Yesterday I went to see the doctor about getting a diagnosis sorted out. Ended up in a conversation about trauma and information processing. Turns out when I couldn’t work out why I was struggling to process the dance calls at The Printers Guild Ball and was wondering if it was the low lighting or something that actually it was probably more to do with having seen an attempted suicide cut down from barbed wire three days earlier.
Could really have done with that conversation years ago, you can’t work around what you don’t know and when stuff is messing with my head insight into what’s happening is hard.
The doctor made me fill in an anxiety and depression form after I told her about the breakup. Unsurprisingly I scored highly for Depression, the thing is, I’m not depressed I’m just incredibly, incredibly sad. She asked if I wanted sertraline and I asked more about the information processing/trauma response but it wasn’t clear if it would help or not so I opted to not. She gave me the phone number for Mindsmatter and I told her about the trauma group I’m enrolled on in January.
I haven’t wanted to kill myself, I haven’t thought I was worthless, I’ve spiralled a bit, and my gods I’ve pondered on my mistakes. Weirdly enough the doctors appointment helped with that. But the weirdest thing is I keep coming back to the sunlight from this last year and having been loved like that, having felt like I was worth being loved like that. I never felt guilty when I was with them, when I was with either of them, I was loved and I loved and it was ok. It was sunlit and allowed.
That’s new for me. I keep coming back to Blue Eyes. I keep thinking back to uni, and later to FJ. This year was raw, opening, full of feeling and it’s made everything else, the deepest loves I have, look slightly numbed. The Jellicle is my home but when she first said she loved me I told her not to. There’s always been such guilt in me when people have loved me, there was no guilt with FJ but for all it was deep, reliable and consistent (until it wasn’t) it wasn’t passionately romantic.
This year felt so real in a way my life often doesn’t. There was no sense of through a glass darkly, just what was, what was real, until it wasn’t anymore.
There’s no numbness here, there’s no withdrawal from the saddening pain inside my heart because there’s still that cushioning comforting feeling; “I have been loved without guilt or fear”
Sure I’m scoring high on a Depression chart right now because I’m incredibly sad, I’m mourning the million could have beens from three of the defining relationships of my life. That’s the thing, I haven’t lost my Beloved, I’ve lost my Love and my Beloved and a third Love all at once. It’s a lot.
They made me feel so desirable, so lovable in a way that Blue Eyes did in a way that I generally don’t because it involved all the parts of me that don’t interest the Jellicle or M-i-L.