Oysters, triggers, and healing.

Broken hearts.  It's such a cliche'.  No topic has received more attention in the history of the world.  More books, sonnets, songs, movies, plays etc etc etc ad nauseam have been written about broken hearts than any other topic.  Country music exists because of broken hearts.  Taylor Swift's career exists because of her broken heart (more power to ya, sister).  NOTHING HURTS MORE THAN A BROKEN HEART.

I have avoided continuing to write about "the flight of the bumblebee" mainly because.... it hurts. Also because..... it hurts.  And I don't want to give it attention and I don't want to dwell and I sure as hell don't want to re-live it.  But mostly because, it hurts.

I was saying this very thing to my friend Jessica a few weeks and without hesitation she responded so brilliantly I had to turn it into a screensaver....

... her next sentence was, "because I'm sure it hurts like hell."

Here is one thing I do know.  Healing is not at all linear.  Healing is the most messy process of all time.  When my grandmother was in the hospital dying, there was this night when the hospital was very understaffed.  They had taken a vein from my Nana's leg and used it to try to repair something around her heart.  The wound in her leg wasn't healing.  That night, when there were no nurses to be had, there was a nursing student frantically trying to help Nana clean up and care for her wound.  I stood at the head of her bed and stared for too long at that wound.  It appeared to be an inch deep and 2 inches wide.  It was gaping and oozing and bleeding and.... not good.  I knew it wasn't good.  You could look at this wound and just know it was never going to heal, not properly anyway.  This gaping river of pain ran the entire length of her leg.  My mom and I stood at the head of her bed, looking from the wound to each other to the nursing student and just.... waited in a room thick with anxiety.  Nana was in so much pain, but no one was coming.  The student nurse was doing her best and wiping with gauze and trying to clean it up the best she could, but the wound was more than she could handle.  She needed help.  Without a word, I walked over to the wall, put on a pair of rubber gloves, and just started helping.  Obviously I had no idea what I was doing, so the student did the "nurse" stuff, and I did the stuff I knew how to do like open gauze and wipe away blood and lay a comforting hand on Nana's leg to try to calm her down.  Nana died a few months later, and truth be told, I can't even remember if that wound on her leg ever really healed.  All I knew is that SHE never healed.  The why didn't matter.

I keep envisioning that wound in my head, the wound I knew just by looking at it, would never heal.  I picture that wound now in the center of my heart.  One that will never heal.  Not properly anyway.  The gaping river of pain, the emoji of a broken heart, shattered right down the center in a jagged, messy line that will never be able to reconnect.

In real life of course it's not that clean.  In this image it looks as though you could simply push those two halves together to make a whole again.  It real life it's not that easy.  In real life there are blood and guts and infection spilling out of that crack and it ALL needs to heal before you can even consider pushing the parts back together again.  And when you do... it's not the same.  There are days I believe that my new heart will be better, stronger, more efficient, wiser, be able to feel more... and then there are days when I think there will be parts along that line that never truly reconnect again, and in that way, my heart will always be a little bit broken.  

It's too soon to tell which version of my story will be true.  

I have been doing really well.  I have, I promise.  My healing time is shortening.  There are days I don't think about it at all.  I'm experiencing this interesting phenomenon.  All across the many apps on my phone, no matter what I try to delete, there's still a picture out there.  It seems as though once every few days I open an app and there's a picture of us.  I opened a drawer the other day to find an 8X10 photo of us the weekend we got engaged, clutching each other tightly and smiling so big it looks as though our cheeks might burst.  I felt nothing. I feel nothing, and I do mean NOTHING when I see pictures of us.  I can't really understand it.  My therapist says it's my brain's way of protecting myself.  She is probably right.  There's some sort of "shut down" mechanism built into the danger of witnessing our former happiness together.  Thanks, brain.   But last week I was reaching under the sofa to find something (that I purposely keep there, because I'm weird) and I found a guitar pick.  And I stopped breathing.  And I felt like I was dying.  And I still do, over a week later.  And I wanted (want) to throw a fcking temper tantrum.  I want to scream and yell and throw my fists and kick the ground and possibly throw something glass and hear it shatter into a billion pieces because that's what I FEEL like.  A human being that has been shattered into a million pieces.  

Why is this guitar pick tearing me apart? 

My therapist kindly informed me of all the psychological reasons, and the actual physiological reasons why that guitar pick wrecked me.  He spoke of the reptilian brain; the most basic part of our brain which houses the fight or flight response- and the limbic part of our brain which is responsible for storing memories and creating human emotions. (Sidenote: right about now I would like to have my limbic brain removed or at least paused for an extended period of time).  Trauma makes our brains do things out of our control.  That guitar pick opened a tiny door between my reptilian brain and my limbic brain in which all kids of yukky painful feelings and memories came seeping through and as a result triggered me.

I laughed at that phrase for so long.  "Omg I'm so triggered!" It became a bit of a psychology hot word a few years ago and as a result; overused.  I don't laugh at it anymore.  I live in a constant state of waiting to be triggered.  What will be the thing around the corner that brings me to my knees?  When will I open a drawer or a closet or a box and the pain engulfs me and I cease to breathe or reason.

I simply CANNOT WAIT to open by boxes of Christmas decorations.  I think I'll enlist the help of wine. 

I consider myself a relatively evolved human being.  I work hard, constantly trying to better myself through therapy, books, classes, meditation, etc.   I spend a lot of time looking inward.  As a result, I DO have control over my thoughts and emotions perhaps more than the average bear might.  Which is why this has utterly rocked my world.  I have no control over it.  I've said it before and I'll say it again.... I didn't have a say in any of this.  There were no warning signs, there was no trouble, there was no unhappiness there was no communication of "things need to change," or "I'm not happy."  We went from wedding planning and house shopping to **disappeared**.   There will never be closure for me.  I'm not sure if it would even help anymore. I have to make peace with the fact that I'll never get it.    Intellectually I know, understand, and empathize for the myriad of ways that he is broken.  It still hurts me that he never let me see those parts of himself, that he never felt he could share that pain with me such that we could work through it.  That's what couples do, they work through stuff, the ugly hard stuff, and they grow stronger and evolve into better people and a better couple for it.

My therapist said it best.  "As humans we need nutrients in order to grow and thrive.  Sometimes that means we have to eat vegetables and things we don't love in order to get those nutrients.  What you had was a non stop dose of cocaine.  It felt absolutely incredible to be high all the time, but you weren't getting what you needed to grow as a human."

I love my therapist so much y'all.  (and yes in this post I refer to my therapists as he/she because I have seen not one, but two therapists during this healing process) 

And you know I'm all about thriving.