Never Stop Dancing

Today marks the halfway point of my 12-week PTSD/trauma focused program. I’ve written less in my blog than I’d prefer but my mind has been everywhere else. The tools and skills I’ve learned cannot be measured. The one thing that sticks out the most is avoidance. I can’t count the times I nearly quit the program. Not because I thought it was too hard, but because I was afraid to face what I couldn’t see. Funny thing is, the more I stopped avoiding, the less afraid and more confident I’ve become.

Last Friday I threw my hands in the air and walked out the door. The struggles I’ve been enduring were weighing me down so much that I had convinced myself the program was a joke. Thinking that everything I was learning was just making me worse off and the time and effort was meaningless. Why go through all this pain just to make the pain worse, I thought. I mean, I was indeed getting worse and the exhaustion alone was enough for me to call it quits. All I wanted to do was sleep. Who knew mental work could be so draining? Wait – law school comes pretty close.

I took the weekend to make up my mind and consulted with a couple friends. Regardless how many worries I have, none of them compare to living a life lacking the necessary tools to cope. Today I went in giving 110 percent. To my surprise, it was the best day I’ve had so far. Holding back judgments and invalidating thoughts, I began to mend differences with another group member I thought I would despise to the end. More significantly, I made it through my trauma exposure exercise and was able to recall pleasant memories from Iraq. Most notably, the singing and dancing camel adorned with a military shirt.

This camel has a name but I can’t recall it now. It’s one of those toys where you push a button on its foot and it starts dancing and singing. He grooved to Vanilla Ice, “Ice Ice Baby”. He was shipped to Iraq by my co-worker’s mom. We had him in the office chilling on top of a bookshelf just outside the boss’s door. Some days the boss would walk out of the office and push the camel’s foot as he busted a move while exiting the office. Rarely, he’d yell at us to “shut the damn thing off”. This camel survived through the harshest of conditions. My co-workers decided to strap the little guy on the back of an MRAP for a seven-day mission up and down Iraq. Whenever we stopped at a base someone would run to see if the little guy was still dancing and singing, he always did. The MRAP suffered some serious injuries but the little camel never stopped dancing. After the mission he was completely covered in mud and needed a bath. I fought, whined and argued but lucked out and ended up taking him home. To this day, he’s still singing and dancing. He doesn’t have the spunk he once did, but he’s still got it nonetheless.

Though just a stuffed animal, Mr. Camel never lost hope. Although he’s been through quite a lot and suffered some pretty bad injuries, he has never given up. Today I pushed his foot while reminding myself that no matter how beaten and wore down I am, I’ll never stop dancing.

 

Love To All,

Jamie