Literal Chronic Health Condition

    I’ve seen the look on my manager’s faces when they are straining to understand what they are looking at. I’m sure they are perplexed, annoyed and sometimes exasperated while I sit across from them fighting back tears from my own frustration over why I am needing to be counseled and it makes the whole thing even worse. I am often at a loss over where to start- explaining myself not as an excuse for my behavior but as an attempt to be understood is often inadequate and not received well because it’s a long story. Here, in front of them there is a person who is passionate about the job, competent, self-realized, responsible, punctual and adaptable, the person they usually see is affable and charming and capable. But they don’t know that the reasonably good employee they hired is not the only person behind those green eyes looking back at them. 

    I’m sitting in their office receiving a correction because the other Emily made an appearance somewhere in the workplace resulting in upsets amongst other coworkers, or even worse, our clients. Managers receive sporadic reports about paranoia, hostility, emotional meltdowns, hypercriticism, friction from burning bridges between co-workers, and see an employee needlessly spun out over what appears to be a minor issue, who is attacking coworker’s performances, and is making clients uncomfortable with a level of intensity that is overwhelming to them. The polar differences between the two Emilys is probably pretty jarring.

What they don’t understand, because it’s a lot to have to explain, is that I have a chronic health condition.

I was diagnosed 6 years ago with a brain injury that does not ever heal. It can be managed but it does not respond to typical therapeutic modalities, it is often fatal, and it is the cause of other health conditions with high mortality rates. It’s an overwiring of the amygdala and other parasympathetic neural systems that overwhelm the body from the brain, like a migraine or a seizure in the presence of certain environments or stressors. It’s similar to a runaway train, in that it takes off with only a little push but then quickly builds into a self-sustaining charge that takes over all other areas of the mind, derails everything it touches, and then crashes some aspect of my life and I am left to clean up the wreckage when my mental faculties eventually return.    

Symptoms began to surface when I was in college- for me that was at age 30- and I was having trouble memorizing formulas for chemistry class. I was one of only 3 females in an engineering program and was experiencing social anxiety so severe that I would sometimes refuse to go to in-person class, hiring a tutor and following the syllabus at home and taking the exams at the test center instead. When I did attend class I would be so overwhelmed by the sounds and movements of classmates that I wore earplugs to tune them out, and would sit in the front row so I wouldn’t have to see any of them. It so happened there were a few rabble-raisers in the class, and my reactions to their poor behavior was oversized, making me quite unpopular and probably difficult to work with. I would refuse to do engineering math problems at the board in group activities, insisting on staying at my desk and working out the problem myself on paper so no one would see me struggle with the math. I was terrified of group activities and did not ask for help, which caused my grades to suffer and made me the odd-man out in class. I spent almost three years getting that degree and did not make friends with other classmates during that time. I wanted to be invisible and covered completely in a blanket every day that I was in class. 

    It was extremely difficult for me to make it through the program with the social obstacles that were created by my fear of socializing with other classmates, my distrust for group activities, my fear of being considered stupid or crazy, and my tearful exits from the classroom when I was so overwhelmed I would go hide in quiet restroom behind the gym that most people didn’t know about so I could be assured I’d be alone. I had a persistent feeling that the other students in class were trying to push me out of the program, that I was disliked and when I raised my hand to participate, there would be eyes rolling. One student even told me to “shut up”. I went to class sensing that I was hated, barely tolerated, and was going to go nowhere in the civil engineering world. I did struggle with the coursework- math never came easy to me, but it was especially difficult to concentrate on the classwork because I was often sitting in a state of upset-ness, which was distracting to say the least. 

I was so concerned about my inability to focus, memorize and regurgitate lessons in an exam despite the time I spent studying that I went to a neurological psychiatrist. What I didn’t realize at the time was that he specialized in ADD/ADHD, so when I went to see him, that was what he saw. At the time, I was using “frantic business” as a strategy to manage my symptoms. I had a tweenage son at home 4 days a week, and was responsible for all his parenting needs.  I was also playing drums in both a cover band and in a marching drum corps in addition to holding down a 30 hour workweek and a full-time load of engineering coursework, and was also spending any free time internet dating (disastrously). I had a spreadsheet to manage my time, since I often forgot where I was supposed to be without it being lined out for me in Excel. There was comfort in being so busy that I didn’t have time to think about anything too deeply. 

    My life was all about just getting through the day in one piece- maintaining a survival mode of my own making that was familiar to what I’d known before, but with less chaos- and under my control for once. At the time, I believed that I needed to prove that I was not the heap of garbage my family treated me as. I thought that if I did enough worthy things, if I was able to complete this education and pull my life together that I would be redeemed and transformed into a valuable person. I was driven by the fear that I would not live much longer, and that I only had a few years to accomplish a degree before ultimately being removed from the planet in some uncontrolled manner. I wanted my son to see that I was not the disaster his father told him I was. I was fueled by a hope for redemption and a drive to live fully before a guaranteed untimely death.

The doctor saw these symptoms as ADD and prescribed Adderall. I took it for a few months but became aware of the dependency it creates when I would forget to take it on the weekends. And it didn’t really help my grades; I was focused but I was still socially anxious and overwhelmed regularly. So he switched me to Concentra, which also didn’t really seem to help, so that’s when he tried Ritalin, which also seemed to have little to no effect. One day, when I was particularly frazzled in his office, after I told him that my sister was bipolar and my other sister had a borderline personality disorder and my other sister and father had chronic depression he changed his diagnosis to type 2 bipolar disorder and changed my medicine to Lemictal. I never felt like that was an appropriate diagnosis and it was very painful one to receive because of the stigma that comes with it and also the fact that I never got manic, but I didn’t want to be a patient who doesn’t listen to their doctor so I worked very hard to accept it and I took the medication for about a year without feeling that it did anything for me either way. Eventually I stopped taking it and I stopped seeing that doctor because he did not seem to really understand the social anxiety that was the biggest problem in my life, and my grades weren’t any better and my relationships were not improved under his treatment so why continue?

I dropped out of medical supervision in frustration over what felt like a bullshit diagnosis and switched over to self-medication. Not deliberately, mind you. It was a subtle giving in to the draw of readily available instant relief from the emotional anguish I was experiencing in school and at home. My experience under this doctor caused me to feel like I was unhelpable and beyond reach, like a deer who has slipped through the ice in the middle of the lake and is doomed to either freeze to death or drown because the surrounding ice is too thin for rescue. I knew that something was abnormal about me- that I just couldn’t trust or maintain relationships the way I observed other people doing it. I would try and it would always end up with rejection or with a painful misinterpretation of interactions, all showing me that I was not an acceptable person to have as a friend or even as a fellow student. There was something about me that was inherently unlikeable, I thought. Feeling like a permanent satellite in the social world, I was only comfortable when I was orbiting far enough away that I could escape quickly without being noticed. I worried about how this would affect me in the professional world of engineering; would anyone see any value in me at all?

I did graduate, and I did immediately find work in a geotechnical consulting firm as a laboratory technician, which was a tremendous windfall and miracle, really. I was working at a firm full of highly educated folks who presumably had supportive families and financial security that I had never known. I felt foreign among them- a rough floundering bundle of awkwardness, like I didn’t know what to do with my own hands. Out of place and unrefined. The alienation I brought with me was bearable because I was allowed to do most of my work in isolation- alone with my soil samples in an environment I could control, with little oversight and with this firm in particular, a permissive attitude around alcohol, which was in the office fridge at all times. Company events always had beer or cider, and there were several people in my office- engineering professionals- who overdrank like it was a regular day. I remember feeling like if I drank like them I would be accepted into the social group. It’s not that I drank a lot at work- I found my test results suffered if I ever did, but it was the normalization of using alcohol to cope with regular life stress that made an impression on me, who was raised from birth to eschew all alcohol. It seemed acceptable in the professional world I was trying to make my way into to drink at the end of the day as an acceptable way to cope. 

For a long time it was not disruptive. It was a 40 oz of beer while doing homework in the evening. It was a couple cocktails on a date. It was wine in the afternoon on weekends, and sometimes it was too many drinks at a party I attended. I found that alcohol removed my social anxiety and allowed me to feel less threatened in groups. I discovered my ability to perform charm- to make people like me- when I was under the influence. Socially it helped me, honestly. For a while. I soon made it a habit after a stressful day to have a couple drinks after work and at the end of my day. It seemed like a grownup thing to do and I really needed the escape. It took a few years for that convenient beverage to become a tool for all of my pains. Bad breakups were soothed, abuse from my ex-husband was more easily shrugged off, financial distress was alleviated, and by drinking, I was able to numb out all the out of control feelings that persisted no matter where I went or what I did. I felt like I was a better person when I drank, that I was nicer, more fun, more socially acceptable when I had a drink in me. But there is a cost to ingesting a known addictive substance over time; and the bills were starting to come in. 

By my 40’s, I had already tried a half dozen times to stop drinking and had failed to maintain any length of abstinence. There were too many painful things in my head to face without a numbing agent. I remember a stint at AA where all of my social anxiety showed up and mixed with religious trauma and created a toxic soup of self-loathing and alienation that drove me out of the group just as I had started creating relationships with sober people. It seemed that the closer I got to forming real relationships, the more I would push away and try to escape the feeling of being known. I was so uncomfortable in the rooms I began drinking before attending meetings, which needless to say, was counterproductive. Being in a group setting was so upsetting I couldn’t really absorb anything.

So I more or less gave up on sobriety and decided to just embrace the lush that I was. I started dating another lush and we made creative interesting cocktails together and went on drunken adventures full of laughter and rambunctious fun in his social group, which was all heavily imbued with alcohol. I attended social events with him and booze as my buffer so I was able to perform the charm and be the cool, clever person I craved to be seen as. He was very good at legitimizing and enabling my increased use of alcohol- he never made me feel bad about getting too drunk, never shamed me and never expressed any alarm or concern over the increasing incidents of bodily harm from risks taken under the influence. If he did, well, then he would have to start looking at his own habits and he was not interested in doing that, so he would gladly pick me up from the road where I’d fallen, come rescue me from over-inebriation with a chuckle and would be sympathetic at the injuries that started to accumulate during my drinking. 

Eventually, drinking became more important than being socially acceptable and more important than other relationships. I stopped hanging out with his friends, because I didn’t really even like them- they just threw lots of parties where there was free booze- but I was bored of them and found it more comfortable to drink in the comfort of my own home rather than leave the house because my drinking had become so heavy I’d become a hazard to myself and everyone else. I was grateful for the Covid lockdowns because the pandemic gifted me with a green light to drink to abandon in guilt-free isolation. All my fears about the apocalypse seemed to be coming true, so I was happy to drink my way through the gloom like many others were. I was content to be alone in my basement with my Truly lemonades, keeping the boyfriend at arm’s length where we both preferred to be, and maintaining the appearance of a functional person. It was a daily ritual. It often ended in massive hangovers and a lot of regret. I was drinking 4 to 6 units every day, sometimes more, and it was starting to cause health problems. When I drank I also binge ate. Mountains of food could be ingested after a drink or two- I would not feel full- I was a never ending depository of junk food or foods that I knew were bad for me. I didn’t care because I was ready to go downhill all the way.

There was hopelessness that settled in when my liver started hurting. If I went a couple days without alcohol it would go away, but since I was drinking everyday, the liver pain got worse. I gained 50 pounds in a couple years because I was sedentary when before I was using business to cope. I was often too drunk to exercise, and when I did I would injure myself. I have chronically sprained ankles from all the drunken stumbles I’ve had.  Working out while drunk does not work, so I stopped working out.  The self-abandonment took over, and by the time the lockdowns ended, I was feeling so unwell, trapped and unhappy, I was starting to look for ways out. I had some short stints in sobriety, but nothing seemed to stick and I felt like my parents were right; I am doomed. 

At work I was more maladjusted than ever. I made enemies out of mentors and I alienated myself from other construction inspectors by drinking too much or by being hostile towards peers who felt threatening to me. I had a constant hangover so I never felt good. The escape that I found in alcohol had become a comfy prison. I stopped maintaining any previous or current social relationships and was more isolated than ever. No more parties, no more volunteer events, no more performances, no more people around me and I could thank Covid for that! I saw everyone as a threat to my peace but I was miserable being alone with myself because I was always drunk. 

    Always. 

    There were years that went by where I didn’t even know what it was to be sober- every day that I didn’t drink was just a brief recovery period between drinking binges. I didn’t like leaving the house unless I had a drink first. If I had to socialize, I would pre-game with a Truly or two. I have broken bones and scars on my face from my increasingly dangerous drinking misadventures. There was no one in my life telling me I was in danger- there were no interventions, no words of concern from my partner of many years. No arrests, no DUIs, no major crisis to force me into sobriety. I had been getting away with slow self-murder for years! Partly because I was doing a good job of keeping it hidden and partly because the people in my life were also not willing to look at their drinking or not willing to risk a big negative reaction from me. I could feel an imminent disaster coming- the odds favored a serious consequence, so I had to choose if I wanted to welcome the mayhem or did I want to try not dying again?

    I turned to medicine once again- even with my suspicion towards doctors. I researched the synergistic effects of combining bupropion with naltrexone to curb alcohol cravings and convinced my primary care physician to prescribe that combination. Doing that also required me to be honest with my healthcare provider about why I wanted that medication. When I did, she suggested AA, which I explained to her was actually not an effective program for me or for most people- it’s got a 5% success rate.  I wanted better odds and thought chemistry would be the trick. Hoping I could cure it all with pills. Much to my disappointment, the Wellbutrin and naltrexone were not instantly successful either. I quickly learned to drink despite taking the medication, and therefore the medication was less effective. A side effect of naltrexone is nausea, so it was easy for me to choose not to take it and continue drinking, as I would rather be sick tomorrow from getting a buzz now rather than be sick now without any buzz at all. I can do that math!

 

    I tried therapy too. It was unsatisfying for several reasons, but mostly I felt it was a waste of time because I spent my sessions performing for the approval of the therapist, and that meant a fair amount of dishonesty and once again, self-abandonment. One therapist told me that he had run out of ideas on how to help and wanted to stop sessions. I tried an online women’s recovery group but within a few sessions I was so overwhelmed by the alienation and threats felt by the social aspect that I left the group hastily and without explanation- I was sure nobody would understand why I was so upset that I didn’t bother trying. There was something about being vulnerable in a group of women that was completely intolerable for me. I’m like a squid, squirting out a cloud of ink and then disappearing in the cloud. 

    I did eventually find a doctor who specialized in safe detox and substance abuse disorder who listened to me for about 10 minutes before saying with confidence that he knew what was driving my addiction: unprocessed PTSD and Complex-PTSD. At this point it had become serious enough that I was experiencing withdrawal when I didn’t drink and he was able to help me quit for a few months. I wish that had been the end of the story.  

    Having this diagnosis was such a relief. I felt like there was finally an explanation for why I had such self-defeating behavior. I read books by Gabor Mate, Pete Walker, Beverly Engle and Bessel Van der Kolk. I attempted to enroll in a program for PTSD at a specialized clinic but when I told the intake clinician how much alcohol I was consuming he told me that doing any work on trauma would be ineffective as long as I was drinking so heavily. I had shown up for the intake session under the influence and he probably could tell. I was so dejected. The program was not for alcohol treatment, so he recommended that I seek treatment for Alcohol Use Disorder first, and only then would therapy have any hope. I wasn’t able to stop drinking, so I never entered that treatment program for PTSD. 

    After these failed attempts, I sunk even further into alcohol use disorder and spent every night wishing I would just not wake up at all the next morning. I had lost a job that meant a lot to me because of my social difficulties at work, and they were not at all helped by having a constant hangover. When I was let go, I started suspecting that I was so damaged and broken that I was not employable. It started making a lot of sense to just end all of my problems by taking myself out of the picture entirely. I wasn’t even upset about it- I was very calm and logical in my suicidal ideation. It was clear that no amount of help from the medical or social world was going to stop me from dying in one way or another rather soon, so I thought the best move forward was to take control of my life by extinguishing it rather than let anything else do it. 

    There was a faint voice in my head telling me that this wasn’t true- that these thoughts are dangerous and that people shouldn’t know that I was getting serious about making a final escape. I thought about walking in front of a semi-truck. I considered stealing pills and going out to the woods with liquor and taking them all alone and laying down in the forest and never coming back. I wished that there was an aggressive tumor that would wipe me out quickly or qualify me for prescribed death, which is legal here in Oregon. 

    I hoped that the pain in my liver would translate into a quick end. I harbored these thoughts and schemes secretly for months before finally calling a crisis line and telling a total stranger that I didn’t want to be alive anymore. No one in my life knew; I have been a very good performer, creating a persona that covered for me so no one would see the darkness beneath. The crisis center referred me to the local walk-in mental health clinic. Although they were caring and understanding, I only made one appearance, and then drifted back into the shadows, slipping through the fingers of a strained mental health system that doesn’t have patience for patients who have a habit of disappearing. 

    So I gave up on the healthcare system because it couldn’t cure this slippery eel. I decided that the current job I was in wasn’t helping me because it wasn’t challenging and it wasn’t supportive- it had enabled me to drink alone most of the day every day and it was becoming clear that I was headed for doom as long as I was sitting in this environment. I accepted that face to face therapy and group therapy was probably not going to work because it so far never had. I was injuring myself with increasing frequency- I started feeling like I was in real danger and more alone than ever. At some point, I accepted that I was probably never going to get to the bottom of my dark soul as long as I was poisoning myself on a daily basis. I was going to either do something to hasten my end, or I was going to have to quit drinking if I wanted to end the misery. I spent about a year in this purgatory. 

    I looked at where I was in my life and started to read and study about CPTSD and realizing just how much of it was tied together in a knot of despair that was so tangled up I didn’t know where my symptoms ended and I began. I started to realize that most of my 30’s and 40’s were spent cycling through trauma responses, and that they were very effective in keeping me alive and safe, but had consequences that grew over time into an intractable dilemma.

As I gained more knowledge about how PTSD and Complex-PTSD had occurred and how it was showing up in every area of my life, you would think I would feel better, but this awareness only deepened my pain. Accepting the diagnosis meant having the raw awareness but also it meant grieving for the damage it caused, and for the good things in life I didn’t ever get to experience because of it. I spent about a year maintaining a daily routine of study, journaling, going through self-help workbooks on CPTSD done even while I was still drinking regularly. I began shedding light on the slippery eel that has been slithering through my brain for the entirety of my life. I was getting glimpses of clarity between ever-increasing solitary drinking binges and that clear thinking started to stick with me even through the hangovers. Realizing just how far I had gone to abandon and betray myself was so excruciating that I drank to medicate from my remorse. 

    I hung a picture of myself at age 7 and tried to convince myself that the little girl in the picture would be proud to be me when she grew up. It took some time to grieve and to forgive myself for my anger, my inability to trust and my self-defeating behavior. I came to understand that I was set up from the beginning and that it wasn’t my fault. I don’t think anyone would go through what I grew up in without having some kind of long-term damage. I had a very toxic family of origin that did not invest in my future in any meaningful way- I was repeatedly abandoned by family until I believed that I deserved to be betrayed and abandoned repeatedly as an adult. It was so normal for me to exist for other people’s comfort and convenience that the only way I could be authentic was to flee, escape and abandon, and the only relationships I deserved were ones that required self-abandonment. 

    I couldn’t think of any relationship in my history that felt safe; no wonder I learned to fear, and no wonder fear was the only thing I understood. I know that I was wired to live in a state of conditional existence. I was invisible whenever I was not serving the convenience of the adults, so invisible was where I became comfortable. The only emotional regulation I was taught was to go to my room and not come out until I could behave. So I learned to love being alone in my room. This was actually resilience. I came to realize my parents unwittingly conditioned me to feel unsafe in close relationships and rewarded me for withdrawing when there was conflict. I always felt like such an outsider- in every group- never have I really found a tribe. The closer I am to a person, the more unsafe I feel. This is hard-wired and no therapy so far has been able to cure me of the feeling of being different from other people. Alien no matter where I am. 

    My other early act of resilience was to own the loner role and display it for the world in the form of black clothing and big black boots. My love of Morrissey and all things goth I recognize now as survival tactics in a reality where I was regularly neglected and unloved for being different. 

    The physical ramifications of PTSD and CPTSD surfaced while I was still in my marriage, still being actively traumatized. There was a physical toll my daughter’s death had on me, because I had also been ill enough to require powerful antibiotics shortly after her birth. Women used to die from sepsis from having dead material remain in the womb decomposing slowly. I had already been in a dark mindframe, feeling more trapped in the abuse at home than ever, her death compounded the daily stress of living with an unreliable, irresponsible, inherently dishonest spouse who did not believe in divorce and would not allow me to leave without taking my son away from me as a punishment. 

    I was experiencing insomnia, recklessness, rapid weight loss, hair loss, cystic acne, and Raynaud’s Syndrome. I was performing like a normal person to the best of my ability but the cracks were getting larger and larger until eventually I snapped entirely. As I went on to experience homelessness, the unfairness of the criminal justice system, a brutal loss of custody and the humiliation of my family abandoning me throughout the whole upending of my life, I developed an extremely itchy, blistery rash on my legs. I began having stomach pain that felt like I had been eating river rocks and they were stuck in my intestines. I had repeated throat infections that required antibiotics while I was on supervised probation and attending court ordered offender-treatment. I was diagnosed with anemia and vitamin b deficiency while I was back in court trying (and failing) to regain custody of my son. 

    My doctor finally looked up the rash in an old book and came back with a positive gliadin antibody test and diagnosed me with dermatitis herpetiformis, which only occurs with Celiac Disease. 

By the age of 29 I was already diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder that is strongly associated with PTSD in women in particular. You can do your own research about the prevalence of autoimmune disorders in women who have high trauma loads. Just glossing over my 20’s I can confidently say I was in a state of active traumatization that was way beyond my ability to escape for approximately 10 to 12 years.  Being without much of a support system, the only person I could rely on was me, so eventually of course my health was impacted by existing in a prolonged state of distress. How could it not?

Even after I escaped, rebuilt a new life for myself and tried to carry on, the ghosts of those traumas still chased me everywhere I went. There were nightmares and panic episodes and a dangerous appetite for risk and terrible men. Even after the disasters ended, I did not know how to live without feeling constantly distressed. Either by creating situations that would ensure distress, or by allowing distressing people to enter my life, I had a way of making sure that I continually felt abandoned, betrayed, neglected and let down by all the systems that were meant to help and protect. What remains after the apocalypse are survival tactics and coping habits. After a person gets broken, they stay broken; they do not actually get stronger, that’s nonsense. 

After all this research and DIY therapy I was able to finally quit drinking entirely. I made a choice in 2022 to kill the life I was living, but not to kill my self. I started making changes to the things that were putting me in a chronic state of self-abandonment and distress. A lot of it was environmental. Being in the city, for example, was overwhelming to me, and I was just forcing myself to live there for no real reason anymore. I was in a relationship with someone who was not abusive physically, but was absolutely no help to me as I was struggling for my life. He was a lot like my Dad that way. I left him and moved to the woods and suddenly it became easy to not drink myself to sleep every night. I bought a camper van that I quickly learned could not have any alcohol in it, ever. I started having delicious sleep from not drinking and didn’t want to miss out on it anymore. There has never been alcohol in the cabin in the woods I proudly own today. I am 3 years without that poison and I am grateful every day for what I have been able to achieve ever since I decided not to personally die.

       I wanted to believe that eliminating alcohol would fix my underlying health condition. It did reduce my high cholesterol to normal. It did cause me to lose weight, lower my blood sugar and I feel physically so much better that I cannot conceive of ever having another drink. But over the last 2 years as I have healed physically from all the self-abandonment, but I am still struggling to manage PTSD/CPTSD symptoms. I am still being triggered into that limbic state of mind where I am dissociated and can’t focus on work or eating or anything other than what’s set me off. I tried attending meetings and even ran meetings in a sobriety program that did help me for about a year. But they became triggering and I disappeared into the dust again.

     I had some disappointments in friendships since I quit drinking. I am still living a mostly solitary life and still uncomfortable in groups, and still melting down at work. I try to treat it like a health condition instead of the stigmatized shameful mental illness outsiders probably see it as. But PTSD and CPTSD are not mental illness at all. They are the result of injury, no different than a concussion or TBI experienced by veterans and football players. Feeling different is part of the injury- because my brain has become structurally different from a non-traumatized brain. It's more accurate to classify the PTSD brain as neurodivergence, since there isn’t any evidence there’s a neurochemical imbalance or a direct genetic cause. 

    The traumatized brain functions exactly as it was supposed to given the environment; it increases blood flow and neural networks to the fight, flight, flee, freeze systems because those systems are used for prolonged periods. Eventually it becomes stuck in a state of hyperarousal and stays in that mode no matter the environment. The trauma brain sees trouble where there isn’t any, and it sees threats in any situation that feels remotely like past experiences where trauma occurred- that’s what brains are evolved to do; anticipate. And the trauma brain does that a little too well. Although I still hope for a day when I am able to feel no shame over it, I also accept that I may have these little whispers of past pain coming from the back seat of my mental bus for the rest of my life, and that's ok.