Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Friends

A long time ago, about seven years now, something happened. When this thing happened, not only did I nearly lose myself, but I lost contact with the majority of my friends at the time. A lot of these friends I had had since I was about ten, or even longer. I've been out of contact with many for years and years. There are a few who I remember being particularly awesome friends. Owen, Walker, and Katie…among others. They know who they are.
The thing is, I'm not sure how many of them remember who I am. I'm positive very few of them would recognize me now, and I don't just mean appearance. I've changed, and not for the better. I used to be someone different, more confident, more outgoing. Today I am too scared to set foot outside my door. I hide behind my curtains and my excuses and most days curl up in bed, barely eating, not doing much.
But this is different, this fear. I am scared to go outside my door because the medication keeping two events - well, a two-part event and a long line of emotional abuse - locked where they belong - inside my head - was taken from me. This same medication allows me to order my thoughts and actually take less than a full day to decide if I should cook, let alone what to cook.

But it is those two things that I can no longer banish from my head that keep me locked up in my own apartment. I suffer nightmares of the two-part event anyway, but now I relive two ordeals complete with all the immediate pain I suffered seven years ago during each one. To be honest, even though I've told others, only one outside person knows for sure exactly how bad it was - exactly how lucky I am that I wasn't killed.

The years of emotional abuse already left me with self-image issues. Now, without the medication that let me Not Think About It, I am deathly afraid of the worst offender in that chain, someone I need to deal with regularly, and it's bad - and noticeable - enough that someone else has thought to force me and the person I am afraid of together to "make [me] deal with it and get over it" - a supremely idiotic idea, by most opinions, but a fantastic idea according to two.

I need the support of good friends behind me if I am to ever get enough back to my old self to live in a world I am now rather afraid of. And most of my best friends got left in my past when I nearly had my whole self destroyed by a person I trusted, and was nearly killed during that.

I regret that. I was dealing with the aftermath of seven years ago for five, maybe six years, and lost two of my family during that time. I lost friends because I couldn't keep up with life, let alone MY life and the lives of my friends.

Is it too much to hope that my friends will forgive me? Can I dare to hope that I can reconnect with friends I all but abandoned?

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