Greetings my true believers, what a ride the last few months have been. Nothing like a complete nervous breakdown combined with a vivid dream with talking cats and ancient swamps to get you back on the road to recovery. That was a joke, I am still trying to get my head around a lot of things, some days are better than others, lately, it’s been a bit of a slog, I know this is because of my usual seasonal depression, but this year I actually have the tools to fight this issue, because of my obsession with growing things I have full-spectrum lights in my living room and thanks to Mrs. ZM a little one by my plant shelf, I also have an office with a southerly facing window and an aggressive heater so it’s helping me a lot, especially if I sit by the lights by our couch and read in the morning before I go sit in a dark room for 8-12 hours. I am blessed to have a pretty cool psychologist who specializes in PTSD and trauma responses, and a safety net system that can catch responders when they are falling, and I feel safe saying this, and because it’s funny, much like abominable snowmen I bounce (reference the Rudolph the red nose reindeer show on tv this time a year) but I have known that I can bounce for many years.

I am dealing with a lot of trauma right now, but I’m doing it in a healthy and controlled manner, when I was younger my parents spent a lot of time being reminding me of mistakes I have made and I adopted that behavior for myself, despite vowing to never do it to someone else, sadly I can’t seem to do that for myself most of the time. I can tell you every mistake I have made in the last 10 years, but could maybe tell you 5 things I did right and even those don’t seem to matter to me most of the time because someone else probably did it better.

I think reminding someone of times when they weren’t their best self is destructive to that person especially when they are struggling. I am not sure where I heard the phrase “it is not my job to pull someone down, but instead it is my privilege to help build them back up” Unfortunately I can’t seem to remember that I shouldn’t be pulling myself down while others are trying to help me rebuild. I know a lot of people are struggling right now and I know a lot of people are like me feeling very small and lost and not wanting to be seen as a burden, I know I have felt like a burden for a long time. I still do quite often, I know that people don’t see that in me but I still feel it, I’m working on that.

I had a trigger event a week or so ago when an old co-worker and supervisor took a class from me, this particular former co-worker was tasked with firing me from my EMS job, something that I spent a decade being bitter and angry over and feeling like I was somehow being treated unfairly, something I had chalked up to my own feelings of righteous fury. That was until he came to my class and we got to talking about old friends both still here and those who had passed on. Then he told me something, I was let go not because of a mistake I had made, or the fact a diabetic got drunk 4 hours after we saw him and crashed his car, no I was fired because our director of operations wanted to get rid of all of the former union representatives in the hope we wouldn’t try to reform our union that had been decertified a year prior. Said director was fired 3 months later because of his unscrupulous activities in regard to other aspects of the operation of the company. But after the fact, I felt something stir inside of me, something I hadn’t felt for what seemed an entire lifetime, forgiveness, I hadn’t been a terrible medic, I had been confronted by political forces that I had no chance against, and was a casualty of a battle between labor unions and managers. Even after a judge told me I was in the right I still carried that weight like a black mark on my career that no one else could see, like a chain holding me back, it fell off at that moment, for a moment I knew what it must feel like when a person is wrongly convicted gets their case overturned,

I did realize earlier today that with everything happening to me the last few years and especially the last few months, I had missed the 23rd anniversary of the night I and some of the scariest people in the world, put on our dark blue tactical gear and grabbed the tools of our profession, and literally blew the door off the hinges off the closest thing to the gates of hell and marched in like the merry marauders we were to fight a monster and rescue a princess, who I would like to point out did kick me in the face while I was rescuing her.