Isolation is the Best Medication

This isn't an easy post to write, but at the moment, I hate my family.
'Hate' may be too strong a word, but I'm very angry and incredibly frustrated.

How can they just completely ignore D-Day and continue on as if nothing happened?

Mum says they've no choice but to keep playing 'happy family' and just ignore it until everyone gets their own individual help. Unfortunately, I don't have that luxury.

It took all the strength I could muster to lay it all out in the open. More strength than it took to initially speak about it a couple of years ago. It's without a doubt one of the hardest things I've ever done, and I've gotten nothing - less than nothing - out of it.

For a long time, I've been made to feel guilty for feeling anger towards it, or towards my family. But after speaking with my GP about it last week, she assured me I have every right to be angry. So you know what? I am fucking angry, and I won't stuff it down anymore for their sake.

Even writing that makes me feel like a horrible person.

The weekends are the worst. I hide away, even more than I do during the week. I'm the elephant in the room, the looming black cloud, and I can barely stand to be around them. I can't look them in the eye. I can't talk to them.


For many years, I've basically lived in the lounge room. Since the abusive relationship at age 14-15, I could no longer sleep in the crime scene once known as my bedroom.

To start with, I'd just find my way to the couch in the middle of the night, unable to stay in my own room, although I could still manage to spend the daytime in there. But in the past few years, I've been increasingly spending more and more of my day in there, the couch permanently set up as a bed. I had a couple of years of normality, when my ex-boyfriend lived here (who I broke up with and kicked out just days before starting this blog). As soon as he left, I returned to the couch.

And don't even get me started on my fear of the dark. I leave a lamp on all night. If I'm home alone with no one to tell me otherwise, I leave the ceiling light on 24/7.

I shut myself in, safe. Mum had been pushing more and more, prior to D-Day, for me to not leave the lounge room so closed off.

We have beautiful double doors with patterned glass, detailing a classic Australian landscape (not to mention a deer on our front door, and a ship on a swinging door halfway down the hallway, the latter of  which mum has always detested for some unknown reason). I keep one of the doors open halfway most of the time. On bad days, I leave it ajar just enough for Billy and Misty to pass through. The curtains covering the sprawling window are only ever opened half a meter, or maybe a full meter on days when mum pushes.

  "I'm trying to get you out of your bubble" she says
But I'm safe in it.

Since D-Day, she's stopped pushing. She doesn't pull the curtains wide or open the double doors except for when she has dinner, while I'm outside in my armchair with my coffee, waiting to go to bed.

All I want to do is hide, now more than ever. Not a year or two ago, she was actually offering to move my bed into the lounge, but the couch is a much safer vessel. Now, she'd never allow it. And I can't even begin to express how much I long to sleep in an actual bed again.

She doesn't see the steps I do take, but I have (for a while now) had a plan to transition from the lounge back to my bedroom and study. It mightn't seem like much, but they're things I haven't managed for years. Currently, my life is centred around the lounge room and my armchair on the back porch.

STAGES OF TRANSITION

1. Sewing in the study, instead of having everything set up in the lounge

Clothes (both storage and changing) back in my bedroom

2.  Journaling, writing, and my various notebooks back in the study

3. Spending time during the day in my bedroom (writing, reading, gaming, watching movies etc.)

4. Sleeping in my bedroom

Yesterday was yet another day spent waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for the Clinic to find me a bed and a psychiatrist. I saw my dietician in the morning, and ran into my GP (she has wonderful timing of coming into work as I leave the dietician's office). She said she'd call the Clinic, and try to give them a nudge. I wasn't holding my breath.

To be honest, I'm starting to have second thoughts about the whole thing. But if I don't go, things at home will never improve. They'll keep up the 'happy family' facade, and just ignore it indefinitely.

In the afternoon, I got a text, asking me to call my GP. Mum rang with the phone on speaker, and my GP said she'd had a long talk with the intake worker. My old ED psychiatrist is on call this week, so it wouldn't happen this week. I refuse to see her due to extreme distrust in her. But the psychiatrist who first diagnosed me with C-PTSD, the one I requested initially but was told his books were full, will be on call from next Monday. My GP said she'd call him to go over the details and try to sort something out, so with any luck, maybe next week I'll get some good news.

Honestly, I don't know how much longer I can wait before I completely break. 

The barricade of my Fortress of Solitude

xxBella