The Black and Red Carousel

A simple blog about a complex life. TRIGGER WARNING

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Hyper-Vigilance and Me

Sometimes I feel like everyone else is dreaming and I am the only person seeing things clearly. Hyper-vigilance gives me an advantage in this life sometimes. I often find my peers unable to logically think out the consequences of even their simplest actions. If you don't clean your stove, it gets disgusting and attracts flies. If you want a towering flower, you have to plant seeds. If you hand a two year old a stick, it will hit someone or something with it, and on and on. I know every color in the room without thinking of it, I know who is coordinated and who is not. I can tell (partly because of 6 years of communication classes) how someone is feeling before they know. I'm the first one with an ashtray when your ash gets too long and the first to know who's turn it is. I can tell you when someone is lying, flirting, nervous, scared, or cold. I can remember every person in the room's name and I can tell you how they feel towards the person they come with. I forget that other people don't comprehend or notice these things and then I get irate when others don't treat me with amount of attentiveness I am capable of at all times. That isn't fair. 

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Why I Can't Write This Blog

I know it will help, but I refuse myself it at all costs. It's simple and free and what I want to do for the rest of my life, but I am so hesitant to write when there are painful things happening because it would mean recording something that I have real and current feelings about. It would mean facing the pages in the future, seeing how worked up I get, how extreme my reactions are. When I visit old journals I wince and laugh. I hate the thought of even myself laughing at my feelings while I'm having them, so I just WAIT until I've worked through the crisis some other way before committing it to paper. All of my journals are becoming passive and boring. "I broke it off with so and so a week ago," or, "I had a really bad panic attack about such and such yesterday."  The magic of journaling is that you can peek into who you were but I spoil it by constantly by editing myself. Stopping myself from writing also extends my pain. I still eventually write about each incident, which often triggers renewed sadness and panic, making me experience residual emotions sometimes weeks after. The cruelty I inflict on myself accidentally because of the damage in my head is so profound that I'm still surprised when I find another instrument of torture that my subconscious is/has been using to control my thoughts and actions.  

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Thoughts on Splitting-up

I know I'm crazy but I still feel. I know I'm bitchy, but I still hurt. I know I'm irrational, but I see things that are put  right in front of my face, and I just wish I wasn't so easy to cast aside.  

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Realizing My Disorder Is Real (a glimpse into my thoughts)

Am I real? My therapist thinks three goals per day are too many. Three. I cannot manage three things in a day, admittedly. If I had known being an adult simply meant I would be as scared as a child without someone cooking for them, I would not have rushed into adulthood so vehemently. How is it that my brain works so hard at the things others do without effort, but asking me to write a 10 page paper on existentialism in contemporary literature is like asking a garden to grow? The baffling part is before I became an adult I was much better at it. I could buy a week's worth groceries on $25, go out with my friends every day, manage a 3.5 gpa, get drunk every weekend and live peacefully under the same roof as two of my primary abusers. Now I'm six years and a state away, and I can't handle wiping my ass and flushing the toilet in the same day. Will it be like this forever? What happens when my friends are sick of giving and never getting? Will I grow up one day? I can't stand at the sink and do a load of dishes without completely changing my mood or without walking away half way through and forgetting all about them. More than once per day I am completely overcome by a feeling of dread that replaces every other sensation until I'm left staring at a wall with horror painted onto my face.

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The Soft Grey Dessert of The Red Bulls (a personal narrative)

I can't rein in the bulls driving through my head. The run, they pull, they dash. Red and red and red they run and then the brick wall comes and I brace myself for the impact. The first of the bulls smash full force into the wall, unaffected by the fact that it doesn't move. They run in place until they are burying their hooves in my grey matter. My spine feels frozen with the stress of the battle. The bulls behind them smash into the first ones' behinds, the ones behind those climb both sets to drive themselves into the wall. The red bulls pile up and up and the wall grows taller and taller. The bulls spread out and out and the wall goes wider and wider. It hurts to have them all there trying to dig their way through the wall, but stopping them is impossible. I feel as though my head may finally burst, sending raging red bulls into the room around me when I hear a *pop!* in my brain and I fall over, crying and defective until further notice. The wall finally broke and the bulls charge on. I'm numb with damage, but all you see is me, laying in bed, red-eyed again and unable to speak. How are you to know my bulls just gave me brain damage? 

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A Rant About Fear and Horror Movies

The sound of a man screaming scares me, but not nearly as badly as the sound of a man's labored breathing. Sometimes when I see a man give a woman a once over it's all I can do to keep my insides inside. Then I look around me and I see over and over it being reinforced that men are creepy creeps, and I don't want to become someone who simply fears half of the population. Some of my best friends are men. Can we talk about vampire culture? We've LITERALLY sexualized a monster and a sexual predator. Hey, no judgement, I love True Blood too, but folks, vamps are creepy, dead people who want to seduce you into letting them suck your life force out of your throat! That's not sexy! I can't watch scary movies hardly at all because our sick society refuses to offer thrills without rape or child sexual abuse or incest. Well friends, I've had brush ins with all of those things, and it is just like the movies. JUST like them. Who the fuck decided realistic rape and abuse was entertaining? Not me. I know that the theory is that you are suppose to feel scared and after you should feel that life is affirmed because, well at least you're not 'that guy.' Well I was that guy. In fact 1 in 6 women in America suffer some kind of sexual abuse. It seems to me that 1 in 6 women should agree that it's not entertaining, and then there are all of the men who have been abused, and everyone else who has been abused, plus all of their friends and family. Why do we still constantly have horror movies focused on these themes? I just want to sit down and watch some scary monster killing people, or maybe a murderer running around terrorizing folks, but I don't see why we can't lay off all of the perverted stuff that does nothing but give thrills to the perverted and turns the stomach of the sane! I want to leave a theater thinking, "phew! at least I know this will never happen to anyone and it's not some sick freak's way of getting off!" end rant. 

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The Opener (Read First)

TRIGGER WARNING: ABUSE, SEXUAL ABUSE, CHILD ABUSE, INCEST My thoughts are faster than your thoughts. It is not a superpower. It is a signifier that I have suffered trauma. I have suffered trauma. I was not in a war. I was not starved or tortured in a room that has chains on the walls. I was not raped or severely beaten until I couldn't function. I was not locked in a closet for the first thirteen years of my life, or any of the worst of what you have heard. I was touched once or twice by people who I should have been able to trust. I was dragged up and down stairs by my feet. I was hit with 2x4s or smacked across the face or thrown into a wall. I was choked and tied to a bed and other family members were invited to throw things at me. They did. I was smacked in the face for saying the wrong thing, and I was told that my abusers loved me by my mother. I was a young girl sex object, although I remained pure until I chose change that. I was teased at school, like so many of us are. I was out-casted and misunderstood. I found solace in the theatre, where the nights were long and the friends were strange. I am a disappointed, paranoid, college drop-out. I am not a victim. I am a survivor. My family is full of mentally ill persons. That much is sure. This is not a blog about my troubled past. It is a blog about my troubled present. This is a blog about my brain, the dark part of it where slimy things slither into corners as lights pass. This is a blog about what happens when you heavily abuse an American, lower class, white girl from a small farming community. This is my black and red carousel.