I am not going to give a rundown of my month; you don’t deserve the frustration and I’m not interested in baring my personal life for folks to read. I’m no one’s friend here, and it wasn’t particularly interesting anyway. It was just…hard.

Because I’m chronically ill, I forget what it’s like to experience violence from something outside my body. My day-to-day life is a minefield of managing a disorder that, when triggered, provides me with heaps of trauma that I then have to wade through. I spend months – sometimes years – working through my fear while still living in the body that is responsible for that trauma (and threatening to inflict more).

It is not a fun place, my body – my brain, specifically. But there’s nothing for it except for suicide and I’d like to at least enjoy my thirties. Forties, too, if I get those years.

Vigilance and violence are part of my life. They are part of my mornings, afternoons, evenings. They are part of my writing practice. I think about them when I cry, because the action is not entirely controllable. I think about them when I laugh.

But this month was difficult because of an external force and it felt like a privilege to experience that. It was a perverse feeling and made me feel bad, like I was invalidating other people’s terrifying experiences with abuse, and yet I found it comforting in some ways. It gave me something to fear that didn’t come from me.

I could lock the door. Separate myself from her. God, what a luxury that was.

The month is over and the danger is gone. My apartment feels like my own again. I’m back with just me and my brain. I am glad for it because weathering that danger was exhausting, but there was something to knowing she couldn’t hurt me when I was staying with a friend, across town, that was soothing.

Chronic illness is such a strange thing. The filter through which I see the world makes it difficult to relate to other people, and my relationship with fear and pain is very warped. I am a great listener and like to help folks with their problems, but I often find myself holding back when talking to friends, because their problems are so, so bearable to me. I’d love to have their problems, and only those problems.

I’m going to stop with this self-pity and move on to my little recommendations section.

Music: Delirium Division, Little Pink Houses. It’s a rock song. I just really love it. It’s been on repeat for me.

Stuff:

1. Comic: Vinyl by Image Comics. It’s about a serial killer with Alzheimer’s who is emotionally attached to his FBI agent. He saves him from a murderous cult. It’s very, very cool.
2. Been wearing my half-rimless glasses. I like them but they make me look like a librarian. I’ve decided I don’t care.
3. I’m going up to Marblehead on Saturday to drive around. It’s where part of my novel is set.