Save Me

Today is my daughter's almost-birthday.
It would have been her birthday if I hadn't miscarried her a few months into the pregnancy, when my fourteen year old body, riddled with drugs my mother forced me to take every day, which I didn't need, could no longer keep both itself and a child alive.
I still love her.
She would have been eleven today.

It's been a long day, and the new therapist at treatment is most assuredly the devil incarnate.

Fortunately, I bring my journal to treatment with me- well, one of my journals- and I get more therapy from that than this woman most days.
Today, I cried- just like the last two days. The husband and I are still happy together, but the PTSD, in a combined effort with the military, is making our lives a living hell. Between flashbacks, ab responses, nightmares, blackouts, and field exercises, when we're together, we're mostly struggling just to avoid hurting one another.

I made a decision this afternoon that I'll have to make again in the morning. I'm going running tomorrow morning. I'm not going JOGGING in the morning, I'm going RUNNING. I'm going to run down the street, with my dog, around the corner, to the light and back, and if we have to stop, we will, but I'm going to try really hard to just let loose tomorrow morning. I don't want this primal side of me to be caged anymore. I can't open up at treatment most of the time, now because I don't trust the therapist, but also because of the guy who admitted to being a sexual predator and the guy who won't talk about anything but his penis and sex life. Maybe if I push myself to the brink, if I stop being scared of feeling fear or anger and just feel it anyway, and RUN like my life depended on it, maybe then the tears and sweat and pain and weakness will have a place to go. Maybe if I open the floodgate, I won't have to prod anything to come out.

I need this.

Tough

I had read The Hunger Games Trilogy shortly after the announcement was made that a movie was in the works. I had a friend who commented on one of my pictures that I "look like Katniss Everdeen". This, naturally, led to a Google search, and the trilogy came highly recommended. (Warning: Possible Spoilers Ahead!) It was almost impossible to keep myself from reading a book about a girl who's physical description does sound eerily like me. This was the picture that received that comment/compliment:

After I began to read the trilogy, I was hooked. Suzanne Collins is a truly gifted, incredible author. The way she describe's Katniss' thought process as she goes through trauma and recovers from it, as she describes her thought processes after having been through some heavy stuff as a child, the woman is nearly describing me, in so many more ways than just the physical. The symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder, distrusting people and having abandonment issues, but, ultimately, being more of a survivor than anything else... Describing the way she feels about people in her home district after going through the games, the clear signs of Post-Traumatic Stress this girl displays, that I relate to on the deepest level, to include her inherent mistrust of her own mother, despite and because of her own maternal instincts, this girl is ME.
It sure doesn't pain me that this book has the single best strong female lead character I have ever run across in my life. I could not be more impressed with the depth of the characters in the book, nor with the intricate, beautifully crafted story line. Miss Collins is brilliant.
After seeing the Hunger Games movie yesterday, I am more determined than ever to focus my attentions, where the media is concerned, on games, movies and television shows with strong female leads. Especially as I lose the Soldier part of my identity, especially as I grapple with my own demons in treatment, especially as I unearth events I had forgotten, I need the influence of strong females. I wish I had a mother to turn to in these situations, but, for all intensive purposes, I never had a mother. What I need to remember more than anything in the days, weeks and months that follow is that, above all, I am a survivor. I have survived my mother's abuse, her alcoholism, I recovered from my own voluntarily, I survived multiple sexual assaults and molestations. I survived a divorce, homelessness, and joined the army, only to be put down by them years later, and, ultimately, am going to survive losing what I'd intended to be a career in the military.
I think the media could use more female survivors in the spotlight. I know I could.