When it comes to communication I will be the first to admit that I fucking suck at it and always have. As I listen to audiobooks or read on healing I am learning a lot is linked to what I went thru growing up. I also hate confrontation or the fear of it happening that I hold off on saying what is on my mind or if something is bothering me until I get to the point of exploding and can and have way too many times. It is something I am working on but a very hard habit to break (like many of mine). It wasn’t until recently that I have realized how much my childhood trauma affected everything else that I have gone thru in life without even knowing it, how much it has shaped who I am. But I’ve spent most of my life without a voice you could say. I would lock my pain, my emotions, feelings and thoughts away instead of voicing them. For most of my life as I found a little piece of voice and losing it or not being able to express it, I became very bitter and my outward persona was an asshole. If you got to know me then you would see that I wasn’t always an ass. But then when I went thru my divorce and all of those emotions and its own trauma especially with how some things turned out over the next few years I started using the asshole persona again to most people and it became part of me and still is. I try to keep it in check, especially over the past few months since I am being more conscience about it but this also means I still hold to much in.
My habit I started when I was younger is to communicate with songs, quotes, sharing poems or nowadays videos or memes. I found it was easier to express myself this way because a song or quote could say how I felt better than I can. But not everyone will get the same meaning as you and that can cause issues, TRUST ME I am a pro at putting my foot in my mouth because someone didn’t get the same meaning as me or I expressed how I was feeling the best I could and get frustrated when they don’t get the same meaning or there is no response which makes me feel like I am ignored so I go into shutdown mode. But it how I am wired, how my brain works. For me so much is tied together in the way I store my memories, emotions and feelings, like how I can’t even look at cherry pie without thinking of my grandmother and the good times I had with her before dementia took her mind, same with dominos as soon as I start mixing the dominos up I am taken back to when I was about 8 or 9 and spent a few weeks with her, just me and her. We are sitting there at the end of the dining room table, dominos are set up, she has her little yellow notepad and pencil so she can keep score because of course we are playing for money, a nickel a game to the winner of the round and a penny a point and we would keep score until someone hit $5 and then start the scoring over. We would have a coffee together (mine was more 3/4 milk and 1/4 coffee with lots of sugar back then) from the black percolator in sitting in the corner by the green sink, grab a Little Debbie doughnut stick or a pecan pin wheel to snack on while we played. Granny would be smoking her More 120 cigarette from the green pack with its weird brown wrapper and if she ran out I had to go grab one from the freezer for her. I get filled with all the admiration and love I had for her and how she always made me feel loved and SAFE. That is how my brain works, good and bad can be all be recalled from something as simple as a cherry pie, a song, how someone responds to something that you share with them can all trigger the old feelings both physical and emotional to come back, and sometimes that is all you get back at the time and you have to go searching for the memory that is tied to those emotions and feelings so you can make sense of why they came back. Sometimes it takes years or decades and sometimes you are still trying to figure it out. To say the least it is HUGE pain in the ass and a big source of depression. For example I have always been bothered and flooded with emotions and very painful memories of my father when I even smell beer.
But of course alcohol is legal and its everywhere you go and so much of the world revolves around it. I mean you can’t scroll thru Facebook, Youtube, TikTok or really any media without seeing an ad, video of someone drinking, etc. Always has been my whole life but it is what it is. And even being a recovering alcoholic I don’t have a problem with drinking and I have even had a few since I “quit” drinking and maybe one day will be able to go out and have a drink for New Year’s or my birthday but that will be awhile and I will need to heal a lot more before then. But I don’t have a problem with alcohol except for beer, the smell, how people act when drunk on it, and the taste, and yes I can still taste it after you have even brushed your teeth or when we have both been drinking. But what happens is in the beginning you deal with all the negative memories, feelings and nightmares and just say it bothers you but you will be fine so you can fit in. Eventually it becomes easier to believe that it doesn’t bother, just drink or do something else to numb you when all that weight comes back to attack you, you do whatever you can to suppress it all. Then as a teenager you find something that works but it is illegal but you don’t care, I mean at that point jail would have probably been better than at home. But then you get into the real workforce and having to get drug tested so you have to stop(well except one, one of the best and worst retail stores I worked for but that is another story I will tell soon). You’ve lost what helped you cope so you go back to suppressing it. As the years go by and you are finally able to legally drink you are back to the same lie you tell everyone, you are fine and it doesn’t bother you. But in reality you are constantly, silently having waking flashbacks, physically feeling the beating with the belt or cigarette burn, having the same gut wrenching tightness in your gut because your body has gone into fight or flight mode, you get the anger back you felt back then. Constantly pushing down all that down because you can’t let it out, you can’t explain it because at the time you didn’t understand any of it, you just knew you felt this way and you didn’t know what would happen if you let all that out that was and still is in me. But how do you tell your date, your best friend, your wife, your coworkers, your roommate, your fiancé what it is like to be around something as silly as beer because it’s everywhere(unless they read this, then maybe but doubt they will read it anyway so not worried about it). I mean who doesn’t go out with your coworkers for a drink, have a beer while camping, have a beer at the baseball game(even if it is travel ball tournament for high school age kids), have a drink at dinner when out, I mean you see it at every gas station, grocery store, event, club, etc. So you go along, you try to find something that is socially acceptable, you try beer but nope, you try cider but it is too sweet and gassy, so you find liquor and it takes years before you really start drinking. But you had found something that made it where you could fit in, you find a happy medium because you could drink with everyone now, but it’s still always a social thing and didn’t drink much because you hadn’t worked up to drinking straight liquor yet so it was never many when going out because mixed drinks aren’t cheap, especially in your 20’s. Then one day I try moonshine and like it which lead to whiskey and the rest but you also find out you have a naturally high tolerance that grows as you get older and drink more and because of that you are still high functioning but I’m getting side tracked and tired as well because honestly this draining emotionally, I knew it would be but wasn’t prepared for how bad it is. But you had finally found a happy medium that worked for over a decade, no more drinking syrup of ipecac(I think that is how you spell it) to make yourself start vomiting so you didn’t have to go to party with your wife or something similar because you didn’t enjoy drinking so there wasn’t drinking till drunk for years so there was no reward just the negative flashbacks. Until close to the end of my marriage drinking was social unless flashbacks got too bad when stress levels got too high then it might be a night I would get drunk to drown them, then slowly I would get a flood of those unknown emotions that would linger for days and because I didn’t know what they were at the time and the flashbacks were back daily but I’m not ready to explain why they were back but it took me until very recently to fully understand where they came from and linking it all. I’m still processing and working thru the tangled mess of memories. But drinking became a big part of me and my crutch to deal with life and how it all flipped and shattered on me and I was finally able to start the journey to find my voice which I’m still on after a lifetime. And there will be a lot more on all of this as I am processing everything that was locked away, all at once when I quit drinking back in October of last year. And it comes in waves. And I still get the unknown ones that I am trying to link. But with all bad there has been just as much if not more good, a prime example is without alcohol I would have lost out on a ton in my life like not meeting my fiancé, but on the flip side alcohol has caused a lot of hurt and damage to that same relationship that I have no clue if I will be able to rebuild and save or if I will always feel like I am waiting on the hammer to drop and it be over all because I can’t communicate properly. All because of the things that are pent up in me that like to explode out sometimes or weight on me so much that I fall into a deep depression.
I write it, I try to explain with a song or even try and speak it but the problem is when I try to speak my brain is thinking about everything I would put into words but the path from the brain to my mouth takes a detour to my foot a lot and since it takes the detour it leaves the gates open and those inner demons come out and throw everything you locked away or imaginary conversation you had in your head to discuss this issue and throw in some of the repressed anger in you when 90% of the time the anger is not with them or even the situation that much but they make you believe it is so you start yelling, say things you don’t fully believe or the demons convinced you to believe or even worse you say something that you know will hurt them. And I have realized hopefully not too late so that maybe I can somehow salvage my life because right now I feel like almost everything in my life is being held up by a thread all of which are attached to a few key anchor points, every so often the thread gets closer and stronger but then gets pulled back down or chewed by something. And I’m afraid of which of those threads is going to cause everything to come unraveled. And I know this my insecurities and how my brain is taking every current trigger to try and attach something that got out when I stopped numbing my mind. So I am going to end this long ass post and thank you to anyone that read it all, maybe I’m the only one that thinks this way or maybe you do to or maybe you know someone that does and this helps you understand them a little better. There is no way any of us can ever fully know what someone is going thru, how something affects them, what emotions they are feeling, or how they process things and what they find important or not, or how they remember something or what emotions they attached to a memory if any at all. It’s why military service can affect two soldiers differently long term because even though they went thru the same thing and may be physically affected the exact same one could be fine with no lasting trauma or triggers and the other person could lasting trauma that they can’t deal with, deal with in unhealthy ways or destroy themselves mentally because it is deep rooted and sometimes you can’t put into words how it makes you feel or why it bothers you so you try your best to communicate to understand them or make yourself understood but if they don’t or can’t explain or understand then you end up dealing with it eating at you, you dwell on it and it takes over your mind and you become obsessed with making sense of it until you have built up something in your mind even if it’s wrong till it causes a problem and makes things worse and somehow the process starts all over while it steals as much of your sleep and thought cycles and weakens you then it starts the domino effect of screwing up as much as possible in your life and makes your mind a complete mess so you are stuck spinning in a circle. But maybe we are all spinning in a circle and the key is getting on the same RPMs but I will say goodnight with oh so happy thought.