The Time-Traveling Brain

          It's a horrible thing when your mind breaks. It's even worse when the shards hit the person you care for. I've learned to accept that I can't trust my mind. When I feel a hand grab me, it may not actually be real. When I react in a certain way, it may be a reaction from decades before. In the worst case, a memory will manifest itself as fact in the present. 

          The safest, and perhaps most humorous, example would be my mind replacing Taco Bell's "usual order" with the "usual order" from over a decade previous.  My husband corrected me and I was convinced this was what we did, but no. The past infringed on the present and I still have to remind myself how it's done.

          Yesterday, though, this happened again where I went on and on about my penchant for not standing up for myself, and no matter what he said I rolled over. He said he didn't understand, and that he always valued my opinion. He asked for recent examples... and it was like my brain just... popped. I felt that crash like the world stopped, and I realized it had been over 12 years since I felt that way. 

         Ever since, I've been shaky. Whenever my brain betrays me I don't feel I can trust myself. It happens a lot with PTSD. I shut down with stress. I used to have staring spells up until 2008, the longest of which was 8 hours. Those diffused the pressures I couldn't handle, but they also removed huge blocks of my life. I don't have them anymore, and I don't know how to deal with the stress. Meanwhile, those things the missing blocks were trying to protect me from come back to bite me.

~DC