Circ Day

When I feel like free style writing, I know the depression is lessening and I am starting to come home to myself. It means I am feeling in the present and have an urge to share my thoughts.

As someone with CPTSD, I struggle with reliving the past in all sorts of ways, some I have no control over, such as dreams and flashbacks. A handful of times throughout my adulthood, I have woken up feeling like I was in the past (within the time of one of my experiences of trauma that has occurred in my life) and that feels like literal hell on earth.

I definitely hit rock bottom with my depression and anxiety 3–4 weeks ago, and then after that things started to change a bit for me and I have been coming back to the present each day and feeling hope for myself and my future. It’s a really big deal.

I am not exactly sure how long it’s been that I felt stuck in one place- the past. I want to say it was July 21, 2017. A day that started great, and ended horribly.

I met up with my circulation co-workers from the library I worked at. One of my supervisors owns a cottage about 2 hours away from the city in which I reside in. It was a planned event and something that she scheduled well in advance year after year, up until that year as it turned out she didn’t have an opportunity to do it again.

It was a day where I finally felt free. I have body image insecurity but that day I was with people I trusted and felt safe around, not only did I swim for the first time in years around people, but I didn’t completely cover up with a t-shirt. It felt liberating and I felt at peace.

There was food, friends, laughter. I had a chance to meet the grandkids and spouses of supervisors I respected and enjoyed being around, it was such a good day.

Also a day that I made an important decision and decided that night when I got home I would end a 3.5 year relationship with a guy, where I felt the relationship was just not working for me. I felt like I was settling and there was a lot of conflict and financial insecurity. It was a relationship I felt myself getting into for reasons you don’t get into relationships-safety.

I was trying so hard to get my needs met from others, not realizing until years later that I get those safety and security needs from within myself.

Looking back I know we didn’t communicate well and that was something that I struggled with all my life not just with lovers but with family as well. I have a hard time dealing with confrontation and arguing. I shut down and try to make it go away. I go directly into fight or flight, and this is something that over time I would go back and forth between fleeing a situation where the other person was trying to have productive conversations with me, or fighting with them with deep rooted anger and neither of those things are useful in a romantic relationship. I couldn’t get over or work through that ingrained learning in that relationship.

This person loved me though but I didn’t yet love myself. I was struggling with completing my undergraduate degree. I was studying psychology at a university in my city for over a decade, basically through my entire adult life up until that point, I did graduate may 2020, during the start of the pandemic. I started the degree when I left a horrific, and incredibly abusive relationship that I am still processing because I pushed it away for years while I was studying and in other relationships. But more on that later.

In summer 2017 I was struggling with being in my current relationship while pushing myself to finish my degree and working full time at the university library. I realized a few weeks before at a family wedding that I would have to break it off. I was really worried because this person loved me but I felt like their love was suffocating me.

It didn’t feel like the love I felt once before, during my second relationship when I started realizing how awful the first one was. It felt like something was missing. It felt like I didn’t want to settle. It felt like I was stuck. It felt like I was trying to fill needs from this person that I needed to learn to fulfill myself even though at that point I just didn’t know how.

It felt like it took about 2 years to process that night and the relationship. I made myself feel terrible for breaking this person’s heart, I felt so awful. But my heart was just not in it, I just couldn’t do it anymore and I felt it was not fair for him to continue. I was also really focused on school. At the time I was getting really interested in forensic psychology and criminology. I was getting A’s in all my forensic psych classes and B’s in the last of my electives. I felt like it was time to let go and be free and learn to live by myself. I also find in relationships it is incredibly hard for me to work through and process previous relationships.

I live with depression and several anxiety disorders, so a lot of the time that keeps me in a state where I am not able to focus on the present and live my life the way I intend to. It takes a lot of work to be able to focus on the present and what I want from this life before even thinking about my relationship.

It took a few years to let go of the guilt from that night, but I thankfully remembered the day in two parts, one, in the day time at Circ Day (circulation staff) where I felt free and ready to move on, and felt like I was making the right choice. And two, after I got home where I felt filled with dread of what was to come and of course breaking someone’s heart. Year later, I realized the demise of the relationship was not solely on me, it takes two to tango. But like in other times of my life I pushed all of that weight on my shoulders and let it hang around way longer than it needed to. I didn’t really start to process it until I found myself stuck in another relationship and realized that one wasn’t going to work either. But that’s a story for another time