Haven’t said much in a while. Not for lack of trying. My family and I have moved to a much quieter place, and it’s beautiful and fantastic here. There has been much to do with the moments I’ve had. The undesirable intrusions of progress are more infrequent here. The people around don’t have clocks rammed up their asses sideways and it makes for a calmer existence without the rush and push of urban existence. 

However, my crazies moved with us. I’m still struggling with focus and, of late, mood. I startle myself even here since I’ve stayed so jumpy. I can’t stop working in my head and dreams, yet I also still miss it like only a crazy person would. It feels stolen and unjust. The cognitive connections remain, like the proverbial bike skills. I still fight against seeing failure in the mirror. I’m still struggling and at times incapable of coping with both my own and everyone else’s feelings (they call it empathy but it actually just feels insane and impossible, like synesthesia). Isolation remains attractive and numbness appealing. I have been pondering dissociation quite a lot recently, and trying to grasp the role it played and still has. Would I even know if it was still happening? I referred to the initial panic attack and subsequent dissociation as “breaking”. Really I was long broken already and that was just the fracturing of the last defences. 

I’ve realized that despite it all I don’t want to change anything back anymore. I might miss work but my time and place in that space is long gone.  Neither thing nor person was waiting for me to come back. I think that was my biggest denial of all, playing dress-up in old uniforms, meeting with an OT and pretending I still belonged there, pretending there was still a place for me, pretending that cleaning and stocking shit in a paramedic uniform had meaning and kept me a paramedic. 

Thing is, philosophically speaking, I never was a paramedic, it was something I did. That’s why none of that going back stuff worked out. It wasn’t meant to be as intrinsic as I made it. In a world of being identified as what you do, this rabbit hole doesn’t let you fall nicely, nor do its consequences guide you back safely. 

Those are the markers of identification. Like it or not. The things you do and like are you. So when you can’t do what you do anymore and you’re exhausted and feel unrewarded to the point of indifference from decades of unsolicited opinion regarding what you like, what are you? What does that make you? What’s left is what you still can do. Is this who you are now? When you leave the sane you either justify or wither, you never just get to be anymore. 

Depression and hopelessness don’t create or communicate. They tremble my fingers over the keyboard in hesitance of finishing and sharing this for fear of the criticism and judgement that may come. If you end up reading this it means I prevailed over myself in a good way. 

Until next time just stay afloat.