I’m still here

You may have noticed that I haven’t been writing on the blog lately. I have felt unable to articulate with words how I’ve been feeling but I am going to try. I need to find my voice again. So here is my attempt.

So much has been going on in our community and in our country lately. About a month ago a mass shooter went to a private Christian school here in Nashville and shot six people, three of them only 9 years old. We are still grieving this terrible loss. It felt like a crushing blow to our sense of safety. It hit us really hard. People mobilized and marched and filled the capitol with their pleas for gun reform legislation. Young people organized, staged walk-outs and chanted for hours. It seems mostly to have fallen on deaf ears.

Then, last week, a young boy was shot in Kansas City because he knocked on the door of the wrong house. An older White male shot him in the head and then again while he was on the ground. The boy was Black. Thankfully, he lived and is recovering. And the next week, a woman drove up the driveway to a house while lost and the homeowner shot her as she drove away. She was killed for making a simple mistake. And the same week we heard about the young woman who went up to the wrong car in a parking lot and was shot as she tried to drive away. She lived.

What is happening in this country? We are so trigger-happy and we have so many guns. It seems no place is safe for anyone anymore. How do we go about business as usual? How do we make the violence stop? How can we let our kids out of our sight? I don’t have any easy answers but my heart breaks for all of the people and families who have been touched by senseless gun violence and will never be the same. We don’t have to live this way. But until something changes we do. So we continue to live in fear, hoping that our families and our loved ones won’t be the next victims.

In the midst of all this, I am just trying to keep my head above water. The last couple of months have been really hard. I’ve felt insecure, vulnerable and worried much of the time. I started a new medication and I am hoping it will help with the feelings of detachment and lack of motivation that have plagued me lately.

In therapy I am trying something new. It’s called Cognitive Processing Therapy and it is used as a tool in recovery for PTSD. The goal is to identify how traumatic experiences change how we think about things and reduce the distress about the memories of the trauma. It involves practice worksheets where I write down events that have happened to me and how I think about them and notice the emotions that come up for me. Then we ask whether the thoughts are realistic or helpful and if not, challenge them and reframe them so they no longer cause distress.

For example, when I think about one of the most traumatic things that happened to me–getting a blood clot and nearly dying in Croatia almost six years ago–I feel stressed and worried, scared and vulnerable. I worry about it happening again. The thoughts I tell myself are that I am unhealthy and that I can’t trust my body. But when I ask myself what evidence exists for those statements to be true, I have a hard time coming up with anything. I am healthy now and I have been able to trust my body in the years since this happened. I take care of myself and know the risks now in order to avoid a similar scenario. In this way, I am learning how to reframe the negative thoughts and allow myself to think differently and reduce my distress about the traumatic event.

Even though I am getting better, I still feel fearful and anxious. I have a hard time letting Daniel leave for work every morning. This is not who I am. I used to be an independent, extremely capable woman. And now I can’t ever be left alone. But I know this is temporary and I won’t always feel this way. For now, I need extra support.

In closing, here are a few things I’ve been enjoying lately: the third season of Ted Lasso; Barbara Kingsolver’s book Demon Copperhead; the flowers all over my neighborhood like tulips, peonies and wild irises; the warm spring weather; my yoga classes. Here’s to a beautiful spring and continued progress in recovery.