Total eclipse
I don't know what is happening to me. The world around me collapsed. I have lost it. This will never be over. It will always stay like this. I will never be able to dance again. I will never be happy again. I will never love again. I will never laugh again. My world is pain and tears. My world is loneliness. My world is a black tower in a dark sea. My life is gone. Is this life still worth living? Loneliness. Pain, deeper than ever before. Why don't I just go? Why don't I just stop moving in the middle of the street. Looking down the bridges. I could make it stop. Make this nightmare be over. So lonely, so lonely. I am alone. Alone in this sea of pain, alone with my screams. It nearly tears me apart. Nobody cares. I am scared of people. Can't face seeing anybody. Hiding away. What if they ask how I am doing and I don't know what to say. There are no words, only tears and screams. I can't scream my pain in your face. So I hide. My house is not my house anymore. How did my friends turn into people I am scared off? I don't dare to leave my room. The risk to meet somebody on the corridor is too high. I am alone and I will never be happy again. Something else has taken control over me. A black ghost follows my steps and whenever he feels like, he throws me on the floor. It can happen any moment. I don't dare to go out anymore. I can lose it any moment and end up crying and winding in cramps on the floor. What if that happens on the street? I rather stay in my bed. What is there to do for me anyway? Nothing makes sense anymore. I cry. Cry like I have never cried before. Something is tearing my stomach out of my body. I nearly puke. I am not myself anymore. I am everybody. Every prisoner. Every body beaten up by the police. Every body who gets tortured. This feeling does not stop. Weeks, and weeks. I feel ashamed. I don't want to appear weak. I don't want to admit what they did to us had such an impact on me. I was this strong woman. Now I am nothing. Nobody shall see me like this.
Now it is over. It is a few years ago but writing this I still nearly puke. It was the worst time of my life. When I read it, it sounds crazy. But it was so real. I felt like in a film. I know now that I was not alone. My partner was next to me at all times. I was the loneliest person on the planet. Sounds absurd - how can you not see somebody who is next to you. The word 'friend' made me cry, I did not have any. People cared and worried about me. But I did not see them.
Everything that makes life worthwhile was taken out and pain injected in that dark hole. Loneliness was the worst feeling and the loss of joy.
It took months to pass. I went to see a therapist, she thought that I was doing political actions because I was suicidal. In the state I was in, I believed her everything and paid her 50 euros an hour (adding up to 400 euros) rather than telling her to fuck off. Finally I met a social worker “from us”, X. He told me to cry every day for 10 minutes at a certain time that I should decide upon in the morning. And when the alarm goes after ten minutes - get up and get on with life. Sounds crazy but helped. This is how I gained control over my life and my tears again. The feeling that the black ghost could attack me from behind at any given moment diminished.
I needed to control everything. Prepared myself for 2 hours before leaving the house. Making sure nothing could go wrong. I could not do anything. Not work, not cook, not clean and I felt guilty for not contributing. How crazy, I think now. I had serious PTSD and was feeling guilty for not washing up. This is the problem with wounds you can't see. If I had had a broken leg I would not have felt guilty or ashamed.
I could not ask for help. I could not tell anybody what was going on for me, apart from my partner. Scared of asking too much, scared of feeling being let down by people or disappointed. Rather stay alone.
I was scared of cops, not directly, but they provoked flashbacks and I would see everything happening again. X told me to ask every week three of them for directions. The first time it took me an hour to approach the cop. He did not try to kill me. Slowly I reprogrammed my brain.
I took bach flowers (natural remedies) that were mixed especially for me every two weeks. I think they helped.
I studied, made me feel that I did something useful with my shit time, gave me some sense and was something that could not go wrong. A book will not attack you or let you down.
Before the trial a year after it happened I had some therapy sessions because I was scared that I would freak out in court when I saw the fuckers who nearly killed us. I had EMDR sessions (a special form of trauma therapy). This stuff was great for me. Fast, direct, just me with my experiences without being distracted too much by the therapist. I was calm in court.
What would I have needed? A big social centre to come back to with a huge group of people coming and going was not the best place to come back to. I would have needed a safe space with a small intimate group of people I could relate to and trust and who cared about me. And I would have needed professional help straight away, from somebody who respected my background and who had experience in trauma therapy. And I would have needed more information. Only after weeks of despair I searched on the internet about information on trauma and found a checklist with symptoms where I could tick nearly all. Why had nobody thought of it and got more info? There was a name for what I had. I was not going crazy. I was relieved. I did not need to feel ashamed, it was normal. Knowing did not make it go away, but it made it bearable. What I had was something real, it was something like an illness and there were ways out of this hell.
I am back to life now. Can go to demos again. Took a while, but I am back. Not quite doing actions again. Still steps to go… I learnt lots. About myself. About people. About our struggle. What I lived made me stronger. I know who I am and what I believe in. I know what I am fighting for. I know I am strong and I know it is also okay for me to feel weak at times. I know we are right and we are not alone.
Let's never give up.
