My body seems to think sleep is optional. I get it. Life has been complicated of late, it can get in the way of the joy. Reliving past events has been literal. I'm realising I don't mentally remember too many details about the darker days of Jase's story but muscle memory - that's a whole other realm.
I have been trying to recollect the day of Jase's surgery. If you ignore the amount of stress I was under, the baby hormones wreaking havoc on my system and the anxiety of the unknown, it is easy to understand why I've blocked most of it out. My body, however been reliving every stressful memory. Tightness in my shoulders, pain in my muscles, headaches, tremours from the anxiety I've built up all reared their head. In Chronic Fatigue, it is recognised as a crash. I can hardly walk, reliant on the walls of my house to accomplish even the smallest distance. Yesterday, all I managed was to eat, sleep and administer basic hygiene.
Image belongs to Chadwick Bacon
That is how ingrained the trauma is to my body. Physically, I had returned to 2010, mentally, I regretted my decision to.
I called and messaged several people who lived through it with me. It was not an easy time but the muddle and brain fog is strong with this one. There is a constant haze over my imaginings, whether it was the salt which permeated the air while I ate at Botany Bay or just the way my brain has blocked it from me, I can't tell. Luckily, the details I do recall seem to be correlated by the other people with me. The gaps are huge. My experience has taught me that I more than likely was asleep during those times. So maybe the trauma hasn't blocked it all out, my weariness did.
Although my body has recalled it in so much detail, it has caused me physical pain and unable to sleep; it has also allowed me to work through it. I woke up this morning at five-thirty. I had started typing by six. By eight, I had completed the chapter in extreme detail, the story now made sense in my mind. That's the positive of all of this; the words just flowed. A few weeks ago I was stressing as I neared the eighty-thousand word mark. In the small space of two weeks, I have added another ten-thousand. My initial goal was one-hundred-thousand words. I might even surpass that which bodes better for the story because I will be able to cull the boring bits.
Another positive calculation I made, "Thunder" made the twentieth chapter I have completed the initial draft of. It is a thirty-one chapter book. I am almost two-thirds of the way finished. This excitement has completely overtaken the anxiety of my memories. I want to keep going. The hardest thing now is allowing my body time to rest. I don't have time for that in my everyday life so I'll take the win and take the rest of my day in a floatation therapy pool, melting away the stress in a bath of dense salts and allow my past to seep out of my soul with it.
Add comment
Comments