How quickly a day so brightly begun can turn . . .

. . . to complete. Rubbish. I would like to use another word right now, frankly I'd like to use a LOT of other words, not one of them nice, but I cannot bring myself to do that right now.

Why? Because I'm in enough pain, and sliding downhill, so I'm doing everything I can to correct that.

Yesterday over on "What a long strange trip it is!" I talked about "What It Means To Be A Woman." I was pretty pleased with what I wrote, and when today brought me another perfect fall day, emboldened with my success of a week ago today, and how I poured out my heart yesterday, I thought I'd go walking in my favorite park in Ohio.

It was a great plan, and the day was going well. I took some pictures (albeit with my camera phone, but still, pictures!) of the lake I was walking around and was more than 75% of the way back to my starting point when it all went wrong fast. Above you can see a satellite map with the entire path I walked around the lake. I walked in a clockwise direction starting at the green dot, and had made it to the last yellow thumbtack along the path when it all went wrong.


Yes, a view from space, modern technology is wonderful no? So what caused my day to go wrong? As I stopped to put the thumbtack on the map (yeah, while I was walking I was making the map) someone on a bike came across the bridge there. They have these steel plates over the expansion joints on the bridge, and his going over it made a loud, sudden noise. Regrettably one of the challenges in my life after Earl is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD] and everything that goes with it. How I react to things having been beaten, abused and tortured isn't always normal. Often it isn't even close. If you've ever seen a cat "popcorn" as friends call it, you'll understand when I say that I popcorned. If you don't know the term, that's the term for when a cat gets freaked out, they puff up to triple or more their size and shoot straight UP! From a standpoint of how a cat, or a woman in her 40's does that, it's kinda like being electrocuted. Every muscle in your body contracts (or expands) at the same time so fast you couldn't stop it if you wanted to. Well when the biker hit that metal plate, and it went CLANG! The sharp report was loud, unexpected (right behind me) and scared me into popcorning.


So now every muscle in my body feels like it's been hit by a truck at high speed, a BIG one! By the time I made it home and safe behind my triple locked door, I was a wreck. Angry, impatient, and in so much pain physically that I couldn't figure out WHY! It takes often inhuman amounts of effort to get me angry, it always has, and because I tried so hard not to let that one second at 16:40:35 today get to me, I got home where I could collapse and lost it. Since that day with Laura (NO, THIS IS NOT HER FAULT!) I cannot just bury things the way I used to, I no longer have the ability to put off, or push away, anger for long. So once home, it came clawing it's way out. I sat here ready to throw my computer out the window because it wasn't doing what I wanted, getting more and more frustrated and angry. A handful of hair was driving me crazy and I reached up and yanked it out of my head just to make sure it would leave me alone.


I came apart. No nice way to put it. In moments I was leaning against the wall sobbing, seething and hysterical and I didn't even know why.


Took me some time to get myself calmed down (mostly) and try to figure out what brought all that on. Which of course is when I lost it again. Which is why I don't go out much, and when I do, I'm a something of a creature of the night. Most of the time I do my grocery shopping at three in the morning. When the rest of the world ... well that part around me that is ... is sleeping I venture out. Because I get the grocery store all to myself, I get in, collect what I'm after, go through the self checkout, and I'm back safe in my car and on the way home.


Because that's the path of least resistance. Because there are less cars out and about, less people, less chances for something to go horribly wrong and leave me once again a wretched mess. As to pictures, well I'll put them up on Flickr shortly. But right now, I need to try to unwind some more, take some ibuprofen, and meditate some.


I just want to state for the record that I was sick and tired or being sick and tired, several years ago. But the news is not all bad I guess. I've been making progress, really I have, and who knows, by the time I'm little old lady I should be in pretty good shape?