visible through my flesh. I want them to get on their knees and pray. I want them to ask for salvation from their sins, stigmata dripping from the palms of my hands in anguish. I will not forget. I will not allow it to ever be okay and I will not move on and let it go. What happened deserves justice for this continued suffering and loss of life. Let them choke on my ashes and fall upon my grave in devastation. But they won't. They breathe lies and denial. They swallowed me whole, my childhood emptied so early on. And I stumble on limping, I carry on not wanting to go on. My ...

I used to not talk. I had the ability to speak but I lacked the words and the belief that nothing I had to say mattered or was worth being listened to. When I started therapy i sat mostly silent for whole sessions. When I was questioned about things I became so afraid of my reality, what I thought was real, being shattered in the light. I would skip sessions or else leave there feeling physically ill and going straight to bed in a darkened room, often missing classes. It's taken many therapists and a lot of years to learn to find words for things instead of acting them out. My therapist now tells me "Everything is important." I am learning that I have things worth saying that matter and deserve to be heard and listened to . However, I have yet to truly address my trauma. I was always an emergency, constantly, and not able to be safe, so talking about topics in depth was not really an option. Though I still react strongly to things and put myself in jeopardy, t...

What does recovery mean for me? I am no longer living in the hospital but I'm sent there every few months. Enough that my life is constantly interrupted and it's hard to plan for anything. I'm not still 80 lbs but I am working to starve myself to death. My limbs are forever altered by disfiguring scars and I get comments and states wherever I go. I am working hard in therapy but I am tormented still by my trauma. I imagine recovery to be a kind of healing. A disinterest in dying and wanting to live. My favorite thing is self-destruction. How do I ever give that up when it is such a huge part of me and how I have been able to survive this long? Who am I without it? I am not happy where I am but why do I not wish for better? I guess I don't think I deserve it. I have a loyalty to suffering. It seems noble to me, it seems justified, it keeps things under control. I think to recover you have to be more sick and tired of being sick and tired than ...

I am a crime scene body, the chalk outline of a girl lost. Im a corpse that I drag around. If I were dusted for fingerprints I would be littered with them. But I'm not in any milk carton photos. I went missing before my mother's eyes; Maybe she wasn't even looking. Left in someone else's hands On me, Trapping me, Taking me over. I am willing to burn this body down for something better Something not already stolen Something innocent. I am a marrionette puppet, strings hanging from my limbs. I am abandoned house My bones turn to ash.

I haven't yet survived my life. What is survival if it hasn't been exactly voluntary? In mental health we speak sometimes about "resiliency." To me, that word means getting through something difficult and coming out on the other side. To me, it's not the same as strength. Instead, for me resiliency has not been a choice. I haven't made it this far because I have wanted to necessarily. I have endured pain, trauma, life-altering grief while being forced into hospitals against my will, hooked up to feeding tubes involuntarily when I wanted to starve myself to death, stitched back together when I cut an artery open, and had 911 called on me other times I've tried to end my life. Good luck? Rotten luck? Sometimes I can't be sure. But what I do know is that after all these years I don't feel like what people call a Survivor. I don't feel strong or really yet that I have chosen life. I feel I am living halfway, in a kind of Limbo. Alive but not ...