purplerabbit

On sleepwalking and memory...

Friends, please read and comment. This one is important to me...

I feel a bit like the sleep walker who finally woke up. I am Rip Van Winkle. So much time passed without full feeling that I had thought it gone. I am in the throws of re-experiencing myself. Sometimes it is more painful than either my physical injuries or the physical sides of withdrawal.

As Lon loving put in one of his recent journal entries, the emotional losses, chronic pain and prescription drugs all took part of what I use to be. While I missed a lot of my creativity, I am not so sure about the emotional stuff. I was always an intense person emotionally. I was told over and over that I was "TOO Intense." That large and sometimes extreme range of emotion was very exciting both to me and to others - but it can be hell to live with. Mom, Lon and Troy keep assuring me that they much prefer the awake me to the more laid-back drugged me.

While I do think I am a much more interesting person this way, I am worried. I am no longer accustomed to the force of my own emotions. And the intensity is not only of feeling but of memory. Remembering for me is not simply an intellectual experience, but a very emotional and kinesthetic one. When I remember love, I remember the touch, the taste, the smell, the pain, my highs and lows with them. Someone once told me that to be loved by me was to be immortalized. I am beginning to understand what he was talking about. I had never understood that memory didn't work this way for everyone.

I am mourning love lost over 20 years ago. I am glorying in experiences with people who are long dead. I am feeling so much of who and what I use to be. I find myself a little frightened by the depth of feeling. I still love Michael McConnell and we have not shared each other's bodies/hearts in twenty-six years. I remember the taste of his lips, the sparkle of his eyes, the expressiveness of his hands, the feel of his body on and in mine. I remember them all again. Love so intense it nearly tore me apart.

My mother once told me that the problem with being the focus of such love was its loss. Mom said that being the focus of my attention was “like being struck by the heat and light of a radiant sun” - it made one warm and glowing. She said that was wonderful, but when that love was taken away, then you were “plunged into darkness.” I thought she was being overly dramatic. Now as I read love letters written to me three decades ago, I begin to understand.

Problem for me is that I never actually stop loving anyone. But it isn't always safe or good to be with the people I have loved. I lost Jackie, David, Michael and, yes, even Tina, to their own damaged childhoods. In tears once, David tried to convince me once again that he loved me more than anything in the world. I finally looked at him and explained that I believed he loved me, but that the way he loved me was killing me. He was controlling and possessive, he so wanted to keep me for himself that he nearly killed what he loved about me.

It was this depth of feeling and inability to forget that brought me to the psych meds in the first place. Post-traumatic stress they call it. Reliving over and over every detail of what when wrong, especially with Tina - it nearly killed me. I am not exaggerating. I went on the anti-depressants because the doctor said it was that or hospitalization for malnutrition. In the first months after Tina’s assault on me and our losing custody of Rowan, I lost so much weight that I weighed less than I had since I hit puberty. I was a size 10 - I hadn’t been that size since I was ten! I couldn’t eat or sleep, I had constant nightmares. I needed to find a way to stop the memories from destroying me.

Thirty years ago, after my Dad’s traumatic brain injury and his loss of memory, I took an oath. After Michael’s brain damage and loss of memory from drugs, I made that oath again and again. I would rather suffer anything than loose my mind. I would rather give up anything other than my memories. I declared that they are what make me who I am.

So why did I choose the drugs rather than the memories if I have always been like this? Wasn’t I use to it? Rowan. Rowan made me feel like what mom described my love was like. When I am with him, it is as if being the center of all the love, warmth and sunlight of the world. When he leaves, it is like falling into a dark hole. He has the ability to make me feel completely loved without reservation. Holding him in those first moments in the delivery room when all other attention was on Tina, and he and I looked at each other for the first time - I have never felt anything like it. His recognition of me was so complete and intense I was nearly unable to breath. To be the focus of such love was beyond anything I had ever felt before.

People tell me I look different when I am with him. I am different. He changed me completely - and I was unable to go back. When we lost custody, I spent five months without even being able to speak with him. It was over a year of not knowing when we would see him again. We have spent the last six years fighting just to be able to maintain contact with him.

In 1978, David wrote me in a letter that “whoever said that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, was simply a fool - he never loved you.” He wrote of being “left only with memories. Memories of the only girl to totally arouse me with a smile or a look in those eyes.”

Forgetting is a curse and a blessing. I knew that well enough that as a teenager that when I created a fictional character who always remembered everything, I knew that it would drive her insane. In that story, the immortal character is driven literally mad with grief as everyone she loves dies while she lives on.

So I gave up full access to my mind, my feeling and my memories - in order to survive. Now I have made the choice that surviving isn’t enough. I want “me” back. So I have been exploring who I use to be in order that I might find out what I want to be. I hope my family and friends will help me in this journey. Please be patient with me. I don’t know where I am going, but I know I don't want to stay lost.