It's Friday

 Just finished with session with Cyndi.  I'm surprised how much I like her.  Maybe, surprised isn't the word or the true feeling.  I am thankfully impressed that I have someone to talk to and those who are charged with helping me actually came through for me.  We're three sessions in and I look forward to speaking with her.  I feel heard and I can hear myself sharing what I feel, experienced throughout the week, and my accomplishments great or small.  I know the road ahead is long and full of twists and turns, forks, U-turns, and what's in between calm and chaos.  I've been the soundboard, the pearls of wisdom, the "straighten your crown", and sometimes the reasoning for others.  I share and have shared personal experiences to provide reference and a place of understanding but have not shared with many the effects of my experiences have had on me or allowed a window into the pain I feel because of these experiences.  I keep it as a matter-of-fact tone of conversation void of any lack of control.  The control is what distances me from the blackness, the anger, the mercilessness echos of what lives behind in my little boxes tucked away in the recesses of my mind.  Each experience made into little soldiers created for the sole purpose of holding the chaos, the trauma, the pain, the loneliness, the guilt and my shame.  Warriors whose sole purpose is to hold their ground and protect me from what they have each been tasked to carry so that I do not.  Cyndi says they are my coping skills, but to me it's just how I have always been from a small child.  I do not know of any other way to be.  I do not see them as coping as much as I do as my survival.  My survival has evolved over the years with what life has afforded me, but still keep to the tenets of what a little girl created so many years ago.  So called "skills" she should have never had to create in the first place, but so many children do.  Always one foot into "childhood" and one foot in things other than.  It's been four years since we lost Lillian.  It's been four years to find someone to talk to.  It's been four years of flailing and knowing that Lillian is beyond my reach of coping let alone surviving.  Her loss is the first time I knew that I was unsure of what to do and couldn't formulate a plan to come out the other side.  It's been four years of reliving the same day, four years of re-losing her every day when I wake up, and four years of saying goodbye to her until the next sunrise.  One big continuous loop.  The skills Cyndi is trained to teach me are "skills" I have always done.  My quest and question to her is a herculean, but can be broken down into simply "What do I do when it no longer works?"  

-M