Anon: -This isn’t the point of this post at all…but I wonder how much would our system kill me if I used Comic Sans for an entire blog post sometime…-
We have had a really nice morning so far today.
We were able to sleep in a little because we have the day off of work. We had breakfast and tea out on our porch in the rainfall with our wife/partner-system. We even took our umbrellas and went for a walk after breakfast.
My subsystem loves the rain, and water in general. I cannot wait until it’s nice and warm enough to go swimming at one of the state parks that’s about a half hour away by car, but the rain is also really refreshing. I know our grass certainly needs it. It was such a dry winter, that the plants seem to need all the rainfall that they can get now.
On the walk, one of my boyfriends was fronting on and off fairly often as well, and it was really nice to see him. There’s a lot of alters in our system who are dating multiple alters within their system {and vice versa}, and this particular boyfriend of mine isn’t one I personally have gotten to front around in quite awhile, so it was a nice surprise.
I felt really calm and honestly relaxed while we were walking back home.
I actually felt like I had energy.
But now, not very long after returning indoors, I feel stressed again. We need to write out our monthly rent check that’s due today. We need to make a credit card payment that’s due today. We need to see how much over what’s in our system’s bank account that’s going to put us and see if our partner system can write us a check from their account. In the next couple days, we need to see if our surprise medical bills have gotten themselves sorted out with our insurance as well.
Our best-friend-system is coming over for lunch today {we try to have lunch once a week, as everyone’s schedules allow}.
For some reason, all these thoughts and worries and plans flooded back into my brain after returning indoors, and all of our anxiety and stress piled back up.
Financial stress is the worst, in my opinion. And that seems to be the most prevalent of our concerns right now. It seems like everything will be okay, but if anything crazy unexpected were to happen, I feel like we’d be doomed. We haven’t had a chance to get our savings back up and our credit cards back down after the last couple of crazy big and unexpected things {complications from our surgery this past August, plumbing issues, changing jobs and getting a very drastic pay cut in the process}.
I just hate that the tranquility I felt outside in the rain with my boyfriend by my side disappeared so quickly.
It’s not even like it’s due to switching, unless I’m somehow just getting the emotional bleed of someone near me? But it feels like my own…especially because I can see why I feel so stressed.
Our system keeps worrying that we’re somehow unable to feel happiness. But I don’t think that’s true. I have a feeling it’s more the concept we’ve heard so often about how it takes 10+ good things to balance out a negative thing. {I don’t remember the exact context this concept is most commonly used in…it might have been to do with compliments versus negative remarks…but our system has found it to apply in several contexts}
At least 26 out of our 28 years have been filled with trauma and negatives. There have been some positives, but they are all very interwoven into the whole of the negatives.
Our therapist and even our partner-system keep telling us that we’re actually doing a really amazing a good job, and that we’ve been making a lot of progress.
It doesn’t feel like it…but I guess it’s easier for them to see it than us. After all, I know we see the progress our partner-system is making a lot easier than they do…so it only makes sense that the same would be true in the reverse.
In fact, when I brought up that my stress was already surging back, our partner-system made a comment along the lines of being proud of us and excited that we’re able to feel tranquil and happy for even brief periods…especially when we’ve been so suicidal and depressed and dealing with a lot of flashbacks all the time.
Apparently, we’re doing a lot better than we used to be.
If this is doing a lot better, maybe I should be glad that I can’t remember fully how badly we used to be. {I know others in here can remember better, but it’s difficult for me to access those memories in perspective of how we’ve progressed, as it really does show how bad the situations were that we were allowing ourselves to still be caught up in…and that tends to lead to flashbacks. So maybe that is also contributing to my difficulty in seeing how we’ve progressed}
No matter what, I still hate this stress.
I’m really excited to see our life with our partner-system grow and unfold. I just wish life would give us the opportunity for it to be calmer while we’re trying to find our footing.
We’re trying to remember that the fact that our two systems have chosen to be a team for life means that we’re in this together, and that as long as we’re together, we’ll make the most of the situations we find ourselves in…it’s just really scary {probably for them to at least the same degree as for us}, because so much of our childhoods together were in scary and gross situations, and this is the first time we’ve both been together for a long period and the situation is actually positive.
I guess this whole blogging of today is just making me realize that I’m being really hard on myself and the rest of my system. We need to heal. And to heal, we’re going to be stressed. We’re going to be depressed. We’re even going to be varying degrees of suicidal. We have to allow ourselves to be vulnerable. We have to allow ourselves to be weak. We have to allow ourselves to need more help {and we need to allow ourselves to healthily accept help as it is available to us}.
I just remember being able to at least outwardly appear a lot more invulnerable. And I miss that shield, guarding my emotions and my heart from getting more hurt. After all, if I am just a stubborn, cold-hearted bitch who at least seems to have her shit together, I won’t be attacked for being worse-off {such as we actually are}
Oof. I guess that shows me that I also hold a lot of childhood bullying trauma. Though…with the situations that involved adults and not simply our peers, is there a different term {besides simply emotional/mental abuse}? Perhaps it’s just abuse in that case…but with the literal torture we had to deal with some of our abusers performing on us, which we often label as “physical abuse” in our brain, abuse seems like it couldn’t possibly also cover something so seemingly trivial by comparison as “verbal bullying from the adults who were supposed to be there to raise us”
I…don’t really have a way of tying this off with a pretty bow, but I need to stop here and process some of these things offline for a bit. {As well as actually accomplish the rent check and such things so we don’t have to deal with late fees as well as the expenses themselves}
-Rosalie