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In a better world I would be able to talk to an excellent therapist when I needed to.  I do not have access to therapy and I have no hope that even if there was therapy around where I live that I could access that I would have any hopes of finding anyone who could really help me.  I am left trying to figure things out on my own.  I have to play both parties:  Me in need of insight and me being the only one who can possibly help me discover the insights I need.

Kind of like the blind leading the blind, it seems to me.

Not working on my books put me squarely in line for being hit with my own uselessness.  My own lack of productivity.  My own sense of worthlessness that only goes away when I am working on something through which I feel worthy.  This is a vicious cycle for me because of the very disabilities I live with that came from the severe abusive traumas I suffered for the first 18 years of my life that so limit where I can go and what I can do.

Relaxation, any sense of serenity, peace, fulfillment, peace of mind, even leisure.  I barely know what these states feel like.   My inner reality tells me a person has to EARN these things.  They have to DESERVE these things.  They have to be WORTHY of them.

I am too young to be “retired.”  I am too young to have been forced out of a productive life because of these disabilities.  Talking about anger, THIS makes me angry!  And the whole mess is very, very real.

I know I am extremely fortunate to be receiving disability income that keeps me with food and a roof over my head.  I AM grateful.  Grateful like starving to death and at least finding bugs to eat to stay alive.  This is NOT what I deserved.  This is NOT fair.  It’s all wrong and it always has been wrong ever since I was born to that psychotic mentally ill Borderline Personality Disorder mother — that nobody took me away from.

I try the best that I can to make the best out of what I have available to me.  Nobody forced me to take a break from working on those books.  I HAVE to take a break.  But even then — I struggle continually with my feelings of being completely inadequate as an adult.  Useless.

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Because I have to be my own therapist and my own client all I can do is try to open the doors to whatever might come through within my thoughts to help me understand “my condition.”

I think about how the horrors of the abuse I suffered throughout my whole childhood included extensive periods of isolation and confinement in corners and in my bed — completely alone — always after severe beatings.

I was “let out” — to work.  Every kind of chore Mother could invent was my reward for “being punished enough” — or enough of a reward to be granted a temporary pass, a temporary reprieve from the solitary confinement — only — the person I was then allowed to be in the presence of was MOTHER!  Not other children, not my siblings — my mother who was my abuser.

In a prisoner of war situation the work became the reward.  The only one.

I cannot begin to disentangle my present reality from the deep pervasive patterns that formed me if I cannot gain some clarity about the things that happened to me — and then how they affect me. 

It dawns on me that some of this is about “culture.”  I was raised within the culture of my having been the sole chosen target of horrendous abuse as the evil devil’s child all-bad projection of mad mother.  I escaped her with my mind intact.  I am lucky for that.  But all is not well in every area of who I am or of how I am in the world — how could it be?

A sense of impending doom is my perpetual “balance point” all of the time.  I knew very little during my first 18 years other than disaster — and that disaster came most of the time at me out of absolutely nowhere.  Because Mother was psychotically mentally ill, I could not predict, plan for, predict, control for — attacks.  That sense of threat and danger is with me always.

Work, then, as the reward — is my chance of sidestepping that reality for some periods of time.  When I was working Mother’s rage was diminished, although I still had no way of knowing when she would be displeased and attack me again even when I was trying my hardest to please her by doing things perfectly, doing things right.

I wish I could say none of this matters to me anymore.  It doesn’t matter so much if I am doing something that might be remotely productive, i.e. work of some kind.  Of course I live alone with everyone I love a long, long ways away from me.  It’s not like I am going to have genuine reprieve as they walk into my home or I walk into theirs.  I am on my own with “this.” 

Severe trauma made me “unfit” and unwell.  It gave me serious limitations that fortunately I did not truly understand were present until after I went through cancer treatment five years ago.  I also did not have to face how I feel now as long as I had dependent children in my care.  As a mother I was ALWAYS being productive!  I was raising human beings.

That phase of my life is past, and even if I did live in close proximity to my little grandsons I do not have the stamina or inner resources any longer to care for them in the ways I could fortunately do when I was younger with my own children.

I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place, and because I have a firm agreement with myself to leave the book writing alone until May 3rd I am facing many of these feelings, thoughts and concerns.  Just as I refuse to go out and snag someone to engage in relationship with — because I know that would be a disaster — I am not at this moment going to grab my book writing and dive in any sooner than I have agreed with myself to do. 

Agreements are agreements.  I guess I don’t have anyone else around here to make any agreements with – so I make them with myself – and then I honor them.

I figure I am going to learn something useful by honoring this break time I have chosen to give myself.  I have lots of yard work, housework, etc. that I can do.  My depression makes doing that work difficult for me because none of it seems to matter.  None of it makes any difference.  There is nobody (but me) to care if those things get done or not.

If I had a great therapist I would go talk with that person about these things.  As it is I do the best that I can — as nearly all severe early abuse and trauma survivors do.  I don’t like being stuck with old wheels a’turnin’.  At least I can pay attention to them — but then what?

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