#2. No Place to Start

I don't want to do this.

In my mind I am a tiny child laying in the middle of the floor, crushing myself into the fetal position, screaming "NO" while I'm being beaten to death by all of the things I love the most. I suffer from severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. For those of you who don't suffer from it will have no basis for comparison to the way it feels, the loss of control. I will do my best to be sympathetic to your inexperience, and hopefully I'll breed empathy into you. Not for a single moment do I want you to fully understand, nor do I want you to show me sympathy. No one wants to be a member of this club. I don't want to be this broken. I don't want to hurt this badly. And the last thing I want is to expose those emotions in order to solicit "the look" from people. The look of utter discouragement and despair that I see painted across the faces of people who know my story. The look that says "you poor thing." The look that labels me.

God, I don't want to do this.

This is my reality.

The words I'm going to say are honest. They are more honest than I want to admit and I choke on the thoughts, let alone the words. The reality is far worse than the speculation in this instance. The only thing that compares to what happened to me are the nightmares I play over and over and over and over, as real as the sun on my skin on a blaring hot summer day. They sting my mind, and my heart, every time I close my eyes.

I wrote once in a letter to my Aunt that I am a product of my past, and a testament to my future. In order to understand that statement, you would have to understand that my life is punctuated into chapters. Different people played the lead in each. I have no idea who the girl was in the first few chapters, through childhood and teenage years. I have no idea who the woman was who was married in the mid chapters. The woman who birthed two perfect children is a complete stranger to me now.

The woman who lay on the pavement, holding my lifeless child, is who I am now.

That's where this has to start.

I know it. God knows it. My baby knows it.

That's where this starts. At the end.