[Trigger warnings]. It’s 4:50am. Yaphank. I had thought that I was beginning to get better yesterday after having moved to Yaphank. But I was wrong. I’ve been having a recurring nightmare all night. So tired that I fall asleep, only to be reawakened by the nightmare in which I am running away from an unhinged person I once knew chase me all across an empty town and through empty buildings trying to murder me with an ax. Seriously. It’s like the movie Shining. And it’s this same person: someone I’ve never had any personal issues with. This smoldering pain from my heart (from the bone infection toxins going systemic) is so intense that my body is translating it into pure fear in my dreams. My entire body is inflamed from the infection. This inflammation from endogenous toxins (jawbone infection) feels different from the exogenous inflammation (air toxins). The fire in me is internal, not on my skin everywhere. But it is worse, much worse. This is the pain that prevents sleep, with ceaseless nightmares, and physical shocks that repeatedly bolt me awake.
I had planned to get a night’s sleep and do a larger load of laundry at the beach before it opens at around 8am, but I may need to halt these plans and try to accumulate at least a couple of hours of catnaps. I won’t be to drive.
Symptoms: left ear loud tinnitus, left eye intense itch, left side of face warm and prickly, left jawbone sharp and throbbing pains, and an intense smoldering fire in the heart and radiating to torso, limbs and head, throbbing bone and joint pain in my upper humerus radiating to clavicle and scapula.
Usually when it’s this bad, it will take another week or two. And I need to start fasting today to settle down the infection.
[Added 10:50am]. I’ve had a booming flash of a realization that helps me understand how I’ve been able to be so uncharacteristically patient with my daughter, and I believe this holds the key to healing from all my childhood traumas including al the emotional dysregulation I’ve suffered since then. The key is my mother. She is healing me with neither of our knowledge. But it’s happening.
Wednesday, August 23
7:19am. Last 24 hours has been hell. Rock bottom. And I do forget what feeling like dying feels like—they’re ephemeral, like dreams—but it’s here again so I’ll describe it: on top of all other symptoms of fire and burning, my heart feels like it’s sputtering and quivering on final fumes, my breathing is hot and shallow and hard, and my body is also sputtering as if the engine is about to just shut down any moment once I sleep.
The infection is raging all along my left side of head with pain and loud tinnitus and head feels sore to the touch. My gums and teeth at infection is very inflamed, not just the lower jaw of foci infection but the upper jaw now as well. The entire left side. Realistically, there is a good chance I will never heal from this due to the nature of bone infections, but I’m still fighting to better fight to stay positive no matter what happens, in accordance with this essay I wrote yesterday, How to Win When Winning is Impossible.
Saturday, August 26, 4:13am
I just recorded a 12-minute video, single shot, immediately after I woke up just now in great pain from my bone infection. I’ve had about an hour of sleep so far tonight. Around 2.5 hours last night. So I’m slipping down the drain again—just when I thought earlier today that I may begin my slow climb back out. Plunged back in again.
As an aside, I’ve been hopping back and forth between Yaphank and Hampton Bays. The air is so skittish, so unpredictable from bad to okay to bad, it’s hard to gain any stability. So my relapse is predictable. But I need sleep, I need strength, because today was the day I was going to visit my sister for her newborn daughter.
The video I recorded gives an overview of this “calling” I’m feeling—a calling I do hope to God is not mine. I hope that my dream was just a dream—a fever response from inflammation and pain. But I honestly don’t know.
I just texted one illness friend: “I’ve relapsed again tonight. Woke up in great pain from just an hour of sleep. And I’ve had a terrifying but also beautiful dream. ’ve had a terrifying but also beautiful dream. Want to share it with you during day. Hope you are well resting friend.”
I need help with this, interpreting my dream, but I don’t know anyone in my personal “real” life that can advise me. I’m repeating myself, but I hope it was just a dream. Because that means that I have a chance yet to heal and live some life with my daughter and maybe mother. But if this dream is correct, then I won’t have long to live. A couple years perhaps. Hard pill to swallow.
1:57pm. Only slept around 2 hours last night. Nodding off constantly now but also keep getting jolted awake by pain. It’s just what it is. I do need to drive 50 minutes to sell some stuff from my old truck. Need the money badly. Fasting so far today to try to settle the infection down.
Sundayaugust 27
In 2016 or 2017, through the help of a therapist, I became aware (and accepted), for the first time, the great impact trauma has had on my life. It’s one thing to know I’ve had trauma. It’s another to realize just how much I’ve been affected by it. And this can take a lifetime to unpack. So that moment of initial awareness and acceptance was a huge step up in my trauma recovery.
But since then, my emotional healing had stalled. There were obvious reasons like my focus switching to sheer mortal survival (from my illnesses) and slow-mo financial implosion, but remarkably, after stalling for years, I’ve taken another big step up recovery over the past couple of weeks.
What spurred this step up? Well, I had been researching trauma for my family, especially because my daughter experiences trauma regularly (as does just about every child in some way). Preventing all trauma is impossible. But I began a journey to learn how to mitigate the damage to my daughter, to undo it in the future, when I’m healthier. And that sparked a second big epiphany about trauma. And that is this: everyone has childhood trauma locked deep inside. Everyone. Trauma is embedded in all human life. The human experience is, in fact, defined by trauma and tragedy. Our best stories are the triumphs over them. Shakespeare wrote tragedies for a reason. This was an incredible eye-opener for me.
But this path I am now on, this new ability to see, is lonely—because no one that I personally know believes that trauma affects them. Everyone thinks other people have trauma, but not they themselves. It’s pretty amazing to observe. Literally 99% of everyone believe that they are above the trauma fray. It’s as if trauma has as bad a stigma as borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia, or drug or porn addiction. It’s astonishing.
The past couple of weeks, this journey has been so rewarding, so full of nonstop revelations and explosions of epiphanies on a near-daily basis, that I want to share it. I want someone to go on this amazing journey with me. Yes, it’s painful, but it’s also eye-opening and soaring. I want to talk and share our personal discoveries, how they relate to each other and to others we know. So I invited the one person that I thought had the greatest chance of going on this journey with me—but we just had a huge argument, and she was deeply offended that the word trauma was attached to her in any way, or deeply offended at the suggestion that she needed any input or help in fixing her emotional issues. To her, the emotional dysregulation I see is a normal thing, not a big deal. So why even bring it up? That pissed her off like, triggered her, in a huge way. And our talk devolved into a fight.
I was angry at first. But quickly settled down. Then I was sad. I have realized myself hod difficult, how impossible actually, it is to try to resolve one’s emotional dysregulation—however small—on one’s own. So I sought a learning partner.
I guess we will find out how far we go at it alone and in our own ideas of fixing our dysregulations.
But for now, I am now on this journey alone. But that’s OK. The journey will have its rewards. The process will transform me. It’s already making others harder to recognize me. But it will soon replace me with someone new. Someone I had always fantasized to be. Someone regulated, composed, and deeply secure of oneself. I will be born again—right under everyone’s nose.
And one day, I know, I will find my partner and my tribe. My true home of healing. I can taste it.
Sunday, August 27
Setbacks delays
Today and tomorrow will be lost days. I’ve been driving hundreds of miles, hopping from town to town, trying to escape bad air. Despite my trauma epiphanies, my chronic illnesses have been kicking my butt. Back to sleeping 2-3 hours of total catnaps a night in pain. Jaw infection very active and spreading again. Systemic sepsis like symptoms. And raging reactivity from what seems like inescapable bad air everywhere.
My cab BTW is fairly contaminated. A minute in it and I begin burning. Whereas the bed is only mildly contaminated. In decent air, I can get some sleep. Only, it’s been hard to find good air.
I drove hundreds of miles, and scrambled back to Garden City last night after a sudden plume of manure air slammed into Yaphank late at night. Then, early this morning, I read an email that my other truck would be towed from the shopping plaza parking lot back in Hampton Bays—yesterday! This could be bad, since my topper shell was left unfastened after a potential buyer couldn’t fit it on his truck. So if the truck was towed, the entire topper could easily slide off and created a road catastrophe.
There was no way for me to contact the person who sent me a message from craigslist. So I immediately drove back to Hampton Bays. To my enormous relief, the truck was still there. So I made arrangements to park it overnight about 2.5 miles away. Showered, Decontaminated, all that stuff. Then finally settled down to squeeze in some work. Tomorrow morning I leave at 9am to move the truck to my sister’s home in Westchester, and will take public transport back. I will be back at 7pm. Bracing for a major contamination day tomorrow. Although my body is very fragile now, I have no choice but to do this. Then my sister will need to move the car weekly for opposite side street cleaning. I still have to spend a few hours updating all my car sale ads and set up a new website to sell it faster. The one good news is that my sister’s street has greater visibility so a sale may happen at a price I can afford to lose.
William repeated his suggestion to try the frequency treatment he’s getting. It’s $75 a day, but I am going to try it this time. I need something anything to break out of this prolonged rock bottom.
My mother’s initial cancer screening will happen at the end of the month. Results from this also determine some major financial choices. I will do everything in my power to keep her here with us—for as long as possible.
TragicHappy
After a talk with my marketing exec friend Bryan two nights ago about my declining social media metrics, I’ve decided to make a few changes in my social media strategy:
Be on a predictable upload schedule. I’m not convinced this will yield results on TikTok as it would on Youtube or Facebook, and I only do short vertical videos, but it’s worth a try. At very least, I’ll have some data.
Begin releasing The Hoping Tree on social media (as short form video) serially. TikTok in particular is a brand new reader base so it’s a fresh start with a new promotion medium. Get it out there. Initial iteration will be with me simply doing a reading scored to my original music.
Quality over quantity. TikTok mavens all say to pump out 3-5 videos a day. I tried doing one a day, and quality suffered. Some of my videos felt forced. So I’m going to go against the grain and release two a week and focus on quality.
Include “share” call to actions on all my content (since this is the main driver for virality).
I need to begin preparing to publish the book. And releasing it on social media videos is a perfect kickstart to this process. So I spent time yesterday and today rewriting v8.0 to v8.1. Language is simpler, removed some adjectives, added some more tension and suspense. It’s hard to say if it’s Better though. Every time I edit it, I cry. So it’s very hard to be objective about it. But of course, with each version I feel like it’s better. I need to give it a few weeks to give it another overall fresh look.
Scribbled some drawings. I think I’ll try illustrating it.
My truck bed is contaminated now. Or it’s the air. Whatever it is, my symptoms are all raging. I need to sleep for tomorrow. Need to.
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