A memory palace has so many rooms, so many views

Recently, I was in my ADHD chat group and we were discussing microdosing and the use of psychedelics as a further to expanding consciousness and as a next step in healing traumas, working through emotional roadblocks and upheavals. We were specifically discussing psilocin retreats, picking your own, etc. Someone suggested the liberty cap. I laughed. 'Then I accidentally pick death caps, and then it is all cororners and carnage,' which now that I pause to think about it, is a documentary series I would watch.

 It raisesld an ongoing query with 'English' and it's variants, colloquialisms. (note: I am also aware that every 'host' language has  For instance, someone used the phrase 'knocked off' today to describe an attempted sexual hijinks. And where my cultural reference points come from, that means killing someone. Is it pronounced Ver-Sigh or Ver-Sails? Well, that depends, Hoss. You in France or in Ohio? And yet, 'filet' tends to be pronounced 'fil-ay' in the North American parts I've kicked up heels in. 

There are so many moments that layout a life's journey.  I found myself thinking back to 4 years ago, on a very dangerous loop with the onslaught of memories. I had been watching my youngest toddle around and I am confronted with the knowledge that something terrible happened to both my brother and I when he was 3 and I was 8 and half, almost 9 and that it lead to another surreal but unconnected situation. 

We lived in an idyllic Bavarian walled town. I walked to the bäckerei in the morning for breakfast before going to school.  My brother attended a lovely nursery around the corner; I would collect him on my way home. I missed almost a 9 months of the 4th grade, the ploys becoming incredibly complex until I really did get physically ill.

My parents had started speaking to one another again, it was spring and the world seemed to be full of promise.  My parents went away for a long weekend and asked a family friend - one of the guys from my Dad's unit - to look after us.   My parents ended up on a Military hop to Turkey. They had asked a family friend to watch us, a guy from my dad's unit. These days, the phrase associated with his behaviour is 'grooming.'

A week later I started setting things on fire and hitting myself. My brother started jabbing people with knives or forks if he thought they were hurting me.  I started coming home from school ill, taking stacks of library books with me.

My brother and I traded rooms.

The man in question disappeared - I was never sure what happened to him but it was confusing. I hadn't told anyone because I wasn't even aware that something had happened, only that I started having nightmares of not being able to breathe in my sleep, my legs being forced apart.

Later that summer, my brother, a few other kids and I were playing Capture the Castle.  An older teen cornered me in the woods and held a knife to my throat.  My brother was rattling around in the bushes and when the teen started to lift my shirt. My brother bit him. The teen's knife blade flicked against my throat, drawing a tiny angry line of blood.

We ran to my mother and she called the MPs. We went to the States for the summer. I took tennis lessons and took to my bed, a Jenny Lynn that my mother had slept in.  I started reading the Wilmington Pike Library, in the As. By the end of the summer, I had gotten to the Cs.

During that trip, My cousins and I horsed around at a pool. My eldest cousin dunked me and before I even knew it, I was fighting him as though for my life. He was terrified. I was terrified. And sometimes I recognise that terror is probably down to why I have occasionally lived such an 

insular life. 

In the last few years, I've had to sit back and look very closely at the life I've built and the life I thought I was building, and recognise - own, even - that these are not one and the same.  Yes, these things happened. Yes, they had a residual impact. But it isn't a zero sum game.

In the psychedelic conversations, I always have to pause. Roofies are not psychedelics. And when you are 'roofied,' as we called, it was not by choice nor was one aware of it happening at the time. But it is weird is that you can recognize the feeling when/if it happens again.  I mean 2 of the 3 times I was roofied, I was drinking gin. The first ti time, I was drinking a lager. I was wearing a pair of 28" jeans with a sheer embroidered blouse over a tank top. My hair was down. It mid-December and my first semester of Uni has just ended. The next evening, the guy who had roofied me turned up at my housewarming because apparently I m the kind of person a guy both wants to rape and date.  For years, I associated the aftermaths with the mixer and the beverage and have shied well away from them over the years, guilt by association (although this isn't a bad thing, in this context).  

Post-divorce/COVID, I've found myself becoming more and interested in is the way we can engage with memories of all variety. For instance, I don't blame myself for being at a party that led to my being sexually violated. I would definitely have a swift kick to the groin for the men in question who made this their past time, probably more. But I am also isolate the moments and not turn them into a jagged edge with which to tear at myself.

Being 'groomed,' being conditioned...well that is a whole separate kettle to sift through.  Its the conditioning (Insert bad joke here re the name Pavlov not ringing a bell) that sets the stage to ignore those gut impulses. And this becomes important when learning to ignore those responses , to stuff then down, well... moves us to a whole other staircase of not speaking out or up when the push comes to the ol' shove. 

I think about this a long while at the AMSDEC unit, where I've been sent to be reassessed for my UC flare-up. In a more holistic medical environment, would it have taken so long to be heard? And where does this flare up leave me, aside from the triumverate of itchy, scratchy and grumpy? 

Now to get that pesky skin tag investigated.