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This will not be an easy day for me, nor did the event I anticipate happening today let me have much sleep last night.  Because I try as hard as I can to learn something useful out of every difficulty I encounter, the experience I am having right now must have a pearl at the center of it somewhere.

Being quite low income (fixed disability) I put my name on the local HUD Section 8 Rental Assistance program waiting list over three years ago.  My name came up.  Fortunately my kind, supportive, caring, helpful, loving and very clear-thinking daughter was willing to take care of the first level of paperwork when she came down to visit earlier this month.  This afternoon the housing inspector comes over to take a look around.

There is no way that I can escape the anxiety this entire scenario creates for me.  And this level of anxiety, because it threatens the entire safety and security of my life, disorganizes and disorients me.  In short, it hurts.

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Older houses in this border region were never built by rich people.  They don’t match anyone’s ‘building code’.  In the four plus years I’ve been renting this one I, and my loving brother when he comes to visit, have made every improvement that my limited budget could afford.

I have been cleaning and painting – and rearranging – and waiting – and stressing in my own unique distressed way for weeks.  Knowing the wiring in this house is really inadequate, and that my usual string of extension cords would be a dead give-a-way to that fact, I have worked to eliminate them.  Then there’s heating the inspector won’t like.  There’s all kinds of things about this house the inspector might not like.

Will he, can he make exceptions to his rules?  Will he overlook things in this poor house so its poor tenant can continue to live here?

Not knowing.  The unknown.  The helplessness and powerlessness and vulnerability and fear – no terror – I feel.  Dare I hope?

This is my home.  This and my gardens.  This spot on the earth I have found.  I do not want to move.  I cannot imagine moving.  Moving would be a malevolent traumatization to me that I can not imagine enduring or surviving.

If this house does not pass inspection, will my landlord alter-fix what needs to be done to make it pass?

I don’t know that, either.

If it comes to having to move from here to keep my valuable rental assistance voucher – what will I decide to do?

I do not know.

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Vulnerability is not good for me.  Being of low resources is not good for me, but it is the way my life is and I am grateful for all the programs I receive help from – at the same time I feel guilty, and feel sad for all those much needier than me, those with young children, all those who struggle – and I think I should have let my expiration date pass when my cancer came instead of fighting it, enduring, remaining alive, consuming resources that I cannot earn or pay for on my own.

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There’s a lot at risk.  There’s a lot at stake.  This strange man will come into my house, do his job, prowl around with his critical and meticulous eye, doing his job.  Will he look into every crack and crevice, every cupboard, every closet, peer here and there asking his questions, and will I be able to remain calm enough – not panic – not dissolve into the too-familiar tears that often come now when my anxiety erupts into escalated disaster-based emotions?

My home is my solace.  My infant-childhood abuse and trauma-related disabilities keep me mostly HERE in this place of my safety, security and comfort – such as I can wrest now from this world I abide in.  I do not leave here often, and do not go very far.  I can’t.

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Yesterday as I forced myself through the final stages of preparation for what FEELS LIKE an attack on my hard won well-being in my tiny corner of the world, I became very aware of my heightened depression and of its connection to one critically important state of existence.

In part because of my recent readings and study about how ALL attachment relationships are about PROTECTION first and foremost – protection of the BODY that holds the SELF – I realized that what triggers my deepest sadness (and it was triggered yesterday and certainly here it is today) – is the most ancient pervasive overwhelming state that I spent the first 18 years of my life in:

NOBODY is here to help me.  NOBODY is here to protect me.  NOBODY cares if I live or die (as an infant-child I was very aware they wanted me dead).  I am IN THIS ALONE.  I am desperate.  I am threatened.  My extinction is imminent.

I have to pause here and wait through my disorganized-disoriented storm, searching for words, for a pattern of thinking in words that I can reach for, grab onto, and follow as if dragged forward through time from this moment into the next one and the next one.

What?

I know I know it.  I know I know what I want to say.  I know that I am a self and that this self knows.  I know this scrambling is directly connected to how trauma formed my brain – my right brain, my left brain, the middle of the two – all changed by trauma so that thinking in words can be impossible at the same time emotions consume my body.

What?

I go back to the beginning.  No protection.  AHH!  That’s the word:  Self-preservation.

From the instant I was born if I was going to stay alive in the midst of violent trauma and abuse, if I was going to stay alive it was up to me to preserve my own self.

NOBODY as a tiny infant-toddler-child born tiny and helpless and needy and vulnerable and dependent SHOULD EVER HAVE TO KNOW THIS FEELING.

This is what I felt so strongly yesterday as I dragged my great depression and growing sadness about this inspection and all that hangs weighted in the balance.  This terrible sadness I drag around through my life as a ball-and-chain.

Being deprived by violent trauma and abuse without having a safe and secure attachment to ANYONE for 18 years – and surviving that IN SPITE of this fact – I self-preserved.  I persevered in my self-preservation – but there was and is a high, high cost.

That cost is sadness.

That cost is hurt.

When I read in the article posted yesterday about child abuse consequences that Substance P IS INVOLVED – as I know it is – I can now hang my sadness on that hook.  Being not only deprived for 18 years of ANY protection because I was deprived of ANY attachment – at the same time I was continually attacked by those same people nature had designated to be my caregivers – self-preservation grew and grew and took the place of what I needed and was SUPPOSED to have at the same time great pain and sadness grew within me at the same time.

Facing this inspection today with all the threat to my safety and security it entails, threatens also to overwhelm me with this sadness.  My abilities to self-preserve are coupled with this pain.

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