Legoes and Lunacy

Here's a rant for you about how old and broken down I am: I have been out of my Effexor for 2 days because the pharmacy decided they had to order it for me. I also was at home today with my 5 year old son. This is my day when I am feeling a bit emotionally edgy:
1. Jacob pitched a giant, GIANT fit about his shoes, because he wanted to wear the socks that are still in the laundry, not these other socks. FYI, there would be more of these socks available if he didn't leave the dirty socks everywhere for the dog to chew on and destroy and sometimes eat entirely.
2. Had to take Jacob to an audiology appointment for the school district because Jacob has an IEP. We were late because of the fit about the socks and shoes. The socks and shoes got put on/taken off and thrown in the car about three times. Grrr. Jacob has totally perfect hearing, but I have to have a long conversation about his IEP anyway, even though he is only Speech Only and no longer developmentally delayed. Woman is not listening to me. 
3. We went to feed the ducks at the park and it rained on us.
4. After getting perturbed at me for not being available when he asked, Tony is not available to have lunch with us.
5. Go to the post office. Don't have enough paper to wrap the book I am trying to mail. Have to buy a thing even though I had already printed the postage at home.
6. Take Jacob to Marshalls for more socks, but they don't have the EXACT ones he wants, so no new socks or shoes for him. We did, however, find a SpiderMan watch. Cool.
7. Take watch out of package, and the battery is dead.
8. Go to nearby jewelry store to get the battery replaced. Kid is all over the store, trying to go behind counters and open stuff he has no business opening. Grrr. 
9. Put on watch. Jacob now gives me the minute by minute update on where the big and little hands are. My eyelid starts to twitch.
10. We go get lunch. My contact lens, despite putting drops in my eyes, starts to freak out during the meal. Jacob makes the world's largest burp at the table, causing a grown man nearby to remark on it.
11. Go home and I am dying for a nap. Kiddo, not so much. He decides to go play with his legoes. He comes in every two minutes to ask me to find the one itty-bitty piece that will be the lynchpin of the tractor he is trying to make. Then the labradoodle vomits up a whole child's sock on the bedroom floor. I have a headache. I tell Jacob I am going to have a short bath before I look for the lego.
12. Kiddo now decides that he needs to actually watch me take a bath and make editorial comments about my body. Great. Yes, I do know that parts of me stick up out of the water. I stick my head under the water, but I can still hear him talking. I come up just in time for him to ask me about the legoes again. He has lined them up on the edge of the tub, pointing out that he needs another one like THIS one, right here.
13. I get out of the tub. I realize that playing with These things is NOT as I remember. Now there a billion teeny-tiny strangely shaped bits that have to be arranged exactly according to the diagram, or it is all wrong. I have a headache, trifocal glasses, and am a quart low on serotonin reuptake inhibitor.
14. I spend the next 35 minutes finding all the little itty-bitty lego bits and then painstakingly building the lego tractor and farmhouse. Little Guy watches, but doesn't help much. Unless by helping, you mean trying to jam his Captain America Lego Guy into the house, knocking some of it down, which must be rebuilt.
15. Dog flops down on the pile of blocks, and must be moved while not disturbing the Lego city. 
16. Hubby comes home, and I am ready to die. Not bad for a day off, huh?

Why does this get to be true?

I have a love/hate relationship with my own subconscious mind. Sometimes it presents really random things for me to contemplate when my alarm goes off in the morning.

The topic du jour is an incident that happened to me at 6th grade camp (this was the one I went to up in the North Bay). I just diagnosed a serious illness that I got there, and it disturbs me more than I care to admit, but I feel compelled to write it down.

We were doing the "trust exercise" pictured above, and the camp people had the person falling stand up on the edge of a picnic table, and about 6-8 students on the ground were supposed to catch them.

When it came to be my turn, I wasn't too confident. The adult told me to to just trust and fall back. So I did. I can't even describe the sickening lurch as I realized mid-fall that the people who were supposed to catch me had stepped back and folded their arms. I hit the ground full force, striking my head and my back on the ground. The kids laughed. I couldn't even breathe; the wind was knocked out of me. I remember crying, out of pain but also out of incomprehension. Why did they do that? Why to me?

Later that night, I started vomiting. A lot. I don't think they called my mom, or she would have come to get me. For years I assumed that I had gotten food poisoning. But this morning it dawned on me that the vomiting was a classic sign that I actually had a concussion or had bruised my spinal cord.

Not only had the kids given me a reason to have a lifelong mistrust of other people, but the adults, in what was doubtless an attempt to hide their liability, had covered it up and let me down, too.

That certainly isn't the only reason I have trouble trusting others, but boy it sure sticks out. Recalling that this morning was a very visceral experience. I was still half asleep, and thought about the faces of the kids who were laughing at me for trying to trust them. One of them grew up to be a somewhat famous professional volleyball player, I recall. Ostensibly a team player, right?

Thinking about that, all these years later, hurts deeply. It surprises me how fresh and accessible that feeling is. I'm on the verge of crying just thinking about it right now. I have been carrying that inside me all this time, and I can see how it has affected my ability to trust other people to catch me. I generally don't. I rely on myself, taking on the weight of the world without asking for much help. I can't unload my burdens on other people because I don't trust them. I don't even give the people close to me enough credit in that regard.

Why does that get to be true? It was a shitty thing that happened to me. But it doesn't have to be who I am now. I have grown up and hopefully learned to tell which people are worthy of my trust. But I can see that even the people I want to trust pose a challenge for me. Being vulnerable is extremely difficult for me. It makes me feel like I am about to fall backward and nobody is going to reach out and catch me.

For a long time, I thought my mom didn't come for me when I got sick. I realized just this morning that they hid my injury from her. She didn't know. I really need to reframe my thinking about that incident. I was abused by strangers, not neglected by my mother. That is a big difference.

I'm going to try. I'm going to try to trust someone today. The world is full of people worth trusting. I can be safe. There are arms that want to catch me if I let them. I wonder what that would be like?