Lucidity

So begins the week of recovery. My right leg is definitely banged up from the fight, and my foot is swollen. I don’t think it’s broken but I guess it could be potentially cracked. Hopefully it’s just bruised, in which case I can just train around it. I had my second appointment with my therapist this morning, and it’s going pretty well. I’m much more open and honest that I have been in the past, but it is still very difficult for me. Because of a new friend of mine I am getting more and more comfortable talking about my emotions, but it will be a long process. His capacity to emote is vastly greater than my own, and I struggle with my defense structures to match his openness. This process, though challenging sometimes, is teaching me so much…not only about myself but about the people I interact with. Perhaps most importantly it’s helping me to recognize my own shortcomings in a healthier way, and in so doing it is allowing me to understand the other people in my life as human beings, just like me. It sounds pretty obvious when I put it into writing, but our minds are not always governed by logic and reason. So much of my thinking, as much as I want to imagine that it is grounded in empiricism, is merely mythology and superstition. This is not always a bad thing, for even the most intelligent people are prone describing phenomena they do not understand in mythological terms, but it becomes destructive in my mind when I start using mythology as a scapegoat. And recognizing this tendency in myself is only the first challenge; the real battle is rewriting these patterns in a way that is not destructive to myself or the people in my life. Interpersonal relationships define our existence. For too long I have tried to pretend that I’m some sort of island, removed and independent from the other relationships in my life. This sort of pattern is characteristic of all forms of dissociation…for all dissociating means is simply not being present “in the moment”. When I look at my life through this lens I can see dissociative tendencies everywhere, in the most mundane daily tasks and in highly stressful events. Something definitely shifted in my psyche on Saturday; for the first time since I started fighting I was completely lucid in the cage. My mind did not separate the experience, for the first time I OWNED it, all of it. This experience was a breakthrough, but it’s just the beginning. I have so much work to do.

On a related note, my memories are starting to come back. They are coming slowly, but I’m remembering more and more every day.