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4:02pm September 2, 2014

clatterbane:

Sometimes I wish I could do like a friend, and take comfort from visiting specific places in my mind. But, that usually just ends up making me all maudlin, crying and feeling sorry for myself—and feeling like a colossal whiny ass the whole time. Because I don’t know if I will ever get to visit those places in body again, and sometimes it really does hurt.

I really do not like that reaction, but have no idea how to change it.

Goofy as it may sound to people who haven’t had similar experiences and relationships, the actual land where I’m living now has been good to me. I have no complaints there. I try to be respectful, and seem to be a welcome guest. But always a guest. There is a big difference there that’s hard to wrap words around.

Sometimes I’m not sure that some of the choices I’ve had to make were the right ones, necessary as they seemed at the time. And of course some people are quick to criticize, when they’ve never been given similar sets of life choices. Not the easiest row to hoe, regardless.

That continuing doubt probably has something to do with some of the annoying reactions. Doesn’t make it easier to change them, though. :-|

I know what you mean about wondering if you’ll ever see those places again.  For me, visiting them in my mind works somehow.  But I can see how it could backfire, too.  Sometimes I feel like my heart will never stop hurting because I’ll never live in the redwoods again as long as I live.  That’s one of my reasons I want my ashes and/or composted remains scattered/buried where I was born.  If I can’t be there in life I want to be there in death, and become a part of everything there.  It’s the closest thing I have.

And I know what you mean about the new place… it’s not that I don’t like Vermont.  Vermont is beautiful.  I have the most amazing view out my window – a lake, mountains, an island.  And I have a good relationship with this place.

But it’s not my place, it’s not my home, and I feel like a foreigner in exile.  I feel like I’ll always be an exile my whole life, because I will never make it back to the redwoods.  Maybe I’ll be able to visit once.  I’ve been trying to save up the money to visit Anne, and when I visit Anne I can find a way to visit the redwoods too.  But that may be the last time I ever see them, and that parting will hurt worse than it did before.

Because when I left California, my feeling was “good riddance”.  All of my PTSD triggers were there.  Simple proximity to the institutions I’d been in, was enough to have constant hypervigilance and panic and flashbacks and nightmares, day and night.  And leaving just felt like leaving that.

I didn’t realize I’d also be leaving my spiritual home, for lack of a better word.  I didn’t realize that proximity to the redwoods meant as much as it did, until I spent all this time away from them.  I go back whenever I can, and it does help (I’m very sorry it doesn’t help you, I totally understand how it could backfire), but it hurts really badly, too.

Because I feel like I’m bound to that place.  To that few square miles or so of land.  I’m bound to it in a way I can’t explain.  My entire wall next to my bed is covered in pictures of the Mother Tree and a few other pictures from the local area.  I’ve tried to turn my bedroom into a redwood forest, if I can’t get to the redwood forest myself.  And my mom sent me some amazing decal-posters of redwoods and banana slugs and stuff that I need to find a place for, those were birthday presents this year.

But I feel like I live in one place and my roots live somewhere else, and even as much as I’m connected, even as much as I can fly back there in my mind whenever I want, even as much as I’m capable of that… there’s still a disconnected feeling that never quite goes away.  And it hurts.  And I’m sorry that you have to feel it too.  Google Maps says it’s 3,066 miles from here to my home.  And as far as I know, it always will be.

I still am able to connect spiritually with the place, and the things that live there.  And that’s something that’s very important to me, more important than anything else, almost.  And I’m very glad it’s possible.  If I couldn’t do that, I’d feel really horrible.  But sometimes, emotionally, it’s not enough.  I have to at least go back and see my home again.  It used to be so easy, we could just drive there, even when we didn’t live there anymore.  Now, it requires a plane flight and knowing someone who can drive me there.  

And wondering what I’ll find when I go back.  Will someone have cut down the Mother Tree?  It won’t erase its spiritual presence (and it’s damn hard to erase a redwood’s physical presence, if it gets cut down it’ll be trying to shoot up out of the ground in 20 more places), but it would be a massive blow to me if they have.  And a massive blow to the area in general – that tree was not only the center of the ecosystem in the area (old growth trees in new growth forests hold up huge amounts of the ecosystem that the newer trees can’t do because they haven’t been around long enough), it was the spiritual center of something invisible that most people could feel even if they couldn’t put words to it.  It’s why the tree has a name.

Anyway, sorry to use your post to talk about all this stuff… I just know what it’s like to have an intense personal and spiritual connection to a place and have no means of actually being in that place again.  I’m very place-oriented in general in a way most people don’t seem to be.  And being able to go back there in my mind helps, and I wish you could do that more effectively – but even so, it’s not the same, it’s not enough.  One of these days I will fly out there and I will visit the redwoods again if it’s the last flight I ever take.  I think now that I’m on dexamethasone I could do a plane flight.  (Last flight I did, I turned grey and collapsed shortly afterwards.  But that was pre-diagnosis.)