The shit, the shame, the lies and the truth. Part 2

Crossing back over the event horizon.
It is 2:30pm and it feels like today has been going on forever. Of course I had my therapy this morning and I am going to attempt to write something about that experience here now- but it seems like it will be difficult. It is difficult to describe my morning or my day thus far because words like "hell" and "shit" and "horrific" have no matter- no weight where I am living today and with what I am knowing today.
I feel like I want to get out of my skin- get all freed up from my dirtyruinedself (that is the feeling of it anyway). I want to hide but there is no where to go.
I have been in therapy for more than four years... almost four and a half- and I am feeling now like all of that time has been a sort of preparation for days like today. For days that will be like today. I remember very early in my therapy when I began to talk about having different ways of thinking and the problem of "being confused" about time. What I mean by that is this: The trauma that I survived ended almost 14 years ago- but at the time- when it was actually happening I was dissociating away from the pain and the horror as a way to protect myself and my mind. And all of the horrible memories, thoughts, smells and sounds all got pushed into a kind of temporary black hole of sorts. Except what was once a seemingly blacker than black black hole has now turned into what feels like a purging monster of a volcano in my head; traumatic memories erupting. And it is a bad feeling. A very very very VERY bad feeling. This is certainly where words to describe will fail me- anyway- as the memories come back it feels like they are happening NOW. Because I was not really able to tolerate knowing anything about the trauma (of my very own father beating and raping me for all of my growing up years) when I start to think about it- when I start to know about it now- it seems like more than a memory. It FEELS as though it IS happening now. My mind is so divided- separated into so many ways of thinking to keep one way of thinking from knowing about something and when one part of my brain would become to "full" (full of knowing about how terrible the situation was that I was in) I was forced to just sort of dump that way of thinking, wash the black board of my brain and start a new way- and the process repeated over and over again. But all of those ways were not really 'dumped' they were put into the temporary black hole in my mind which is now serving forth a mountain of horrific memories. And I remember my doctor telling me a long time ago that people have to sometimes REMIND themselves that the trauma is over- that this is just a memory. It hurts like hell but the physical part is long since over. I remember thinking "What? Remind themselves what year it is? How could a memory be that strong that you need to clip the date out of the newspaper each day and post it in your house just to help you remember the year?".
And that basically brings me to this morning after I finished my therapy. After I called my great friend Eve (who, now that Stefano has his new job, has kindly 'taken over' the position of being the person that I can call if I walk out of therapy and feel like my head might fall off my shoulders or some other horrific thing such as that...) and WAILED then sobbed then managed to calm myself to just a heavy crying until I made it to weeping and then was too tired to cry anymore- I made a list of the one thing that not only puts me into the NOW but also makes me feel better, soothes me and always reminds me that the world is enormous and a billion billion times more than this pain that I am left with from what my very own father did to me and for so long. Here is the list: Brahms, Schubert, Beethoven, Prokofiev, Verdi, Rachmaninoff, Janacek, Bach, Puccini, Scarlatti, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Bartok, Mozart, Dvorak, Shostakovich, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Vivaldi. I took four of the names, wrote them on another little scrap of paper and wrote "2008" beneath it. I went into a tattoo place, put the little piece of paper on the counter and asked the guy at the counter if he could tattoo it onto my arm. I wondered as he tattooed me: Will it be enough? Will I look at the same hand that I have used to cut myself with razor blades and burn myself with cigarettes- will I allow myself, will I know, will I remember to go and listen to a piece of genius-beauty on a cd until the terrible FEELING passes? I hope so. After all... it is 2008.