Day 55: Division

Day 55

Problems cannot be

Resolved at once.

Slowly untie knots

Divide to conquer.

-Deng Ming-Dao

The author divides problems into three categories: puzzle, obstacle and entanglement, or a combination. Well, I'd probably say that my life is a combination a missing piece to a Rubics Cube, summiting Mt. Everest and a decades growth of dreadlocks. I'm not seeing a means to getting out of what's been created in my life on an psychological and emotional level.

I went to bed at midnight after taking my new sleeping pill. I was awake at 4pm. I've been suffering with insomnia since I was 26 years old when I was awoken by a 2:30 am call from my mother telling me that my father had fallen and she couldn't get him up. The truth of the matter is that he committed suicide using a .22 caliber rifle to blow out his brains. Prior to that he loved to torture me and my mother with mental, physical and emotional abuse. I've been emotionally unstable since my mother died suddenly from cancer treatment in 2006 and a stressful adventure to Nepal and Tibet in 2009 with a two groups of idiots and upon returning had lost 2 dogs and my job.

My anxiety attacks are back, my insomia is worse then ever and I couldn't take the stress of my last job - I came home and cried every night - for fear that I was wasting a day from my dogs who could get sick and die, my husband, my home - just worry and anxious. Plus it was a very erratic environment.  Now, we're renovating the dining room and kitchen and you'd think some awful event had happened in my life. It's causing me to just breakdown because of the temporary lack of peace and stability in the house. Lately, I've been wondering if I have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

So, since I couldn't sleep I decided to take look into PTSD and saw that I can take a self-test for PTSD - 

I  passed. I got a very high score indicating that I have several symptoms of PTSD and should seek help. But what is anyone or any drug going to do? I already take xanex and sleeping pills. I can't say that I feel depressed, but I do think about death ALOT. Not just my own, but my dogs and husband. I think that I'll die soon - I always imagine "Death" sitting in the corner of the room I'm in just waiting - sometimes he's reading the paper, playing solitaire, or just staring at me. Sometimes I talk to him, other times I yell at hime, and then there are the times that I just dare him to take me. I'm afraid of people and don't feel that I can trust most of them, even my friends - I pretty much feel that there will be a let down or a back-stabbing at some point from their end. I suppose I'm not an optimistic person. Also, in the last year I've become a concrete existentialist and athiest. This coming from a woman who spent 20 plus years searching from "God" in any conceivable means and found absolutely nothing except the reflection of herself in the mirror. So, if I am in the image of any "God", this deity is old, shattered, torn, worn and tired.

Apparently the aforementioned daily life I live reflects an individual with PTSS or on the edge of combined personality/anxiety disorders. So what? What can anyone do? I've talked. I've cried. I've rebirthed. I've sweat lodged. I've yoga-d. I've done everything mainstream, new aged and ancient to heal the wounds. What I've been left with in an un-armed armadillo - I've lost my shield, my shell. I feel unprotected from the world and very vulnerable with just my skin as a very poor piece of armor.

So, dividing and conquering is not alway the answer there Deng. I wish it were so easy. I'm begining to think that Deng Ming-Dao contradicts himself every other day and has not had much practice with personal suffering in his life. It must be great to live in his little, protected taoist world.

"The only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great lonliness,

and can be reached only through suffering. Privitaion and suffering

alone open themind of a man to all the is hidden in others"

-Igjugarjuk, Caribou Eskimo Shaman