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No matter how hard I try I do not feel like myself today.  Just going out yesterday to do my monthly shopping leaves me feeling today like a different person, like a foreigner in my own body, in my yard and in my home.  This ‘derealization’ feeling leaves me without grounding as if I am not the same person now that I was before my venture out yesterday.  Like I left in the morning and came back as somebody else.

The world around me does not feel the same, either.  This is a dreamy sort of feeling and I don’t like it — but neither can I find a way to rush things back to the way they were.  Intellectually I know that the world including the people in it are continually changing.  But I also know that we are supposed to remain with a sense of intactness as time moves forward.

All I know to do now is to be patient.  Take it easy, be gentle with myself and be patient.  There is nothing I can do to rush away this unreal feeling.  There is nothing I can do to convince myself this unreal feeling isn’t real.  It is real.  Very very real.

I let myself know this is a sort of sickness feeling, a sort of un-wellness that is a part of my life.  I allow myself to feel grateful that I don’t always feel this way at the same time I feel grief and loss for myself in my life that actions as simple as running a day full of errands can so disorient me, so unsettle me — so that I feel I left a bread crumb trail from my home-self yesterday that I should have been able to follow to get back to myself — but it didn’t work.  The bread crumb trail is gone.

These feelings and this sense of derealization is a part of what it is like to live with a trauma changed body-brain.  I didn’t ask for this.  I didn’t ask for any of the horrors that happened to me when I was so young and so little — trying to grow up in a world of pain and terror.

But here I am anyway feeling lost to myself no matter what I tried to (or did) accomplish this day.  It doesn’t help me that the wind is racing and tearing around today.  I never do well here in these winds, but they go away.  They do not last forever and this feeling — though it is likely to come upon me again in the future — is also going to go away before too long.

(This is like losing my place when reading a book and having to try to find that place again — in a complex book that is the story of my life.)

I wait this out knowing that my usual work in my yard is greatly about grounding myself in my body in this world, and that yesterday I had to break that stride, break that rhythm because those errands had to be done.  But it feels like I left myself behind yesterday when I left my home and when I returned I wasn’t anywhere to be found.  Perhaps I could see humor in this but I can’t.

I am going away now.  I will be back when I am back.

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