Monday, February 09, 2015

Ghosts in My Soul

I have ghosts that haunt me.  Ghosts like Bella, lost in that wreck way up there at Tombstone Pass, with no hope unless someone finds her.

I wanted to find her.   Then when I realize I won't, I am overwhelmed with other ghosts of similar failings.

Some people would call it PTSD.   Sometimes I call it that.  It hits me when I'm passing places where I've witnessed terrible atrocities against animals or even people, violence and cruelty and apathy and arrogance exhibited in brutal behaviors towards lives other than a person's own.  Or just horrific accidental tragedies.

Then I have to go home because I can't focus anymore.  I'm not "in the now".
 My head is full of exploding horrors.  I lay on my bed and hold my hands over my face, as if this would stop it all.  And cry.

Sometimes this lasts a day, sometimes a week.  I pull myself up out of it.  Lately I've decided to set limits on this and seek out new behaviors to distract myself.  I can't let it take me over.  These flashbacks into past horrors have been with me a long time, refreshed in the last decade by work helping cats and seeing way too much of the dark side of humans.

I carry a clicker, that is to remind me, when I use it, to stay in the moment, in the now.

I want to be surrounded in light and people who are good and try to do good things, despite their own faults and problems.

I try to craft the world I want in my own mind.  I sing to myself and this helps me survive.

I stay clear of politics and religion---the entities that invoke the most violence and hate, along with greed, that I've encountered.

But recently, politics is pushing in at me too.  I try to ignore the frenzy going on.  The Portland paper is trying to take down the Governor of Oregon and its like two papers up there are competing on who is going to tie the noose knot around his neck.

The sharks feeding on the Oregon governor now, a man, who has served this state over decades, make me uneasy. There seems no particularly evil reason for the largest paper in the state to demand his resignation.  Seems like a witch hunt almost.

I don't know what he's done but he did a lot of good over the years for the state and has maintained, while doing it, a very low profile. He may simply have fallen for the wrong woman.  I don't know much about it really and I don't want to know.

I didn't vote for him.  I don't think anyone should be governor four times.  I voted for Miss D, because I didn't like the other guy who was running.  Too radical religious, and belongs to a religion that doesn't treat women as equals or believe they are equal.

He is currently also being ripped at by every bored inadequate armchair online commenter in the state and beyond.  These people rip apart everyone after any article, so I guess it is what it is today.  We live in that world.  It adds to my deep unease and darkness today.

I don't know where it will end up.   Men seem to want to fight and tear up other men and many want to control everybody else, especially women.  It can be very dangerous, especially for those who think its mostly silly and don't buy into the fervent hate and blood letting.

I began chatting with a woman at the cat food aisle in Fred Meyer, about cats from a neighbor man who lives beside her, who doesn't fix them, the litters upon litters.  She talked of her cats pee marking inside, and I asked if they were fixed and about stress.  Then she left on a tangent and told me about how she'd gone to see the FBI because she said that the neighbor man had hacked into her car computers and now control it, and also into her house and control everything in her house, and that he and his friends who bugged her house cause her sleep deprivation by triggering noises through machines and vents.  She said the FBI told her she needed to be on medication.

I was so sad, when she started in about this, and went on for many many minutes.  She believes this is happening and nobody else does, so she becomes more isolated.   I said nothing however except for suggesting if she can't do anything about it, maybe she could devise ways to survive and live with it (the thought that her entire life has been hacked electronically by a neighbor).  In the end, I had to leave.  But it's how I survive some of life's horrors,---by finding little distractions and tricks to live with what I can't change.

 I try to do the things that will keep me healthy.

I sure wish I could have found Bella.  My nights have not been easy as result of this failing.  I'm so sorry, Bella.

But some days I have to let the sadness fall out of me, days like today.  Once it's poured out, like a river, I feel better and I can go on.


9 comments:

  1. I am glad that you can, at least some of the time, find ways to leave the past and its ugliness behind.
    That poor lonely woman. Truth or not, her terror is real.
    Hugs.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Her terror is real. Escaping past horrors is a work in progress for me, always, and yet I take on things that I know might make it worse for awhile. But it's my choice to actively try to solve some of the horrors in this world, even if I fail at doing so.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oh the poor lady.
    You can't do the impossible either.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I know, Whiteangel, isn't that sad about her? Then last night on the news, all about how easy it can be to hack the newer cars since they are all computer now. But to date, there is no known case of someone hacking into a car computer.

    As for my limitations, you are absolutely correct.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I thank you for opening this window into your self.

    Even more, I am thankful for you being the beautiful self that you are.

    ReplyDelete
  6. That's interesting about hacking into car, and non entering them...yes, so sad about the lady..

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  7. The car-hacking business really has me creeped out. Sure, the poor woman over-reacted, but more and more it is becoming a legitimate fear, and "even if you're not paranoid, they're still out to get you."

    If I ever have to replace my present car, you can be sure that it will be with one that is too old to be hackable.

    Why doesn't someone market a basic off-the-grid car without all these needless high-tech
    bells and whistles, just basic transportation, like we used to have? Surely there would be a market for such. Or am I just getting old?

    ReplyDelete
  8. I think they would be popular, Jim. I'd like to be able to roll my windows up and down, for instance, without an electronic switch, which I've had to replace now twice.

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  9. Well, I feel the same way - about ghosts, that is. Sometimes a flash of a vision of a cat long gone will haunt me. I try to change the subject. Yeah, it's pretty much PTSD.

    As for the lady in Fred Meyer, well, maybe she has poltergeists. I don't think we actually know what's going on in another person's reality. If I were advising her, I might suggest she determine the extent of the problem, and then find a way to work around it - basically to live with it without being upset. You can't fix others, you can only fix yourself.

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