Tom's Journal...

5/18/99

What is clear to me now, my new "obsidian knife" showed me, is that I have been running to find safety for many years, and always, due to improper "programming," have been left with pathways toward danger, and pain...

I have been faced with a past filled with abuse both sexually, and physical, from men, one of whom is now dead... To escape those painful experiences I looked toward woman-kind, and there, because of bad-lessons-taught, I once again failed to find a place I could live safely...

My last job was at a company my chief abuser once worked. Initially I was happy-the pay was excellent, the job challenging, and then one day I bumped into one of his friends, and my world started crumbling, I had anxiety attacks, and those lead to my diagnosis with Attention Deficit Disorder... The meds helped... But the meds did not address what later turned out to be a real issue...

Then my Mother died and that allowed me to venture places in my mind I would have never considered going while she was alive. Those places were cold and foreboding indeed.

But love seems eternal, and I befriended a woman who lived in a place I once considered running away TO.

Seattle, Washington-I spent two years aboard the USS Seattle, and I grew aboard her, crossed the equator aboard her, visited the pyramids while crew... but had never seemed to make it west of the Mississippi River...

But things started crashing once I chose to make the move-already severely depressed by Mothers death, actually incapable of thinking normally, with what we now realize to be PTSD episodes [among other things] casting a gloom and fog over my thinking.

The move crystalized years of abuse and dead ends, terror and despair. I found a psycologist and weekly we worked at my hard head, trying to dig our way back through a life I have been told, was near unsurviable...

But I worked at my lathe as I could, like a mantra, it helped my spirit at times. And we dug, and we dug, uncovering more and more "Rusty Pipes leading to hell-on-earth..." and emotions long held at bay surfaced slowly, little by little, some times we went weeks without any progress at all, but I refused to quit.

Of course eventually my need to escape what I percieved was a dangerous situation, lead me to Harborview Hospital, and some world class surgeons, and... brain damage.

But I survived!

I lost some of my past, but some, deeply hidden rememberences, came to the surface. My ability to stuff horrors of the past, was gone and as I progressed in recovery, so too did rememberences of a past I hoped had died. By then I lived in my RV, a small world unto my own, where I would re-live, face yet again, the evil persons in my past.

I have recieved an apology from one, assume that goes for the other of that pair. Another is dead, but the other? He was the most dangerous... I suspect he is still indulging in his old behaviors and for now there is nothing that I can manage to do about it, but face the parts of that life in PTSD episodes and try to learn how to live.

There's another page of this entry if you've a mind to read further...