hsphaven

I had to read over my last post to remember where I last finished. It has been the longest 14 days of my life and I feel I could write an entire book on these 14 days alone. The happiness that I reported in the last post was the headlamp of an oncoming train.

I had to leave the woman’s bushland property I was staying at. I thought that the country would be quieter, but I just found it to be even worse. On top of all the planes diving through the sky all day long, which I’ve since found out are military planes from a nearby military base doing training, there were shooters nearby. The gun shots were a nightmare for somebody with hyperacusis. They sounded like fireworks and I sometimes got the static feeling of being shot in the head myself. Even wearing my best earmuffs it was terrifying. I never knew when the shooting was going to start so could never prepare for it, leaving me on edge constantly and having to keep my earmuffs with me at all times. One night the shooting went on past midnight. I had to sleep in the property owner’s house, a woman who I wouldn’t really call a friend but more an acquaintance. My spiritual group had retreat on her property over ten years ago and that is how I met her. I’ve house sat a few times since. I felt like a stranger in her house and a stranger in every sense of the word. I even felt like a stranger to myself, a feeling that was haunting me more and more. I ended up having a fight with the lady, a compulsive talker who exhausts everyone. She started harassing my poor disability support workers too, asking them to do more and more things for her. I barely had it in me to do my own shopping as I was so sleep deprived. I was spending my support sessions doing things for her and having a shower in town because I didn’t want to go into her house and be cornered by her. I was happy to do these things for her as I felt she was doing me a huge favour letting me stay at her’s, and seemed to be struggling herself. I felt like a parasite there so was happy to give back somehow. She still made me feel like a total burden though. She then became fixated on the fridge down in my space, wanting me to get up each morning, despite being in a sleep crisis, to turn on the power and keep the fridge going. She wanted me to check the inverter every few hours. I came there needing space and didn’t want to have to report to somebody every few hours. Then she started talking about running a generator to keep the fridge going, even though that would disturb me. I didn’t really understand her fixation on the fridge. She already had a fridge up in her house. I was meanwhile homeless and dying of insomnia. The last straw with her was when she kept going through my bags and moving my belongings. She did it the minute I arrived while I fell into a heap in bed, making me feel uncomfortable.

“Please stop moving my stuff Wendy,” I texted her. “I’m sorry but it’s extremely upsetting, not respectful of my space and crazy making quite frankly. I’m running on empty, I come into the caravan to charge my headtorch. Now I can’t find the bag the charge you gave me was in. I haven’t been able to do the dishes because I don’t have the yellow tub, and have had to drink gross tea with milk skin because the tea strainer is missing.”

“Are you awake yet Zo?” she messaged me. “Please send me Peter’s phone number Zo. I’ve taken the phone charger because I struggled last night with no torch at all. Sorry I didn’t tell you. I was waiting for you to wake up to let you know everything. And to explain why I moved things. Sorry you’re upset and that I haven’t been able to do everything for you when you wanted in the way you wanted it. I know you have very high needs and limited capacity. I don’t think you realise just how much I have stretched myself to help you or what it has cost me and what it might cost me. Truly I have tried and tried and tried. I have put your needs ahead of my own since before you arrived.

Please send Peter’s number. It’s important.

In case it helps you: I know nothing about a tea strainer and if you had one I haven’t seen it so you might find it there. I was going to give you one, but I’ve had limited capacity to remember every little thing when even the crucial things (like keeping the fridge running) were not getting sorted.

I thought you were there when Graeme and I were talking about the sink? It’s okay for you to wash dishes in the sink in the new caravan and just let the water out once or twice every day or two.

The yellow rub is up here because I brought up the dishes with food in that you lef tin the fridge when you went away. Also, had I left it in the sun it would probably have cracked apart by now.

Zo, you were at liberty to collect it yourself any time.”

“I’m not really at liberty to just collect it,” I wrote back. “Honestly I don’t feel comfortable coming up to the house unless it’s absolutely necessary. It drains the life out of me being around people and when you see me you want to talk about more things and you keep piling more and more things on me when I can’t cope or take anything in.

I don’t have very high needs at all. I just have one need, for the world to fuck off and give me some peace and quiet. I don’t need therapy, I need people to stop being cunts.

Yes I know you are doing me a huge favour and I want to help you as well.

I will send you Peter’s number. Where is the post office? We may possibly be able to pick something up. I need to see the fire bunker though that is priority.”

I was so desperate for some quiet that I was considering sleeping in the woman’s stark concrete fire bunker.

When I dropped the woman’s shopping off that day, she hounded me about the texts I’d written, telling me not to blame on her, that she didn’t even know if I was coming back, that the fridge in my space was a shared fridge etc. etc.

I remember feeling so overwhelmed and attacked by absolutely everything there. One night, giant moths invaded the new caravan. They then swarmed on me because I was wearing a headtorch. I had to get rid of a white tail that was crawling towards my bed. I had the inverter beeping, which it did when the battery was about to die and the electricity was about to go. I meanwhile had a pot on the gas stove.

I left the new caravan I had rented at the woman’s place and sought refuge in a friend’s family beach house, which I got my new disability support worker to take me to as I didn’t have a car. It was also off grid and had no neighbours, yet I still couldn’t get away from noise. I heard the military planes there as well. The place was trouble right from the beginning. The lock wouldn’t open. We called the owner, who was no help. It was getting late and I had no where else to go.

“Well you can’t come back to my place, my wife wouldn’t be happy!” my disability support worker said.

“I’ll just get my Melbourne NDIS worker to pick me up,” I told him. I was over it.

“You can’t do that, it’s so late and will take her forever,” he said. He seemed keen for me to stay. He ended up calling a mate who lived nearby to come cut the thick chain and put on a new lock.

When I got inside, I heard loud animals either on or in the walls. I was terrified I had a rat problem again, though thankfully whatever they were they didn’t get inside.

The beach house was not much better amenity wise than my life in the bush. It ran on solar power and had enough energy to leave lights on over night. It had a kettle that ran on the gas stove. I actually had a toilet now. But there was no port to charge my laptop, which I use to cope. I still didn’t have a shower either. The hot water service was ridiculously complicated and even professionals couldn’t figure it out.

The beach house stunk of various odours. I stayed in a room under the house the first night thinking it would be quieter. I set my sleeping bags up on the bottom bunk. I hate bunk beds and got no sleep all night. The room was stale and dusty and made me sick. I then moved into one of the upstairs bedrooms. They stunk of perfume and needed airing. The beach house also had a foul smelling odour sometimes. It was cold and the flooring was hard. There were a set of white double doors upstairs which reminded me of hospital fire doors. I couldn’t get them open, leaving me with only one exit: the front door.

I was terrified all alone at the beach house, constantly worried somebody was going to break in, as they did a few years back. The owners put bars and shutters over the windows and barbed wire over the fences to stop people from climbing over, but I still worried they would get in. I would freeze at the slightest noise. One morning I heard something outside and thought somebody was cutting the lock open. I peaked out the window, then realised it was just a bird. I didn’t feel safe anywhere. As I told my physio, crime rates seemed to be going up everywhere. I met a girl on OkCupid who had almost as severe noise sensitivity as me. I wanted to meet her in person but then she went home to Singapore because she said she felt so unsafe here. My mum had to put a security door over her front door as one night a creepy woman knocked on the door pretending to be a neighbour. More and more break ins were being reported in the hills. I tried to tell myself that it could happen anywhere, and that it was just unlucky that the beach house got broken into a few years back. But I still kept the shutters closed when I went to bed. It cut me off from the outside world and I’d have no idea what time it was because no sunlight got in. I developed a fear of the dark and also felt yuck around artificial lighting.

My sleep was becoming more and more disturbing. I seemed to lose the ability to sleep at all, and when I did fall asleep I quickly woke up again extremely sick. I was nauseous, had this gassy feeling inside, and felt all these chemicals running rampant in my body. I believed I was being attacked by demons in my sleep, or that I had contracted a terrible illness from a mosquito there. I now had to deal with a mosquito infestation rather than a rat infestation. I couldn’t sit or lie down outside without being swarmed on by mosquitos and becoming their dinner. Everything felt so sinister. A few kilometres out into the ocean were these giant gas drilling sites. They looked like cities from the distance. Sometimes they would turn orange, like the gas plant on land which I watched at night outside the caravan I was staying in, the eerie orange glow looking like a bushfire. Apparently they burnt the gas to stop the plant from combusting. I didn’t know why the military had to train so much and started to wonder if we were going to have another war. All the while I started to lose that divide between the waking and sleep world. My whole life started to feel like a dream, or more like a nightmare. My head felt woozy and I felt like I was dying. I lay on the hard ground in front of the gas heater upstairs, trying to ground myself as I struggled to feel my body even. Other times I’d lose hours pacing around.

I turned to doctor google who diagnosed me with fatal insomnia. I joined a few support groups for fatal insomnia and it was disturbing what was on there. People were reporting seizures, freaking out that a loved one had the disease, going on about Satan and this disease being punishment for their sins, reporting the way loved ones with the disease looked eerily normal on the outside while this thing was silently killing them. I didn’t know if I wanted to read any more. I remember lying on the couch playing music and crying because I was convinced I was going to die. I oscillated between fearing death and wanting to kill myself by leaving the gas heater on. 

I became more and more scattered, losing my keys four times in one day. Later that day my disability worker arrived, beeping at the front gate. I couldn’t find them again. He ended up finding them in my jacket pocket inside a pad package.

“For Christ sake!” he said. “Thank god I’m a grandpa!”

“I feel like I’m going demented,” I told him in the car.

“You’re not demented, you’re just stressed,” he said.

My disability support worker took me to see a doctor in town. I couldn’t even sit in the waiting room which I found so overwhelming and had to go outside until the doctor was ready to see me. She came out of the building with my disability support worker, a kind look on her face. I summaried everything on paper as I was still mute and have been for half a year now. She found the stuff I wrote concerning. She asked where I lived.

“I live no where,” I told her.

I asked her for some referrals to some private hospitals back in Melbourne as I knew I’d have to go back there soon. She was a kind doctor, and asked if it was ok if she put her hand on me to comfort me when I started crying about the demonic attacks. She called my doctor back in Melbourne with me in room, telling her I had no MyHealth record and had basically walked in off the street.

“She is non-verbal right now,” the doctor told my Melbourne doctor. “It doesn’t sound like she even knows what she’s doing here. She has no MyHealth Record. Does she have a history of psychosis?”

My Melbourne doctor said that I had Borderline Personality Disorder.

“Oh, so she does have Borderline,” the doctor said.

The doctor believed I did need to be in hospital and asked if I would go.

“Thank you for your concern, but it’ll just make things worse,” I told her.

She asked who the man was that was with me. No body seemed to know what our relationship was. The man who came to get rid of the rats from the first caravan asked if he was my partner.

“He’s my disability support worker,” I told her.

I left with some more sleeping pills, enough to last me five more days. The doctor asked if I wanted an electronic script or paper script. I asked for both, as I lose everything. She sent the script to my phone. I tried to make the pills last, but the nights I didn’t take any were long and torturous. I developed a tremor from the trauma of it all.

Everything felt more and more sinister. One night I managed to sleep but just had a dream where somebody took me to someone’s house on a hill and I collapsed at the door. They were trying to figure out what was wrong with me, and then found out I had been poisoned.

I saw threat and meaning in everything. I walked down to the beach to clear my head. It was an angry beach too dangerous to swim in. I found items washed up on the shore which creeped me out even further. I found a stick with a sharp metal hook.

I thought about bringing it into the beach house and using it to kill someone if they broke in, but I didn’t want it anywhere near the house.

I found a rusty metal bottle of oil or something, unable to escape the filth of civilization even on this secluded beach. Nature had reclaimed it.

I found a plastic bottle with “bait buddy” and “black magic” written on it.

I took it as a sign that I was indeed cursed with black magic, as I had been feeling for a while now. I always told my disability support worker that I was cursed and he was really starting to believe me. He took me to the closest town to have a shower one day. They were the most expensive showers in the world: $4 for four minutes. My worker went into the only store in town to get some coins for me. “She’ll have the best shower in the world,” the lady said. I put the coins in, undressed, went to turn the shower on and then found the handles were broken. I managed to get water to come out but it was cold just like the shower in the beach house. I didn’t know what kind of sick joke the universe was playing at but it was driving me insane. My disability worker said he’d never met anyone with so much drama in their life.

“Welcome to my life,” I said.

He told me my memoir was not over yet and there was enough content to write another book. I said I wasn’t sure if I’d even remember this whole ordeal, but he assured me that he would.

We went to check out a nearby coastal town which I was thinking of moving to.

“Lets see what disaster awaits me next,” I texted my disability worker.

I knew some people who were moving here in a month and said I could rent their caravan. I took an immediate disliking to the area. People hung the Australian flag on their properties, which I found offensive as we were living on stolen land. The place didn’t have much space and was close to a busy road. I was very disappointed as this was my Plan A and I didn’t have a Plan B. I had to vacate the beach house whenever the owners wanted it. They texted me saying they wanted it soon. They asked where to obtain the key to the new padlock and where the old combination lock was.

“How long are you staying for?” I asked them.

“Can you please answer my questions first.” He texted back.

I found his tone very off. Everything about the beach house was off. My friend’s parents, the owners, hurt him growing up. He now goes missing every week it seems for days at a time. When he returns he has no idea where he’s been. He can’t speak, and he can’t even hear sometimes. I felt like a similar thing was happening to me. My memory was becoming shocking, and I was losing things constantly. I felt like I took off to all these strange places and lived all these different lives. My disability support worker started calling the house which sat on a hill surrounded by barbed wire fencing “the devil house”.

“I’ve never been more annoyed at a house before,” he said. He had bought something to try charge my laptop but it still wouldn’t work. He said he found it ridiculous that my dad was paying good money for me to stay there yet nothing worked.

“It’s still the better of the places I’ve stayed,” I told him.

One night I sat up all night researching the resource exploration in the area. According to a news article, Lakes Oil planned to build another onshore gas drilling site, exactly where I was and the very next day: June 1. I was horrified. It was almost like they saw me coming, a plot by dark forces to torment me. 

I went back to see the doctor in town again. I felt like she was the only one who really saw what was going on with me. We had some time beforehand and sat by the pier. My disability worker said his friend had a boat and we could ride it during one outing. I longed for the day I could do some fun things with my disability worker for once. He had also asked if I wanted to do some “girly” things like get my nails and hair done, though a part of me who I’m yet to really understand felt uncomfortable being acknowledged as a girl by him.

I arrived at the doctor’s clinic wearing no shoes. The doctor was still suggesting hospital. I lay on the bed and she felt my stomach, as I also told her about the stomach issues I’d been having for half a year now. I was incredibly squeamish about her touching that area. I then curled up on the bed with my eyes closed and struggled to get up. She went outside to talk with my disability support worker. I overheard him telling the doctor I was this “conservationist” and had been living off grid in terrible conditions. When she came back in and said it was time to finish I tried to get going but I couldn’t. I felt like I had all these different voices in my head that were fighting and paralysing me. I just sat on the bed rubbing my feet against the foot stool over and over.

“I’m getting your disability worker to try snap you out of this,” she said. He came in and I got more and more agitated. Finally I got up and I wandered out, leaving my phone and belongings behind. I wandered out of the clinic and onto the middle of the empty road. 

“She’s probably not going to want to see me again,” I overheard the doctor say to my disability worker.

My disability worker managed to get me back to the car. I couldn’t respond and was shaking. He called my disability worker in Melbourne and told her I was having an “episode” and he was concerned about me.

During my time away, which was starting to feel like a drug trip, I also started a messy relationship with the man who came to seal the caravan from rats. We kinda got chatting more and more. He said that I was “mature” for my age. I opened up to him and he saw a glimpse into my real personality when I said I “just want some fucking normality”. He said he liked my personality. He seemed really nice and intelligent, with knowledge about the cycle of trauma. He told me about his narcissistic ex. He said he used to work as a vulnerable person’s officer for council, that he could tell I was a vulnerable person, that he had never met a mute adult before and he found me fascinating. I expressed my fears around Lake Oil starting another gas drilling site exactly where I was.

“I used to work at a gas drilling site,” he told me. “The gas drilling is being moved offshore.” That didn’t exactly reassure me.

I sent him the pictures of the things washed up on the shore and he told me what they were.

“This is fun,” he said. “What more can you show?”

“I’m not sending nude pics,” I said.

He admitted that while he’s male and wouldn’t mind seeing these pictures, they were not needed.

He knew I was in a vulnerable, scared, “paranoid” state as he put it. He said he wanted to help me, though he was mindful of the circumstances through which we met (service provision). I invited him to the beach house to come visit me for social reasons. We were going to look at the aurora. But then as soon as I gave him the address, his sexual comments ramped up. He said something about his tits being cold and he hopes my tits aren’t cold. Way to fucking inflame the state I was in. Yeah, nice work mate. I was beside myself. I thought maybe he had actually been grooming me this whole time and was going to rape me. And because he was a handyman, I thought he might have a grinder to cut open the locks on my gate. I sent a whole lot of messages out to people like a therapist asking them to call the cops, and preferably FEMALE. I probably sounded completely nuts. Thank god they still called the cops and I was not dismissed as having a mental health episode.

“I can’t see you,” I texted the man. “I’m so sorry.”

Yet he still came, which just made me feel all the more raped.

“You need to go,” I then said quite clearly. He said sorry he didn’t understand what I meant before when I said “I can’t see you” and he apparently left. But I just couldn’t stay there anymore with him knowing that I was there. The cops arrived and took me into town to stay in a hotel. They told my therapist that the place was like a “compound” and they couldn’t believe a disability worker left me there. I felt safer in town with the cop station down the road. I actually had a shower and could charge my laptop too. I went to the online pain support group run by my physio. I kept turning my video on and off as I had become extremely camera shy. My physio asked what people did over winter.

“Run off grid where there’s no electricity or heating,” I joked.

But while I could be humourous and smile, I was still in a very dark headspace. I wrote things that usually I would keep to myself, sharing the way everything felt like a dream which I described as “fucking terrifying”. My physio answered the things I wrote in the chat and it felt like we were speaking on another level. There was a woman who had been taking benzos for a while.

“How do you keep getting benzos?” I asked her. “They’re so regulated.”

My physio said it was common in middle age women to deal with their menopause symptoms.

“Great, another thing I have to look forward to,” I thought. It really was feeling like God was a misogynist who hated women.

My physio also said that taking a person off benzos could be life threatening, so doctors had to keep prescribing them. I worried that I was headed down that path and about to develop a dependence on them.

Everything seemed to have another dimension. I was reading sinister things/messages into everything, and I thought I heard my physio say that he enjoyed hunting or something. And then I felt like it was the universe’s way of tormenting me, turning the people I thought I could trust evil. It was seriously messing with me. That night I heard a man coughing outside my hotel room.

“What has become of my life?” I thought.

I told my disability worker that I was in town. He couldn’t believe it, and wondered how on earth I got there. I don’t know exactly how long I was out of Melbourne for, but I think it was shorter than it felt, and during that time I stayed at three different places, all of which were a total disaster. He thought it couldn’t get worse than “Wendy the rascal”, as he called her. He said it was nice not having to see this woman anymore who could talk one’s head off even underwater. But then we had the “devil house”, and then the motel. After my first night in the hotel, we went back to clean up the “devil house”. My disability worker was exhausted, struggling up the stairs like me. He said he was so exhausted just from the few weeks he’d known me, and wondered how I lived my entire life like this. I don’t think I’d done the dishes once, and there was food stuck to the cutlery.  

“What’s the lesson in this,” my disability worker joked. “Listen to your mother and tidy up. They don’t always know how to say it but mothers are usually right.”

He continued to joke.

“Happy we’re cleaning you, devil house,” he said. “Are you happy now?”

We left with all my stuff in my disability support worker’s car.

“I feel like I’ve got your entire life in the back of my car,” he said.

About half an hour after leaving, we realised that we’d forgotten to turn the gas off. My disability worker offered to come back another day and do it.

“Devil house is not finished with you yet,” I joked.

My sleep continued to deteriorate. I twitched and it felt like a door had shut in my face as I started to drift off, waking me up again. It got to the point where I could even make out all these voices in my head. It sounded like they were whispering and laughing at me. I was extremely overwhelmed. I had to decide whether to pay another fortnight’s rent on the caravan I’d got. I had decided that I definitely couldn’t go back there but we were trying to decide whether to move it to a caravan park. It didn’t sound great and there were no caravan parks that took permanent residents anyway.

That last night and morning at the hotel were some of the most excruciating hours of my life. I was awake at 5am being tormented by all the traffic noise outside. So I put on the TV to drown it out, and I got the most CREEPY channels. Every single one of them. A creepy kids’ channel with Elmo, as if kids are even awake at 5am. “The number of the day is…. 3!” it said, the very number that was haunting me everywhere. I changed channels and got a news report where somebody’s surname was Cox. It felt like cocks were being shoved in my face everywhere. The surname of the people who owned the beach house was also Cox, and on the hot water service it referred to a piece of equipment as a “cock”. I felt tormented. I changed channels again and got one where people were bashing hand drums.

“Seriously?” I thought. “How dense can you get? Who the hell enjoys watching something like this? A total moron?”

“This world is bullshit,” I texted my disability support worker, no longer able to keep joking about my situation. “Whatever I do, wherever I go, its all a disaster, as you’ve seen. What doe sit even matter? The caravan can go back to Gaeme, I don’t care anymore. I’d “kill myself” but I don’t even believe that will bring me relief. I’m convinced that I’m actually already dead and this is hell.

I figure you’re up now. I’ve been awake all night, yet again. Have no idea how I passed the time.”

Just like my marijuana trip a few years ago, the time was going excruciatingly slow. It was utter torture.

My disability worker cleared the next day to see me. When he saw me, he said that he would be taking me back to Melbourne. He said I only really had two options right now: back to my dad’s, or to my local hospital. Both were awful. I felt like I was right back to where I started and was stuck in this eternal cycle of hell. While it was nice he cared, he didn’t realise how shit the mental health system was and how they always turfed me out. I knew my presentation was different this time, but I was still not confident that they would treat me any differently. They seemed pretty set in their diagnosis of me. My disability support worker said it would be best for me to go to my local hospital where they knew me.

“They don’t know me,” I told him.

“Of course they do,” he said.

“No they don’t,” I argued. I told him about the prejudice they had about me, and how in many ways you’re better off seeing someone completely new.

He was on the phone to my Melbourne NDIS organisation asking to speak with my support coordinator, Tan. It was really nice that people could see just how bad things were with me.

I came up with a third option and am now staying in somebody else’s caravan.. the family who are moving to the area I’ve just come back from. It’s only really a temporary solution. They said I can keep renting their caravan when they move but I don’t know if I want to go with them. I really don’t want anything more to do with that area. I’ve come back so shaken. I was a total mess when we arrived here. I sat on the ground outside in the rain crying uncontrollably, which is not like me at all. I was terrified this is the next chapter of my horror story. Even my disability worker was suspicious, wondering who this “Branny” character is on the way here and what I am in for next. 

“Calm down, you’re alright, you don’t want to make Branny worry,” my disability worker said. He tried to get me to laugh but I couldn’t anymore. The others had to carry my stuff in for me. They asked if there was anything they could do for me and whether I wanted company or to be left alone.

“I’m so sorry, I don’t mean to put this on you,” I said, once in the caravan.

They did their best to keep the place quiet as I couldn’t tolerate any noise. They made me dinner, which I appreciated as I hadn’t eaten anything for ages. They also offered to pick stuff up from me at the supermarket, which was helpful as I can’t be in public right now.

I was surprised to hear all these hoons and people during the evening I arrived. I was told there were “bogans” in the area. It is only 15 minutes from where I used to live but has a completely different vibe.

“My gosh, even this place has turned to the pits,” I thought. I wondered if I brought the noise with me. Unfortunately there’s no sound insulation in caravans, so I hear everything outside. Despite the women telling me this area is quite, it’s actually a very noisy area. It’s past midnight right now and I can hear construction noise outside. It’s not easy here in many ways. I have to use the bathroom in the house. I’m going to the toilet outside, like the good ol’ bush days, as I’m not able to use a toilet around other people.

I was terrified of falling asleep last night as sleep deprivation is a bit of a vicious spiral, making your sleep more and more disturbing. Interestingly, I got a tiny bit of sleep. Maybe it’s because I feel held by these people. And when you feel safe, I find noises don’t bother you quite as much.

It’s still hard to shake this feeling that there’s a conspiracy to keep me trapped and suffering. I went for a walk today to get away from the bloody lawn mower and machinery noise next door. I thought I’d go to the shops, but then realised I really wasn’t up to it at all. So I headed in the other direction. I found a bench and sat on it. Then somebody parked their car DIRECTLY opposite me. A man wearing a black hoodie got out. I got up and left immediately. It doesn’t feel like a particularly safe area as well. It feels like a low sociographic area, the houses small, close together and falling apart.

I’m not sure how it’s going to go here, but I have no where else to go. I’m basically homeless now. I’m scared to go back to my dad’s. I didn’t realise how triggered I felt there all the time. I felt like a prisoner in my room, and would only really come out at night once he’d gone to bed. Unfortunately I didn’t really have a single good parent growing up and don’t feel completely safe at either of their houses. It all feels like a past life and my family have no idea where I am now or what I’m going through. I will eventually have to go back to my dad’s to pick up my car. I need my car, especially to get away if this place becomes unbearable, which it already is becoming. It’s all incredibly disorienting and distressing. I still have this sense of unreality, like my life is a movie. I’ve been living in a total time warp and I’m surprised I even remember all this.