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Monday, June 9, 2014. Baby stayed home today with his daddy, neither of them feeling very well. I caught baby’s cold last week. It hit me hard so I am very grateful for a second quiet day to myself.
I discovered thoughts this morning I jotted down in a letter to my 88-year-old friend who was our closet Alaska homesteading neighbor during my childhood. My friend understands the lifelong effects of severe abuse trauma in early years. She also had a mother who hated her, but she also had a father and many other relatives who loved her. I’ll just copy those thoughts into this post. Perhaps they can mark even a small turning point in my continued hard battle to adapt to conditions last fall’s drastic move here have created in my life.
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I called the senior ride people this morning and they will get me for my doctor appointment this Friday. Even such little things scare me! It costs $3 each way cash so I need to get a stash of ones here. Better than a hassle with city bus lines which would scare me even more.
Going to the doctor scares me. I haven’t used that word applied to myself before — but, yes, it’s anxiety — but it is so because I am scared!!
I am trying to get back to sewing my long-handled shoulder bags and I’ll tell you — as strange as it is — even “being scared” is present with that!! Even stranger I just connected how I feel here with being attacked millions of times as a child [from birth] for the whole 18 years of my childhood by PSYCHOTIC mother [Dorothy knew Mother].
That kind of terror out of nowhere came from Mother every day of my life and I never knew when or WHY! I am only in this past year coming to understand how the PSYCHOTIC nature of her abuse was both unique (among child abuse) and SO devastating to me.
This has made CHANGE itself my terrifying enemy. I just chose to change everything in my life [by moving up here] — but even setting up for and returning to my sewing requires hundreds of steps of change because nothing is the same as it was.
Instead of two big rooms to work in I have a little tiny space. My friend so kindly gave me an older but seems unused Wards sewing machine — but I think I have to restart my sewing with this familiar old nearly worn out machine I used in Arizona. I am scared of the new one!
My anxiety is so overwhelming no matter what it’s connected to because — I see at this moment — I no longer have any barriers to all that terror Mother created in me that is IN MY BODY! [I was built that way.] I used to be able to block it but I no longer can.
How strange. How real. How unfortunate! This is what terrorists do. They terrorize people. Your mother did that to you. I think it created (for me) a massive ocean of terror inside of me — no more ignoring it. It hasn’t GONE anywhere. My simple and familiar life in Naco did not create continual strangeness which exists here around everything. I cannot keep it all at bay here.
But I can slowly work through this sewing chaos. I need to know where everything is — every kind and piece of fabric, scissors of which I can only find one good pair and I have at least four — sewing must be orderly and efficient if I am to enjoy it, be creative and effective. At least I have this day as a bonus to try to work through some of this.
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I add…. I don’t believe that anyone who was not themselves “built by terror” has a clue what I am talking about let alone what I am experiencing. I intimately and permanently know what “disorganized-disoriented” insecure attachment disorder feels like, what Reactive Attachment Disorder feels like. I believe the basis of these feelings is terror.
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Stop the Storm 
I feel like I know what you are saying. Everything about our lives and bodies is in a constant state of upheaval and chaos. I live out of boxes because I have no permanent place I call home. I never bother to fully unpack because each place I move to gets smaller and smaller and there is no room for my stuff even if I have so very little of it. Besides, how can I create something that feels like my own safe little space if I always feel like I am going to lose that space because of upheaval in my mind and life? Nothing is forever.
I, too, would love to have enough room to set up my sewing machine and make my own clothes and create small projects but there just is not enough room. The thought of having to sift through all those boxes to find all the supplies I need to sew is daunting. I too need to have everything in order to be able to function, yet, if I achieve any kind of order, it still feels like chaos. I spend so much time trying to create order that it is exhausting and never feels good enough. We learned a long time ago that no matter what we do, or how hard of an effort we put out, or how comfortable we try to make ourselves, it’s not enough, it’s not good enough, and nothing will ever have order…
So much so that it is palpable!!
I know exactly what you mean! 2000 to 2004 I kept the nicest house/home I ever lived in long enough for my son to get all the way thru high school in one place. Six months after he left home I lost my business and then the home — and there I was homeless again. The first two years I lived in that house I left unpacked boxes in the hallway. I knew it was only a matter of time before I lost that place. After two years I scooted the boxes into a closet.
I have decided to stay in this tiny place through another winter in hell to try to save enough to head back south in a year. Family helped me get up here but there’s nobody willing to help me leave. So be it. I cannot leave before this coming winter without losing everything I own only to be homeless yet again. Sure, it will be good for the grandsons to have me here longer – especially for the youngest one I care for weekdays. But for myself? Struggle.
Your words touched my heart. It is comforting to know I am understood at the same time it brings me tears to know there are others that have to suffer when that suffering was so unjustly caused! Order is so essential to our well-being! Having the baby in this little place makes it even harder for me to carve out even the smallest places to do my craft work — which I MUST HAVE!! Losing the gardens was bad enough. I MUST find a way to get this sewing going!!
I can’t even find a wall plug I can get to to put in an extension cord to plug in this old machine! WHERE THERE IS A WILL THERE IS A WAY!!!!! Time to get out my shovel and start digging…. And I don’t mean outdoors.
Any kind of change reminds me of that anxiety you feel before you jump off the end of a dock into a lake. You know you’ve dealt with change before, but there’s that fear that you still might drown in it.
Continually….