Journal entry for 30 Sept 2011

Inside MST Journal Entry

Today it’s been hard to think, hard to stay on task. At my daughter’s work someone put a note on her car that freaked her out. The manager called me and asked what I wanted to happen. I said call the police; have this guy attached to the note and on record. The police did not do a report (there wasn’t much to do one) but it is on the logs and the guy’s name is put to this note and a message from the police was left on the number he gave telling him that my daughter was underage, the note upset her and more or less he needed to leave her alone. I read the note at it was very obvious this guy was very much older than should be ever contacting a girl. Other parts of the note gave a little insight and this guy needs to be marked in case he does this or more to some other girl (or woman).

Dealing with these types of issues would be difficult enough, had I not been the target of a stalker and MST survivor. I found my thoughts not being able to completely form. I have forgotten what I had been doing prior to the call. I know that it was something important but it is gone. I cannot stop thinking about her, about the note, about what could happen. I know it’s normal to have thoughts during and after but these are different. My thoughts are jumbled, but they also intermix with past memories, with feelings that come in waves. When the call came in it seemed to be a normal day, then the day took a turn, this week has taken a turn. I can remember when the manager stated that an incident happened but she was ok. I thought she’d gotten hurt, fell or banged her hand. When he said that some guy put a note on her car, that was it. Without any more information I was shaking, pacing the house, on his every word. Trying not to totally lose it. I had to hold in my own feeling until the call was over. Then the panic set in. I “had” to go get her, “had” to bring her home to make sure nothing else would happen. Those were the thoughts, but I do have a support system and after a call to my husband and her father I could talk down those thoughts. To run out and make her get into my car and take her home and tell her the whole time what I was thinking and about all the times that notes were left on my door or car, or where I saw them on others and what happened from some of them would not help the issue, but hurt my relationship with her and more than likely scare her to death.

Out of all the difficulties being a parent I have to question and re-question almost all my decisions, all my thoughts, all my actions. Am I responding to the situation logically or completely emotionally, drowned in memories and feelings of the assaults? Seeing perpetrators at every turn. A simple statement from a boy who likes her as some red flag or clue that he’s thinking about raping her and trying to put me at ease so he can get her alone. I do not want my children to be naïve as I was, pretty much a walking target because I had never been warned, never been told or talked to about there being wackos out there who wanted to do me harm. I fight with myself over balancing - telling the kids about what could happen and scaring them to death.

While I type the red lines under the words appear more often than usual (and they usually are in every sentence). With having memory loss on top of everything else, the irritation seems to increase exponentially. I lose words, how to spell them, and lots of times I can give the definition but cannot remember the word. One particularly irritating time I could not think of how to spell “of.” Simple word, right? Could not for the life of me spell it. I could say the word, I knew how to use it, but nothing came to my mind. I stopped what I was writing and had to wait until I could talk with someone and ask them.

Not being able to remember every detail of every minute of my life is frightening for me. If you ask yourself what you had done right after you got to work, or five minutes into work, yesterday, many people would not know, but it would not matter to them. It matters to me. I want to remember every second. Not because of something logical, but because I rationalize if I know every second I will be able to foresee if I am in any danger. I catch myself doing the “what if’s” for the past. What if I had remembered what was said and then I would have… I look back and see what I did not see then. I tell myself that I only “see” those things as being pertinent because of the latter outcome. Had nothing happened, they would not have been relevant. I have to pull myself out of the thoughts of “what if’s” cause if I stay in them I will spiral down and end up blaming myself for it. Something I have done thousands if not more times, and it all goes back to me, to blaming me. I tell others that it is not their fault, and it is not, yet to myself I am much harder. I am my worst enemy when it comes to what I consider “my mistakes.” I know with the information I had at the time there was no way that I could see what would happen, there was no way that anyone else could predict what would happen, no one except the jerks who knew in their minds what they were thinking, what they were planning to do to me.