Somewhere inside...

No one is going to save me from this hell
Inside the walls I built for myself
My inability to love anyone else
Creates the loneliness I try to dispell
With no family and few friends
I wonder how to get through to the end
Of this life I cant seem to mend
Because I refuse to play pretend
Yet the passionate flame is strong
Hot enough to burn us all on
How can it feel so right and then go so wrong
Have we been fooling ourselves all along?

The journey is a spiral, we revisit mistakes until we learn the lesson.

I've been caught up in cycles of thought, struggling to accept the way things have come to be in spite of a great deal of effort to remain unattached to the outcome of anything. I'm feeling unsure of how to get through this. Except to let the pain burn through me, like a forest fire. Sear away every bit of the emotion that I had let back in.  What was I thinking?  Was I thinking? Like a little too much whisky leading me to fumble and fall, forgetting all the strength I'd been gaining.  Time to put down the 'bottle', back to working on myself.  The mistake was not continuing to focus on myself, slipping back into the old habit of living for someone else.  There is nothing wrong with caring so much, but neglecting myself only leads to an imbalance and moved me far away from my peace, my center, my aware, reflecting and accepting inner light that contrasts the darkness of my suffering and together they make the beautiful contrast of life.  There is no good or bad, no up and down, just foreground and background. I'd like to maintain a lively functioning foreground, the moment of now.  Let all the rest fade into the background.

Hyperfocus and Trauma

The recovery from trauma involves a lot of learning to catch yourself when your body goes tense or your heart rate goes up or breathe gets shallow.  Sometimes I may have déjà vécu or go into a non responsive state.  Any or all of these flare up and I find myself saying strange things, hyper-focusing on a thought that came through during the moment of flight or fight response, grasping on to a comfort zone of people or places.  The search to know my triggers and work through them has created a habit of oversharing with people who don't need to know what I am going through internally.  Yet being able to share those struggles would be beneficial.  I've shared some of my journey on this blog mixed in with my slow and unsteady art practice.  While one goal of my recovery process is to return to my pre-trauma work ethic in creating art.  Another is being able to socialize without getting caught in a cycle of anxiety.  Living in the comfort zone for me is a fairly lonely life.  While I enjoy my time of reflection and self improvement, it needs balance.  My habit of hyper-focusing on a concern or a mistake, it can exacerbate the stress and I devolve into behavior that is entirely in contradiction to my self identification and personal philosophies.  The embarrassment from such behavior leads me to struggle to return to socialization in the same circles, very few people are capable of understanding we all fuck up sometimes, most people find that support in family, family is always there.
Hyper-focus can be beneficial to a fulfilling life when directed in the right places. If I'm hyper-focused on a book, an art piece, researching a curiosity, resolving a situation, or completing a task for work, than the results are a sense of accomplishment.  My current task to find the best way to redirect my hyper-focus to the right places.  I'm currently redirecting my focus from a failure to keep myself together when engrossed in a concern that was eating up all my mental capacity for days, desperately needing an answer.  I fell into a poor state of mind and didn't handle it well.  The search for possible resolutions, for experiences that might help me get out of the comfort zone has brought me to some very triggering situations, but it has also brought me some grand experience that I can be proud of.  I like to think those achievements have more weight than the anxiety I experienced during them or the way I may have alienated myself among new people I was getting to know. At times I've wondered if I self sabotage out of fear of getting too close to new people, out of distrust that festers up from my memories of how horrible people can be. If so it's unconscious and it'd be great to catch myself ahead of time and breathe my way back into a calm non reactive state.  I've read that some people who tend to hyper-focus have friends, relatives, significant others who help them direct it.  My relatives are distant, my trauma has prevented me from getting close enough for significant others, and my friends while amazing for being there for me, don't quite get all this self improvement stuff. Luckily I re-directed myself today from feeling like I alienated myself again opening up about my recent concerns, to finding a possible solution.  Private therapy has only acted as a sounding board much like my journal, and seeking group activities always has a barrier at getting a new acquaintance to invite me out with the group.  So I'm going to find a PTSD support group, somewhere that sharing my shame is welcome, and understood.  Then, or perhaps instead take a class or join a creative art group or active hiking group where I can be social and not have to think or share my internal struggle, rather focus on the activity and learn to enjoy socializing again.