Writing, Therapy, and Flashbacks

I don’t feel like conspiring to write brilliantly.  I don’t want to care that the creativity has gone out of me like a candle in the wind.  I think I shall never write again because we are not in the blackouts of depression, despair, or constant self-damnation to write from the heart and soul again.

There’s a website I’m linking here called Writing Forward that has creative writing prompts, but I haven’t been doing them.  Maybe because I’m lazy, maybe because there’s no audience to which to write, maybe the prompts just don’t speak to me like writing about the dark side of life.  

But if I can’t write about things other than me and World War III, then what kind of writer am I?

Maybe I’m afraid.  Writing never comes easily anymore, and I think I’m afraid of failure.  Insert failure/success cliches.  

I bought a book for $4.00 full of creative writing exercises that I hope will inspire me. Perhaps this is a ghost I will always be pursuing.

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So we met with Therapist 2x this week instead of the usual once-a-week session.  I think as a group we were in a better mood and there wasn’t such a self-imposed hurry or demand to get everything said and covered we could because we know there’s another session coming soon.  So I think we were more relaxed.  Today we exchanged first bumps, which is somewhat innocuous on the human “touch” scale.  

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We had a flashback tonight.  I’m scared to think about it, but we can not let fear dictate which insiders we help and which ones we don’t .  What if the girl in the flashback is fleeing towards us? Are we going to close our minds to her and the help she needs?

I don’t know what you expect me to say.  

Nothing really.  I just think we need to be open to sights, sounds, and feelings and not abandon insiders.  Why so angry?

B L O C K

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I'm sad. a teardrop falls in my hand.

I don’t feel well.  I have been dissociative, spacey, and dizzy all evening.  There’s a sense of urgency to write, and I can’t escape it.  I must, I must, I must eject what’s in this crazy, demanding  head.

I was anxious this morning, but I knew I would be taking my dog Maybelline for a walk and that would help dissipate some anxiety, and it did.  After our walk, my anxiety lessened until this evening.

But this evening the anxiety shot back up, and the dissociation made it impossible to think and speak clearly.  I’ve had some things on my mind today, and I’m wondering if there is any correlation to my dissociation and anxiety.  These are not things of which I want to write, and I’m angry that I’m being pushed into doing it.

I don’t know if I’ve written about it before on this blog, but these memories came crashing into my head today, fresh and new, and I feel the need to document it.  I don’t know why it’s necessary to write on it, but I feel something  propelling me forward.  

What has my brain so rattled is the memory of me as a child sleeping on the floor because I was afraid of my bed. Stupid, right?  I don’t know exactly when it started, but I was somewhere between the ages of 7 through 9.  But that’s just a guess.  My memory just starts with me sleeping on the floor because I didn’t want to sleep in my bed.  The bed seemed scary.  I just remember finding sleeping on the floor comforting.  The next thing I remember is sleeping on the floor in the bathroom.  I honestly don’t know why I moved from sleeping on my bedroom floor to the bathroom floor, but something made me seek shelter in the bathroom.  

For years I slept anywhere other than a bed until I got married; of course then I started sleeping in the same bed as my husband, although there are still some nights that the couch is safer than the bed.

Why does this matter?  I don’t know.  Perhaps it doesn’t.  I don’t attach meaning to it, but somewhere inside I felt the desperate need to share it.  I know the writing is paltry, skimpy and scattered.  It is very dispassionate and non-descriptive, and it doesn’t really paint a picture of what was going on at the time.   But I don’t have a clear picture, and I don’t understand why it was so important to write about it tonight.  But I couldn’t not write.  As stupid as it sounds, writing this tonight was for survival.

I hate myself.

I would love to hear from those reading this.  Am I alone here?  Have you ever experienced your bed being scary, or  would you sleep in strange places?   

Memories Denied

I disappear under the collapse of the padded walls in which I am mentally locked. I seem to have spectacularly careened off the solid road of recovery and engaged in behaviors that have sent me back to being someone emotionally unstable. Barely making it, I am now suffocating with the awareness of all the frivolous attempts at a sane life I've perpetrated, like so many lies spilling from my unselective mouth.

At the beginning of my summer break, I decided to begin writing my memoir. I set myself up for failure. It seems to write a memoir one needs memories and be able to recall experiences. I know nothing of the life this woman lived, and the parts have died and taken their memories and experiences with them. I have “assumed” knowledge, but I can not provide first-hand experiences of life in or out of that house.

I've been reading books on how to write a memoir, and there are writing activities provided to aid in the writer's process. One of the activities from Sue William Silverman in Fearless Confessions is a series of fill-in-the-blank sentences to help the writer to begin to submerge him- or herself in “particular moments of time.” I struggled immensely with these simple, evocative sentences. Take a look at a couple of the suggested sentences.

• When I was ten, I smelled __________ outside my bedroom window.
• The item of clothing I recall most vividly from childhood is _________.
• The noise that scared me the most growing up was ________.

When I try to complete them, I go completely blank. I have no answers. I can't even come close to anything resembling an idea. If I can't recall basic memories and details of childhood, how can I write a whole book dedicated to the most poignant moments of my life.

And I hate to fail at this, too. Writing this memoir is supposed to be symbolic of making it through hell and living to tell about it, and hopefully someone reading it down the road can say, “I wasn't alone”. I don't want to give up, but is the struggle worth it? Do I even want the memories and feelings I need to write this book?

This whole scenario, front and back, inside and out, is derailing me.

And this just feels like an underscore to the emptiness, depersonalization, and lack of self I feel. Not being able to write this memoir just proves I don't really exist, and maybe I never have.