Journal Entry #7
Some trauma and some poor computer analogies.
5/10/18
24 years old
Okay I’ll write now.
Last night was awful. My stomach is weak from the shrapnel. I don’t want to go home after work. I brought my guitar so I can bring it to get fixed after work and then maybe I’ll head to an open mic and then I’ll have to go home. I just need to decide how to feel.
I don’t like the way that we’re treating each other. I don’t like the idea of me that he has in his head. He says I don’t bend enough, so he’s decided to try to make me bend, even when it’s not my fault. Apparently at all costs. Everything I say to him feels like an attack. He’s been struggling with his own things. Pushing himself too hard and becoming upset when he doesn’t feel like he’s doing enough. He’s been so tightly wound lately. I told him he can have a day to himself to realign with himself. We decided on Thursday.
Yesterday, Wednesday, we decided to split a bottle of wine and practice for a bit separately and then watch some tv. But he got too drunk and started falling asleep and being argumentative and it escalated. Drunk ___ told me he had a tummy ache and I asked if he had any tums and he said that he didn’t want any. I insisted and he said that I always need to be right and it snowballed from there because he had that locked and loaded and we have had so many fights about that already and he loves to bring that up. And I’m actively working on that and I was just trying to tell him to take tums so wtf. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to rationalize with drunk ___, but I was drunk too and pms-ing. And he said some mean ass things.
The fight got to the point where I was begging him to leave me alone so I could sleep on the couch but he was pressing into the fact that I started it and I was holding on to the fact that he was being a dick and I wanted him to leave me alone. And I ran outside and cried on the stairway upstairs and he stood at the door and asked me to come back inside. We had never gotten to that point before. We usually work things through. So eventually when I did go inside he was sitting on the couch waiting. And then he broke. Explaining that he hasn’t been feeling himself lately and he sobbed for the first time. I’ve never seen him cry before. I held him. And he was saying that he was scared when I left and that he doesn’t want to lose me. That he loves me so much and he’s sorry. And I just held him.
I told him that I loved him and that I’m not going anywhere. But I’m so tired and my heart hurts. This morning I left without breakfast because of the feeling in my gut. And I’ll stay out for that same reason and I don’t know if I can talk to him. I have no idea what the fuck to say to him. Help. I don’t want to feel this way. I’m so tired. I thought that writing would help me to make sense of it so I would know what to do but I still feel like shit.
-Julia Cannon
3/31/26
Why am I sharing this? I get nervous trying to justify myself in my own head. But why shouldn’t I share this? This was the journal entry after the abusive pattern first began with this ex. We had just moved to Nashville together not even a year before it started to take this shape. The outbursts with the intention of pushing me to the point of tears ending with me being the one to hold and comfort him. Setting the narrative that he didn’t want to act this way and that he was remorseful each time and that I had just stepped on a land mine and needed to be more mindful moving forward, even though the “safe” path would narrow its margins exponentially with time until the explosions became routine. Unavoidable.
They say that you never really "heal” from trauma, but that you just learn to manage your triggers and give yourself enough tools to not let it disrupt your life. I’m finding that to be true. However, nobody told me how frustrating it is to get to the point where you’re no longer actively thinking about that person or those moments when the ptsd takes hold of you. Your brain just intuitively finds the grooves that have been worn into it by repetition of that pattern and then it carries you off down those neural pathways again as if it’s just doing its job.
I’m still discovering secret tunnels and marking them on the invisible incomprehensible map, circling them in red so that I can steer myself away the next time I veer too close. Everytime I think “surely I have circled all of them,” I am disturbed to find that I have not. If the brain is a computer that we program, then the older that I get the less I struggle to accept that I have been tasked with debugging it…lest I want to keep glitching.
I think I’m sharing it to shine light down into the tunnels. They’re so easy to overlook, especially when you’re used to walking past them, trying not to acknowledge that they exist. I’m irritated to still be dealing with it. I want it behind me desperately. But the only way to debug something is to look closely at the code and then rewrite it. Which sucks ass.
-J