Days 0516 & 0517

It’s bugging me. I’m going to have to go and sit in a witness box for the second time in my life and although it’s an extremely different situation this time around, I can feel it stirring everything up from decades ago.
Is it really decades ago?
Sometimes it seems ancient. Other times I can still smell my fear and relief.
Mostly I just remember the world being grey for that entire year leading up to the preliminary hearing and then the court date.
Like that movie, Schindler’s List, where the little girl’s red coat was the only colour in the bleakness.
Except there were no colours in my situation. My eyes were seeing the world like it was one of the crappy black and white TVs my parents still insisted on buying in the early 1990s.
The world had no flavour either; no scent, no feeling. It was just standing next to me, cold and dull.
That was the time in my life where I’d return to my empty family home each winter night: parents off in the former eastern bloc practically uncontactable, sister off who knows where, coming back only to try to bully me into writing her cheques to cash on our parents’ account.
I drew myself lots of hot hot hot baths that year. Because the house was cold and I thought it might bring some feeling back into my skin. I soaked for ages, too afraid to go to sleep in that house on my own; suddenly, sadly aware that the world had monsters in it.
And wondering how to bring the feeling back into my heart, my body, my eyes.

Day 0266

I have a serious weakness for men who present a somewhat inaccessible shell on the outside but are quivering masses of enormous feeling on the inside.
I think it must make me feel like I’m special when these men show me the softness in their hearts – maybe I feel like I have somehow assisted them to feel more.
For about a year after a very unpleasant experience I had in university I was completely numb. I couldn’t feel anything: inside or out. I would lie in the bath and let the water grow cold and not even realise until my lips were blue and I was frozen deep inside. I didn’t feel impermeable but like I’d lost he essential ability to feel anything.
It was scary. And lonely.
And to this day I can feel the visceral joy of the moment I started to feel again; the moment when my brain stopped working so hard to shut out unpleasantness that it shut out all the happiness as well.
I think it’s that time in my life that makes me feel such kinship with males who seem to lack emotions: I recognise them and want to break through the barriers they’ve formed.
I have done it a couple of times now, but the breakthrough always passes. Their defenses reknit themselves and I find it impossible to penetrate them again.
Men who are open from the start are not nearly as interesting; their feelings for me somehow less real and intense.
They say that in our closest personal relationship, we re-enact the pain and hurt of our worst moments, the deepest darkest habits we’ve learned to protect ourselves.
Somehow that makes sense while also being one of the most heartbreaking truths I’ve ever heard.

Day 0229

Adrenalin is a weird thing. It pillows you in strange chemicals that make the world around you move in slow motion, numbing you to ‘worst case scenarios’. I always get tricked by it into thinking I am amazingly calm in the face of something that should be upsetting.
And then all the fear that was hiding among the pillowed folds sneaks up on me a few hours later to whack me over the head and render me a quivering mess.
I don’t think this a good thing.
I’d much rather have a balance of pillowed practical abilities mixed with the wherewithal and self awareness to admit that at least for an instant I was scared shitless.
Another case of learning to listen to myself a bit better.