Twenty-Four Years of Slow Change

I came back as planned!

The trip was fantastic. My best friend and I got along great, and it was a wonderful reminder of the days we travelled together early in our friendship. I felt very loved and very loving.

Not everything was the way I imagined, but that usually is the case. Some things were — the desert in Coober Pedy is every bit as beautiful as I thought it would be. I wish we could have stayed a lot longer. Tasmania was gorgeous. Wombats look like I thought they would, and guess what — Tasmanian Devils sorta look like small wombats. We saw a duck-billed platypus, a whale, dolphins, seals, a pandemelon and tawny frogmouths (I’ll let you Google them), a koala, kangaroos and emus with chicks along the road. That was far more than I expected.

The low point of the trip was when a hungry kangaroo in a petting zoo clawed me and then ate all the food I was giving him, and the paper bag, too. The ones I had seen before were sweet and gentle and well fed. I couldn’t hold it against him — he was a wild animal and seemed to be given mainly hay. With a diet of hay, I would have lunged for goodies, too.

My back was horrible, and remains so. It feels worse, probably because I don’t have new experiences and all that beauty to distract me. I’m having a hard time accepting that this is my new baseline and I will have to make a whole lot more accommodations. My guess is that this was my last big trip, and that makes me very sad. Funny how my body is going downhill even as I get better psychologically.

Rereading what I just wrote, I notice that there are no references to ritual abuse or its after-effects except for the last word of the preceding sentence. A while ago it would have been all about RA, and Australia would have been barely mentioned. When I look back on the day when my memories first exploded into consciousness, I cannot believe the change. If you had told me then that I could ever feel like this, I would have thought you were lying in an attempt to keep me from killing myself.

I wish I could tell those in the early or middle stages of coming to grips with ritual abuse that it can get better, miraculously better. I can tell them, but I can’t make them believe it, any more than I could have believed it in the beginning. There was no room for hope then, there was only the grim daily struggle to stay alive. And, oddly enough, what I did to stay alive led, small step by small step, to where I am today. There is so much to be grateful for, so much to celebrate!