save your sanity for later.

I got a job.

Not only that, but I'm working in a mental health field as a peer.

More details to come in a locked entry, but I just wanted everyone to know... after 7 years out of the workforce, a new chronic illness, four surgeries, living with my parents for 5 years, being declared disabled by SSA---

I'm working. I get up, I go to the center, and they're overjoyed to see me. My feedback is valued, my foibles are tolerated with compassion, and any accommodation requests are filled with alacrity and met with immediate acceptance.

I can't explain how much the opportunity for meaningful work means to me. It's revitalized my hopes for the future.

It's tedious, this repetitive reorganization of internal data based on startlingly obvious conclusions—epiphanies, I would call them, if it wasn't that actually, this shit is completely obvious and no one else seemed to look close enough—or maybe they just didn't care enough to tell me.

(I've been watching too much Sherlock because I just had to stifle the urge to call everyone I've ever cared about an idiot.)

So. Do I go after older men because I desperately want someone to protect me, to stand with me, to be on my side? And then do I ask them to hurt me—beg them to in bed, desperately provoke them into doing it outside of sex—because I believe that's inevitable? Because I believe that it will happen, I know/feel it will, so the only thing I can control is timing?

Do I encourage the pain because it was outside for so long that in some sort of perverted Stockholm Syndrome I've made a home for it inside me?

I think this is all true. It feels true.

I try, I do try, no one can say that I don't. But I understand myself better every day, and it doesn't make a difference.

I want to re-write that sentence, turn it into "it doesn't seem to make a difference"—so maybe that sentence isn't true, because that's an impulse I recognize from therapy, that's something different, that's something I allowed to be input & not something that was forced into me.

We are all the sum of our experiences, my ex-boyfriend Joe told me yesterday. We ended up talking about our relationship; there are still, ten years after we started dating and 8 years after we broke up, somehow there are still loose ends.

I had told him during that conversation a recurrent thought I've had. If I met an alternate universe version of myself, one who was happy, one who had never been abused—would I recognize her? Would I know her? Would any of the thoughts in her head be identical to the ones in mine?

I don't know. I don't think so.

How to change myself into a survivor, rather than a victim—I don't know. How to be happy after all of this, with my disabilities dragging me down like lead weights—I don't know.

I don't think I can.

But——I don't know.