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.