Normal

I am more normal now than I believe I ever have been in my life. I attend a trauma survivor support group, and at our first meeting we were given a two-sided paper of common trauma symptoms and asked to check off each of the symptoms we had been experiencing. I checked off all but two, both having to do with obsessive compulsive behaviors. I don't have those. Yet.

But I fall at least partially into every other category on the list. I don't have a digital link to it, and I'm not going to list all the symptoms here, but I have them. So interesting. So fascinating. So normal. I am quite a normal trauma survivor, trauma experiencer. Good news, right? It's just thrilling to be so normal. My favorite word. Normal normal normal normal normal. What a grand word to describe me, to describe my life. So effing normal.

I feel like I'm dreaming. I feel no guilt. I fear no consequences. I feel like I can do and be anything I want and it won't matter either way. It makes things easier, for them to not be real. That's a trick I used to employ when I was watching a movie and didn't want to be embarrassed by crying. I'd remind myself "It's not real," and the depth of emotion would dissipate. It also took some of the fun out of it. I wonder if it's healthy to feel like real life isn't real, though. But I kind of don't care.

Caring is missing a little bit for me right now. Even writing this, I'm not doing it for me this time. I've had people tell me they check regularly for updates, so here I am, writing an update...ish. 

Still spinning in my whirlwind. This whole process has felt like such a whirlwind. Happening so fast and slow at the same time. So much squished into so little time but each day feeling like an eternity. I've learned and forgotten so much. I've lived and died so many times. I'm a thousand years old in the last five months.

Spinning and twirling and whirling and rising and falling. Like a dance. I like dancing. I used to like dancing. Who knows if I will ever dance again.

Someone, take me dancing, all day, every day. I want to spin and twirl and whirl and never, ever stop. Just keep on spinning and twirling until I cannot breathe and cannot stand. Spin me until I'm spinning faster than the earth, faster than the speed of light, and then throw me so I rise, out of the atmosphere, into the stars. I have already imploded and become a black hole, you know. Nothing is safe in my vicinity. If I stay here, I will break up the earth, consume all its particles and rip apart all its atoms. I am too big, too much, with the universe on my shoulders. So spin me and twirl me and throw me instead. Watch me rise far, far away

into nonexistence

or more than existence, into infinity.

Take me dancing.