My journey through pain - 6. Chapter 6 - Why mornings hurt so bad

Why mornings hurt so bad

Being such a fan of literature as I am, I have often come across descriptions of how characters feel after a very traumatic event. I have also tried to put myself in the shoes of someone who has gone through something horrible, to connect with that frame of mind if I ever needed to, for a story I was writing. I was kind of familiar with the way the mind handles trauma - or thought I was. Now that I’m going through something for real, though, I realize there is a world of difference between imagining something and living it.

For me, this traumatic event was the night of my breakup. I won’t go into details, but suffice it to say that in that night I went through extremes of emotion that reverberate through my psyche even weeks afterwards. Right then, though, as things were happening, I kept my wits about me and thought very dispassionately of the things that had to be done. Number one, ensure my safety and my little dog’s safety. Number two, find a safe place to be, somewhere I could not be found so the violence couldn’t continue. Number three, restructure my life. Those first weeks I kept asking myself when the other shoe was going to drop, because I found a safe place right away, went right back to work and essentially just hit the ground running and kept on living despite the major, catastrophic change that had happened. It got so that I began to wonder whether there was something wrong with me because I was not grieving for everything which I had lost so suddenly as intensely as I would have expected to grieve. I was very focused on the next steps, on tying loose ends, and moving forward. I thought I was doing okay.

Turns out, not really. On one hand, it was undoubtedly good that I did not fall to pieces right after that horrible night, shutting myself out from the world and neglecting my health and my job. I have always been a guy who plans and is prepared, and some of that helped me even when my relationship changed in a way I never expected. But the problem with all of that was that I now realize I was in denial. I don’t know if I’m going through the stages of grief, or what, but now that some time has passed, the other shoe has dropped indeed. In its wake, sometimes all I can do is tremble. The panic, the anxiety that I have spoken of which cripples me sometimes – these were the first indicators. At the beginning I didn’t even cry. Now rarely a day goes by without me bawling my eyes out, but although it felt like I was choking at the beginning, choking in my own misery and helplessness, now when I cry it feels like a relief. At least a little. Each day has become a test of my will, and sometimes I just can’t get by on my own. For the first time ever, I rely so much on the help of others. I even rely on, and look forward to, the messages you guys so kindly leave at the bottom of each of these journal entries of mine. I have gotten much closer to my family and to the couple friends I still have left after more than a decade and a half of living for just one person who turned out to be not who I thought he was. It is thanks to all the help I am receiving that I can make it through the days sometimes. Especially the mornings.

I think I am beginning to accept what happened, and this is what is triggering such awful feelings in the morning. I am beginning to have nightmares about that night, but also, and these are the worst dreams by far, are the ones where I dream everything is still like it was a year ago, or 10 years ago. No matter how badly things ended, I was happy with this man for a long time. I pushed those good memories away, but now it seems they want to come crowding back into my mind, and it is simply awful how it feels to dream of what was, only to wake up to what is. It’s a horrible shock. One second, my life is like I was used to, even if it’s only a dream. The next, I wake up sweating in the darkness, or worse, open my eyes to the light of the morning and realize with a sudden crash that I have to face an entire day of the new reality. I have to face a full day of me as I am now, of all the loss that yawns before me like a chasm of seething dark - and I am not ready. There is such a horrible dissonance between life as I remember it before the change and life as it is now. When those thoughts come to me in the middle of the day or in the afternoon, at least I am conscious and prepared for them. I can redirect them, transform them, analyze them. But when I have just woken up, I have no mental barriers in place yet. I have this incredibly peaceful moment when I am just waking up and then get punched in the gut by full awareness and the memory of everything I have gone through and everything I still have to go through. It feels overwhelming. The cold of December does not help either – but I have to take my dog out for a walk, I have to go to work, go to the gym, and somehow I make it through until the afternoon, when I usually feel a little bit better though not always.

I think this might be the next step in me internalizing the fact that my life is now different forever. I had planned out my entire future one way, and now it has changed. I want to think that these horrible reality checks I am getting when I wake up are a sign that deep down, my mind is processing everything that has happened and integrating it into my identity. Because each day it happens, it is a tiny bit less shocking. It hurts a tiny bit less. And I am not idle during the day – I am doing everything I can to overcome this snowball of things that have gotten all tangled up in my mind and which trigger my anxiety attacks that sometimes end in full-blown panic attacks. Sometimes it feels like I am just shouting in the dark, like everything I am doing to give my life a semblance of structure is futile in some form - but then the feeling passes, and I remember, however vaguely, what hope feels like. What happiness feels like.

So now I know how it feels to wake up and realize you have lost something forever, something you cannot get back. In my case it was the idea of a future together with someone else, and literally losing my home, and it is substituted by the reality of me having to go it alone, at least for the time being (though not truly alone. I am very thankful for everyone around me, more thankful than I have ever been). I think this mismatch between the dreams I sometimes get, and reality as it is now, will decrease over time until my dreams match my reality. I am also conscious of the fact that I may be blowing all of this out of proportion – after all, though it was traumatic for me, there are far worse things that happen and I am thankful that I got out when I did, that I decided to act instead of simply denying everything and making it all much worse down the line. I realize that I am not just dealing with the breakup, but with a forceful trigger of my anxiety circuitry that sometimes gets stuck in making me feel as though some horrible impending doom which I can’t stop is about to come upon me. My mental health issues are making this tough, but I have taken the first steps, paramount among them reaching out for help anyway I can. I want to keep going. I want to keep working hard to process everything, so that one day I open my eyes to morning light and birdsong and, instead of this horrible shock of fear and loss, I simply feel gratitude for another day.