You'd think after 24 years I'd be used to the spins

Sometimes I feel like I'm on the verge of having a panic attack and it takes something very little to trigger that horrible feeling of your heart closing in on itself trying to protect itself from more hurt. Or it feels like my heart's cringing into itself like a child cringes away from something that the child knows will cause an inordinate amount of pain...

It takes just a split second of a memory that I thought I forgot about and my world just stops and I hear that rush of blood going into my heart as my heart struggles to maintain a normal rhythm. It's like my body knows that I can't handle the memory and it tries so hard to stay normal...

Sometimes the memory just absolutely crushes me; I want to curl into a ball and get as small as I can and just cry. Hold myself and wind my muscles as tightly as I can and cry hysterically or sob quietly and let the tears stain whatever I'm wearing.

I repress, and repress, and repress all the bad memories and I do it so well that I can almost forget that it happened. Maybe it really was a bad dream and I had imagined all that in my head. Instead, it takes something minor, like a whiff of someone's perfume or cologne, a similar face, smile, eyes, mouth...something so minor that the flood of hurt comes before I can pinpoint what that memory was. And then I know that no matter how much I repress something and convince myself that everything was just a bad dream, it will always and forever haunt me and cripple me into a semi-hysterical mess.

I do a pretty good job of holding it in until I'm home but once I'm home, I literally go comatose. The bad memory keeps replaying in my head and brings up more details that I thought I forgot about. I don't think there's anything I can do escape it and just hope that something can distract me long enough to make me stop thinking. This gets harder as I get older...sometimes I worry that all the memories will crush me and reduce me to someone that is utterly unfixable.

More than the memory itself is the emotion and pain from that...I relive it and it feels a thousand times worse than it did the first time. Just that pang of emotion hits me so hard I grunt out loud or have to catch my breath. It makes me feel like I'm traveling back in time when I was a little girl, a highschool student, or those awkward years of my life that truly made me feel useless.

I'm trying though, I'm really trying to move on from that. I keep telling myself, "No, it'll be ok, you'll be ok. Just breathe, you'll be fine and this will pass soon enough." I have to convince myself that everything will be ok; everything will be ok.