My body lets me know when it's feeling stressed by manifesting physical symptoms. At this point in my life, it has even determined specific symptoms for specific stresses, ie, general stress that becomes a little too much gives me indigestion and various forms of heartburn, nausea, etc. while heavier stress that has made its way into my subconscious gives me night terrors.
I started having these night terrors during the Jean fiasco. Of course, I didn't realize that's what they were when I was having them, but now that they seem to surface whenever I'm emotionally stressed about something I try to pretend I'm not, it seems a logical conclusion. The worse one I ever had I woke up from standing beside my bed shaking and scared out of my mind. I had to stare at the ceiling for a good five minutes before coming to the conclusion that there weren't any knives dangling from it.
They are usually extremely violent and feel extremely real. Sometimes they are just hints at violence. Lately they've moved into this surreal paranoid realm where I am sure someone or something is watching me. Whatever the case, they are always terrifying and I wake up in a state of utter fear and confusion.
Two nights ago I woke up hitting the bed next to me as a dark anaconda-like body slithered up from underneath it and brushed my arm. Scared the shit out me until I could slow down my breathing and convince myself it wasn't real. When I finally fell back asleep I dreamed about Jean. I was with her husband (the boy she dated in college who is not in fact her husband) and when she got off the bus from work she saw me and opened her arms and said, "I can't believe you've come! After all this time, I knew we could work this out." She then proceeded to hug her husband first before coming to me. I remember feeling very odd, almost like someone had dropped me into that scene and I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to work anything out with her.
Then yesterday I logged into an old account online and found an email from her. It is over a year and a half old and I only vaguely remember getting it, finding it irritating and ignoring it. It was two and a half years after we stopped speaking. And as in the hand written letter she sent the year before that, she claimed that our friendship meant (and still means if I would get back in touch with her) so much to her and she honestly didn't know what went wrong. She honestly didn't know. This after I replied to her hand written letter with one of my own explaining that it was not one thing that made me angry enough to stop speaking to her. I told her I couldn't go back through it all but that if she really had matured she should be able to look back and see how unbalanced our friendship was, and that it just wasn't meant to be.
Obviously she didn't get the hint. Or she needed some kind of closure by way of explanation. I feel no need to provide that for her. In writing what I did write, I was able to have closure for myself. Or so I thought...
I suppose it really never should have surprised me that an energy sucking black hole couldn't see why a relationship was one sided and hurtful. Perhaps it was true, perhaps she had changed and matured since then. By saying that, one would think it was also an admission that she was partly at fault, or at the very least partly immature thereby leading to some kind of emotional rift which there clearly was. But that would be wrong because she then asked what she did so she could apologize for it.
How does she not know that by doing that she negated the sincerity of the apology?
The whole forgive and forget thing…I'm not sure how far I am with either. Obviously I haven't forgotten, I know I never will, but as for forgive? I may have. I want to think I have…but that doesn't mean I ever want to see her again. She said she thought the reason for our "drifting apart" was because maybe stories were told and therefore our end was based on untruths. If she knew me at all, she'd know I'd never base the ending of a 6 year friendship ( 2.5 of which were extremely rocky teetering on horrible) on something I heard from someone. It only makes me sadder that everything I thought I saw in her, everything I thought we shared really was just me projecting. She never did take the time to know me. Why should she? I fit all her projections perfectly. Apparently we're both at fault.
At any rate, it's just weird how all of a sudden she's in my subconscious again and I'm coming across letters at the same time, and of course now I think I'm seeing her places. Unresolved issues as my friend J would say? I dunno. I thought it was over. I thought I finally forgave myself for being a doormat. Perhaps I should rethink it. Uh. That statement alone makes me want to jump off a bridge. Why can't old shit just remain buried?
Last night I had another paranoid night terror. I even remember reaching up into the space above my bed, trying to grab the audio device I saw floating there. First of all, why the hell would anyone be listening to me sleep and b, wtf? a floating audio device? I even know my eyes were open because it felt like I was awake but trapped in a body over which I had no control. At some point I was able to shake it off….probably after staring at the ceiling for five minutes convincing myself none of it was real.
Very creepy.
But obviously things are going on in my subconscious (which I actually attribute to work stress, but may be related to Jean also??)
Do paranoid people know they're paranoid? If you are aware that you feel like someone is watching/listening but you're not totally sure if it's an actual reality, is it invalidated? That is, am I not technically paranoid because I am aware it's probably all in my mind?
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