The Damage

I decided I'd put a short story up for people to read. It is about me, but 'me. prior to brain damage'...  Reading such soul destroying heartache made me remember back to that time (thinking on it, I'd rather be staked to an ants nest than go back to!). Instead, I can look about at my life now. 

Yeah, I could loose a few pounds but looking back I don't think there was ever a time that I looked in the mirror and said 'okay!'  Now I have a house. I have a job (well sort of). I have money. I have the Squeeze. I have my wonderful kids and their spouses. I have gorgeous grand kids. My life is without a doubt better... But... below is how I used to feel; a goodly whack of the time!

The Damage

I knew I had to be here.  I’d known it for a long time.

Yet I had done the dance of humans.  First I sat and wondered, then I attempted to correlate the issues and pin it to one resounding flash in my life.  It didn’t take me long to work out that knowing the cause, didn’t fix the issues.

I didn’t hate my life, not by any stretch of the imagination.  But my choices over the years had been self-destructive and some of those choices were made knowing this was the case.

What did it all mean?  And if I didn’t know what it meant, how could I stop it from my life becoming one extended loop of self-destructiveness?

In the end, I conceded that it was more than possible that I didn’t have the answer; that the ‘flashes’ I had focused on were not the root cause of my choices and behaviour.

So here I sat, awaiting the man that would tell me where I had gone wrong; what was broken inside me; what led me to where I sat now.  What caused me to deliberately look for the person to love, that would hurt me; caused my broken soul to look for the matching soul; my ying to their yeng.  Me searching for punishment, they searching for inflicting pain.

So here I sat, waiting; not hating my life but tired of it.

I knew that to an outsider my words and actions may give that impression, but it isn’t like that.   Although part of me recognised that I searched for the person who would prove my worthlessness, I did not feel that was the action that I took.

Weird really, how my thought process worked.  Most of the time life stuck to the ‘content’ box; and then every so often, it dragged you out and flung you in to the ‘train wreck’ box. 

It was after one of these ‘train wrecks’ that without really understanding why; I was sitting in the office of the therapist.  According to him.. blaha blah blah  - the roller skates yada yada.

She didn’t understand that I didn’t feel grief.  I genuinely just didn’t feel anything.  This was not something that I had been a part of, at least not in any real sense.

The surrounding room smelled of wood and wax with an underlying ugly nylon carpet smell.  The walls were covered with posters that were there to make me feel relaxed; allow me to see just how normal I was.  I didn’t feel normal.  I had never felt normal.  Still, being normal wasn’t going to be covered with this guy.  I planned to get out of there as quickly as possible; as soon as he showed that he had no idea.

So sitting there looking at the posters, I didn’t feel normal; instead, I felt smug; and just a little fearful. Smug because it was my life and I knew it absolutely.  Fearful, because being my life, I knew that there were fragments of emotion that I had tucked away for another time. I just didn’t know what they were.

Pauses between were filled with a silence that got louder in my head as it stretched; broken only by the distant murmur of voices and a faulty clock that ticket loudly, yet was so obviously moving too slowly. A strategically positioned box of tissues crouched on the edge of the desk, mocking me.  One snowy white sail, like the top of a meringue, pointed towards me.

I sighed a little and straightened in the chair.  I did not need tissues.  Smugness fought to reclaim my psyche and I crossed my legs and leaned back in the chair, abandoning the hunched position I had previously held.

You could sit before a counsellor forever, but until you needed to banish the demons within; until you understood that to discuss it was cathartic, you clung to it like a life buoy.  You greedily pulled it closer until it was so ingrained in you, it was impossible to let it go.