When I went to bed last night I thought to myself this heartburn in my chest and occasional dry cough won’t get me, and it’ll magically disappear just as soon as I turn over onto my left side and close my eyes. But this morning I woke up with unexpected nausea that kept coming and going all day, in and out, almost like it was a kind of tide, and I realized the mind can’t make anything stay away.

I should have known this, since, after my mother left and I told the courts I didn’t want to see her anymore, she continued to follow me around in my head all my life, and especially during times I found myself having to set boundaries with a toxic girlfriend, or just trying to sleep after a long day of feeling abandoned by anything or anyone, which for most people is a pretty normal and singular adult problem, certainly not one to seek therapy about,

but for me is a pretty huge and multilayered one that threatens my mental health if I don’t make a space for the always-knocking correlative to exist alongside my past traumas.

Haven’t you ever had that feeling that no matter how much you want or politely try to get rid of something you don’t want, it stays, and in fact, digs its heels in harder for your trying?

Haven’t you ever thought boundaries sometimes make things worse? So, rather than try to get rid of the problem, you completely comply with it, surrender to it, thinking that because it thinks it can’t get a rise out of you anymore, it will lose interest in you, and go to another country to bother someone else, and maybe even realize for itself that it’s a problem?

That’s kind of like what trauma is like for me most days. Whether I’m awake or asleep, there is a triggering event or association, and next there’s a kind of popcorn machine of shock and confusion popping corns of pain around my brain until something starts to burn and I must merely return to a more detached survival consciousness where disassociation, and not mindfulness, comes with butter.

Maybe that’s what that nausea I was talking about up there is all about. I mean, maybe I’m opening up and shooting off and moving so fast to try become myself I make myself sick with torpor and just have to strap down and wait for the ride to end so that I won’t forget in some other heartbreak permutation that everything, even chaos, changes.

Or maybe this is how I repair myself, when after a day of thinking I’m a kind of king, I need to be reminded that I’m full of it, and should start to empty my crown of self-importance again, while I can still acknowledge I might not be here in the morning.

One thing is for sure. There is too much going on in the me race to keep up with, and so it’s probably best to get ahead of it, by reversing my perspective on success, and trying harder than hell not to finish me.