Reset

I was nineteen when I first really struck out on my own. Completely unprepared for living on my own, with fresh, deep wounds on top of old emotional scarring, the intervening years have not been pretty. I lost my first apartment about a year after I got it. It was the first of many. I was ashamed of my PTSD, neurological differences, and having been placed on SSI before I even had a chance to venture out on my own for the first time. I was "other", I was unable to "pass", to have a life that resembled the lives of those around me. Time and time again, I forced myself to remain in situations that just made everything worse. The years between then and now were filled with constant chaos, fear, danger, and self-destruction. I was shocked when I lived to see my thirtieth birthday.

Last year I made the decision to move back into the same apartment building I started out in. I've had to deal with a lot of flashbacks, which I expected. It's very difficult for me to live in an apartment setting but I'm coping with it better now than I ever have. For the first time since the first time I lived here, I have a place all to myself. I can share my space or have my solitude. No fear that I will be attacked in my sleep. No shame that my housekeeping is pretty much a perpetual work of progress (Okay..less shame. I'm working on it). No one repeatedly disrespecting my boundaries, triggering my PTSD, or disrupting my routine. I can actually go out and do things now, since I don't have to come home and be around people. A certain amount of solitude is vital to my well being. 

Between my ongoing struggle to cope with my emotional baggage and fibromyalgia, I'm often exhausted. I have a long, long way to go, and oftentimes I'm not at all certain that I'm going to make it. Sometimes I'm not even sure I want to make it--there's a certain comfort in maintaining old patterns, even if they're toxic as hell. Preferring the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty, as the saying goes. 

But I'm here: Still fighting, still surviving, and if you're reading this then you are, too. Hang in there!