welcome to earfffffff

I slid the thick binder from my satchel, flipping through the tabbed pages with as much discretion as I could manage lest a passerby spot the bold, red printed text, like an accusatory brand : PTSD. I flipped to the page of condemning words, laying the packet in my lap to better compile them into a semi-coherent narrative to publicize tomorrow. Group therapy isn't new to me- nor is it especially daunting aside from my knowledge that it will take something much more radical to unearth me from my mental entombment. 

"Write an impact statement about your most distressing event." 

My pen stalls on the page, there is no inciting event to pin from the oubliette of my spotty memory. I have wandered amongst the trees for some time, and there is no acute memory of when I first lost my way. I'd explained as much during my afternoon appointment with a professionally sympathetic counselor who's kind but practiced demeanor had done little to assuage the embarrassment I felt about sobbing to another adult about how my experiences of comfort had always been imagined. I knew I didn't have the femininity for my distress to be pitiable. When I cry, I am garbled and lost, it affords me no sympathetic quality such as delicacy, and I cry too often to take pride in seeming unaffected. Like always, I am some infernal place inbetween.

The waiting room was once again filled with the elderly, though I had no idea what other programs occupied the floor. I received cautionary stares that fleeted once I turned to their sources, as though they were aware of being ill-mannered but couldn't look away, as though I were a train wreck and not a girl. I smiled demurely in a way that would be considered polite if I were pale and unveiled. 

I felt embarrassed crying again. No one else had cried so openly and I felt ashamed at being unable to restrain myself. I saw my face dimly reflected in the plexiglass across from me, the hollows of which I knew inspired discomfort rather than sympathy. I have a face fit for restraint, yet I fail even at that, unable to protect myself in the absence of external guardianship. It is why I survive only as a specter of the self, an anthropological observer of my own lived experience to endure the constant confirmation of that which wounds me at my core. I feel as though I am a being defined by a sense of neglect that I mysticize into sylph-hood, to make phenomenological invisibility an ontological experience rather than one of abandonment. I have learned to feel like something else to avoid feeling that I am nothing at all.