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Someday down the road in my life will I rue this day, or more accurately, rue the decision I have made and the actions I am taking to make that decision come real?

I want to paint my computer room, the room first entered from my front door.  There are three tall bookshelves in here besides the two very full computer desks.  What this room contains is — well, most simply put — too much of the wrong kind of information.

Yes, there were months when I raced around on the internet, fascinated with each new piece of trauma related information having to do with the stream of new research about developmental neuroscience and what happens to a human being who is so abused by its earliest caregivers and by its environment that its very physiological development is forced to change.

I have nine running feet of used three-ring binders full of such information, all meticulously labeled and sorted post-printing.  I have bookshelves full of books related to the topic — “what the experts have to say about trauma and child abuse.”

What will I do with the books?  I am not sure yet, but since my awakening at 3 a.m. this morning I am very clear about what is happening with the binders.  “Off with your heads!”  Page by lovely page the notebooks are being torn asunder, tossed into a bucket, and marched outside to become worm food in my newest growing compost center — which, by the way, lies caringly under one of my soaker hose special drip irrigation systems so that I can not only “call the earthworms with good food” but also keep them very happy with the moisture they require to get their part of this job done:  “Eat it!  Just eat it!”

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The astrologers could have predicted this day and this action on my part, noting not only my 3rd Saturn return but also a serious Pluto return, as well.  “Out with the worn out and useless in your life, Linda!”  The very atoms of my house seem to holler until they are ‘blue in the face’.

OK.  I will listen.  I will heed their worm siren call.  I am done with ‘this stuff’.

I, like the worms I know are already spreading the word amongst themselves that good food is on the way, ate in my mind the information contained in these notebooks.  My vision of the world was changed.  My awareness of how my body was changed on every level during my earliest growth and developmental stages has been chiseled into my brain like its a personalized Mt. Rushmore.

My conclusions?  I live with them.  It no longer matters to me what’s on these pieces of printed pages.  I know what they ALL mean because now I not only FEEL in my body the truth of what this research told me, I know how to name it.

DAMN!

Most simply put, severe child abuse that began at my birth turned my stress response system to ON and it now cannot be turned OFF.

I also know that the center set point of my nervous system and my entire physical being is NOT set at peaceful calm where it was supposed to be set, but rather is set in the deepest well of irrevocable and enduring, terrible sadness.

“Call it depression if you will, Oh Ye With the Prescription Pad and the Diagnostic Pads of Paper In Hand!  But you are only a fraction correct.  What the leftovers of the severe and chronic abuse that happened to me really are belong to sadness.”

My tears will not stop me.  I work through them.  I live through them like I am walking through a shower of rain.  I am coming to realize more every day that when I am nearly overwhelmed by sadness it is “only Substance P” that I feel — that creates in me a deep and very real physiological pain.  It has very little meaning to me to cry today.  These tears do not belong in this present world, even though this is where they continue to appear.  They came from an infant-childhood that did not give me a center point of peaceful calm, did not even give me a center point of anger-rage — and ironically (it seems to me) did not even give me a nervous system center set point of fear.

As I mentioned in a previous post earlier in the week, the extreme anxiety that vibrates my insides simply comes from my body’s very real sense that “The next thing that goes wrong in Linda’s life is going to destroy her.”

OK.  I’ll learn to live with that sense, as well.  None of this learning lies within the hard covers of any of the books or three-ring binders crowding my shelves, crowding my space — so out they go!

Ring the dinner bell, dear earth friendly worms!  I am bringing you a feast!

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