hsphaven

After a bit of a rough start, I am finally getting the respite that I need. I am staying in a motel set in a quaint garden. People often have weddings here. I have been the only one staying here the past few days which has been lovely. Below is a view from my window. Small birds with long, thin beaks often stop by and suck nectar from the flowers on the bush.

No body wakes me during the morning. I wake up to the soft lul of the forest birds. It usually takes me weeks to adjust to a new place, but I am already sleeping better. I still get tremors in bed, though, and traumatic dreams about home and loss of home. I seem to still be deeply hurt by the loss of the beach house which was my refuge. As I wrote in previous posts, the beach house belonged to my friend. She rarely used it, though, and let me live there, telling me it was mine as well. I hid there alone for five weeks when my doctor deemed me “manic” and “psychotic” and put a compulsory hospital order on me a few years ago. I truly believe I had angels watching over me during this time and I managed to get better without any medical intervention. I went back to the beach house again, but there was a lot of building noise from a neighbour, so my second stay wasn’t as healing as my first. I was hoping the building noise had stopped and I could stay there again, but then got the crushing news that my friend’s 18-year-old daughter Charlet (who was part of my badminton club) and Charlet’s boyfriend are now living there permanently.

I felt like my friend, who is old enough to be my mum, sort of “adopted” me into her family, like she adopted Charlet, sharing with me her family assets like the beach house. She is an incredibly loving soul and finds joy in helping others because she too has been vulnerable, having suffered mental illness such as bipolar, and Dissociative Identity. I found a sense of home, safety, belonging, and attachment in the beach house. It was quite run down when I first found it and my dad helped to do it up, fixing the taps and pipes, mowing the lawns and putting two white posts on either side of the driveway to mark the edge so the car didn’t roll into the ditch. My dream last night was strange and horrible. In the dream, my family and my friend’s family lived together at their house in suburbia. I kept forgetting to pay the rent and then something big happened in my friend’s life which I didn’t know about because I was too bogged down by my mental health. She got really angry at me (not like her at all) and evicted me. Then Charlet, who had dyed her hair from blonde to black with red streaks, said ta ta as she and her boyfriend were going back to what was now their beach house. I was so distressed I ran out and lay on a road. My mum came after me. I then ran to a nearby station and wanted to jump off the bridge in front of an oncoming train. My mum lay on top of me on the bridge, pinning me down. During another part of the dream, I knocked on the beach house door and Charlet answered. Then I was at the beach having a telehealth appointment with an old psychiatrist of mine. I was telling him all about the loss of the beach house. In real life, I am no longer able to see this psychiatrist. I actually really liked this psychiatrist. My subconscious mind seems to have strung together all these losses in my life and it was an extremely painful and distressing dream.

Being Lemurian, my soul longs to be by the sea. But I still love it where I’m staying right now in the forest. I’m realising the place I live really impacts on my mental health. The past few days I have felt happier and more stable than I have felt in a very long time. It’s tragic that I only get to feel this way when I’m on holiday. I should be able to feel this way every day. I should be able to sleep when I need to without being woken by the fucking neighbour. I should be able to get food from the kitchen without worrying about running into another human being and having to engage with them or listen to their problems. Sometimes, at home, I stay in my bedroom all day without eating just because I don’t have the spoons to deal with another person. I only come out at night once my dad’s gone to bed. I think about how I can make my bedroom self-contained so I never have to leave it. I have a house but I don’t have a home, and maybe that is partly why I don’t put any effort into cleaning up and making it a nice space. When the paramedics arrived the other night I met them outside the house as I was too embarrassed about them seeing the way I live. There was no space inside, anyway.

I love my dad, but it’s becoming hard to ignore my inner crazy cat lady. I think I am somebody who just needs to live alone (probably with a whole bunch of plants as opposed to cats, though!) as far away from people as I can get. People have hurt me so much that I can never completely relax around another person. I don’t feel a label such as autism fully explains why I need so much space. I don’t believe I was born this way, but it is something that developed in me. I feel the best insight comes from the book “Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship” by Dr. Laurence Heller. Sections of this book can be found on Google Books. Heller talks about five “survival styles”. The “Connection Survival Style” (which psychotherapists also call the “schizoid character structure”) develops from the earliest trauma. Personal space is particularly important for us as we have little to no energetic boundaries. Heller writes about the “spiritualising” subtype in page 39:

“These individuals are often extremely sensitive in both positive and negative ways. Having never embodied, they have access to energetic levels of information to which less traumatised people are not as sensitive; they can be quite psychic and energetically attuned to people, animals, and the environment and can feel confluent and invaded by other people’s emotions. They are also unable to filter environmental stimuli- they are sensitive to light, sound, pollution, electromagnetic waves, touch, etc.; therefore they often struggle with environmental sensitivities.”

Unfortunately the peace and quiet here is about to end. I have to change rooms tonight as someone has booked my room tomorrow. There will be a wedding on tomorrow night and also Sunday night. I feel like I live in a completely different world to most people. I am 31 and have never had a romantic partner. I don’t know if I will ever get married and I will probably never have kids. These are things I would kind of like, but I am stuck in survival mode, dissociated and unable to really relax around people let alone feel something more.