Tortured moments.  I have been living in hell these past 48 hours.  I have no memories, but the feelings are suffocating and overwhelming.  The dilemma is I am the only one who has had this experience in my family.  There are no witnesses to untold horrors, there is no one to corroborate or validate.  I am the only one.  Because there are no memories, only feelings, I cannot believe in myself, either.  So I have had this experience, this reality that has no basis in fact, alone.  Why can’t I let it go?

So I must run again, isolate myself, stay as far away from the people I love the most in order to be safe.  I do not know what I am running from, what I feel the need to protect myself from.  Hell, I am 54, a grown woman, intelligent and resourceful.  Yet all the progress I think I have made dissolves in these tortured moments and I am a child again, fighting for my existence. 

I am fighting against a time and place that is not real to everyone else I have ever known.  But for me, this is truth.  To thine own self, be true?  What if I can’t trust myself to know what is true?  What if my reality is so contrary to what others experiences?  What if I see blue when the color is red?  How do I know?

There is something so frightening about accepting that everything I am does not exist.  If I could do so, and accept someone else’s version of me, I think the tortured moments would stop.