These past several weeks I have spent so much of my time and effort trying to recover. I try to just focus on the now, think about the various mindfulness steps to help me overcome my problems, bring my body and brain out of the constant fight or flight mentality.

And I haven’t really been thinking about what happened. I’ve been hiding it behind a door in my mind, filling the area in front of that door with clutter of anything else so that the pain behind that door won’t burst out and overwhelm me.

I don’t know if I’m recovering, but at least the pain is no longer overwhelming, and I am not constantly wishing for death.

And now, I have finally permitted myself to peek inside that door. To remember the people and remember what happened. And I still feel the shock. The shock of knowing that there are people out there who actively try to hurt others for no reason other than revenge and spite. That people can lean into their hatred so much that they will happily cause pain even though no good at all can come of this pain. That people who know me would actively choose a path they know perfectly well would push me to suicide, and not even hope to gain anything at all good from doing this. I get that sometimes hurting others is inevitable, but at least I have never done it unless I felt it was absolutely necessary to prevent other types of harm from getting worse.

And when I think of what I did to trigger their need for spite and revenge, I feel the wave of shock reach the height of a tsunami. Putting my actions and theirs side by side, it feels like after having been stabbed multiple times for a month and seeing them stab others for months, I shove back, and then they take a machine gun at me to punish me for shoving.

And I cannot feel my body again. My therapist says that each time I start thinking or talking about what pains me, my body stops moving entirely. Apparently in my mind I feel so unsafe I subconsciously try to freeze or numb everything, and at times like this even if she asks me to feel myself breathing or my heart beating, I am unable to.

Well. That’s enough of opening that door for now.