2:41pm May 17, 2012

➸ The moon forest: reblog if you have survived something, anything

youneedacat:

secretsofthedisabled:

tw: fight, nastiness, suicide

gimpunk:

secretsofthedisabled:

fromonesurvivortoanother:

missingkeys:

fromonesurvivortoanother:

you don’t have to be specific. let’s just let each other know that we are still here, alive and kicking

…

This is going to be in the directly or indirectly avoiding death category because I’ve already written it too long as it is.

….

I survived being hit by a car (a van, actually) as a pedestrian when I was 16. I was walking home from the public library in my hometown, as it was summer and I liked to go there and read where it was air-conditioned. There was a big, busy 4-lane road along the way, and usually I didn’t cross it, but on that day I got distracted when this random kid across the street started waving at me (I didn’t know whether I knew him or not) so I just sort of…darted into the road without thinking.

Luckily 3 of the 4 lanes were clear…but there was a van in the 4th one that seemed to come out of nowhere. It hit me when I was almost all the way across, on the side of my hip. I fell for a split second but got up REAL fast and finished crossing, all the while half-wondering if I was actually dead and just didn’t know it yet. I ended up with the most enormous nasty bruise imaginable but beyond that, no injuries.

The weird thing was I didn’t actually freak out until hours later. Right after it happened I had this huge adrenaline rush and felt GREAT, but then partway through the evening I just started shivering uncontrollably and crying. I still look back on that event as being a very significant “fork” in the timeline of my life, and it is really creepy in a way because of how easily I can imagine some slightly-parallel world where that was just IT, and I only lived to be 16.

I think the not freaking out until it’s over thing is pretty common. It makes sense that we’d be built like that, too. We’d survive a lot less if we stopped to freak out during the crisis. I’ve definitely been in situations, countless times, where I stayed really okay and strong and sometimes even happy throughout a crisis and then fell apart later randomly without knowing WTF was going on. Then people had to remind me I’d just been through something awful. Because I forget that fast and then go “Why am I terrified/shaking/crying ‘for no reason’?”

When a boy at a residential facility I was in died, everyone tried to keep it secret from me because I was considered the “lowest functioning” person there at the time. But I heard the screaming and went out there and basically… I was the only person not completely wigged out about it. Including staff. I went to bed okay that night, had a dream about him where he told me to tell everyone he was okay even though he was dead (we didn’t know he was dead until later, because the ambulance people tried to revive him). And so I did. And then the day after that I completely lost it, when everyone else was starting to recover. And it’s usually like that for me, in any sort of crisis, whether it involves me or someone else.

Oh and you know what they told me when I freaked out about his death, and about whether it would happen to me too? (He committed suicide.) They said “Don’t be bothered that he’s dead, he was never happy in life so it’s okay that he’s dead now.” Basically. Almost in those words. Yeah, that’s another place I survived. (Didn’t kill myself, survived all sorts of medical shit caused by a constant overdose of prescribed medication, which they didn’t bother to check for. It was only after ending up at the ER several times that someone took a blood level of medication and found it at roughly twice the level considered toxic. All that time they were ascribing near-constant seizures to anxiety. I love the psych system.)

Notes: