Stella Reddy: I Am Living Life!

This week has been a fantastic one for me! I had another Physio session yesterday afternoon and my ankle is back to normal in range and motion, I still need to build up some strength there, but my ankle is great! In Physio they have also been helping me to strengthen my knees, tho I feel that is a lost cause with my left one. My knee joint hurts too much to do much with, but I am willing to try anything.

I have always had the strength and determination to recover from medical issues, whether it be broken bones or surgeries, I always put my mind to my recovery and do anything possible to make my life easier. I have taken that determination and put it toward my mental health recovery. I have done anything and everything to get out of my head and to move on and forget all the nastiness of being smeared online within a domain in my name. With time and a lot of help, I am finally getting to the point where I am not driven nuts by the strong emotions brought out by these Adult Tenant Bullies’ actions and words. I am not caught up in it all anymore and its effects are wearing off the more time that passes.

I am gaining back my confidence and my sense of wonder, my ability to take things and people at face value. I don’t go anywhere anymore with a head of preconceived notions of what they could do to me, or say to me. I even started a conversation yesterday with a lady in the waiting room! I haven’t done that in a long time!

I was told yesterday that I was one of her most pleasant patients, and that I amazed her with my resilience in my recovery from my broken ankle, and how I am a pleasure to be around. Even when I told her that since coming back to this area in the hospital, I have been dealing with flashbacks from time to time of my last visit to this place, she said she couldn’t tell.

I also had a counselling session yesterday and am happy to say I am much, much better at regulating my emotions and my PTSD. I spoke of physio and the flashbacks I have been having and how they don’t affect me emotionally. The ability I have to not be so distressed over flashbacks from the fire shows that I can get to the same level with being Bullied by Adult Tenants. That is my goal and it is getting closer every day!

Yes, I have had flashbacks of my previous physio I went thru 30 yrs ago since I have been going to physio now. Especially yesterday. I had to go to a different area of the dept. that had the walking bars in it and I walked over, stood there with my hands on the bar, and a memory flashed of 2 physiotherapists trying to get me out of the wheelchair and stand up between these bars. I could see it so clearly, me in the wheelchair, trying to just stand up, let alone walk.

That was a really hard time back then and it changed my life in so many ways, but I got thru it all and thrived! I can do it once again.

As I did the exercises they wanted me to do, I told the lady a little about that time and that I had a flashback when I walked in. It was a natural conversation, and I told her at the end, that I survived all that, I can survive anything I put my mind to. Even seeing the tank I use to have to soak my arm in so they could cut off the burnt skin of the 3rd-degree burns, didn’t cause distress, just natural memory flowing thru my mind. I feel for the person I used to be who had to go thru all that.

Flashbacks are not hard for me to go thru anymore, not for that time. They don’t upset me as they use to. I can let the memory flow thru me these days, even some of my feelings from that time, but they flow thru and out. I don’t hang on to them anymore and they no longer cause any panic or upset within me. I just freeze for a minute as I allow the memories to go thru my mind.

That is what I am achieving with this trauma of being smeared so badly. Reaching the point where the memory can just flow thru and out, just like that trauma from the fire and what came after, with the recovery. Don’t hang on to any one memory, just let them flow across your mind like a movie screen and don’t stick on any of them, just let them go across your mind, one after the other, naturally. Once you can allow a bad memory to go through your mind and it has no lasting effect on your emotional state, you know you have recovered. 

Since I started this journey 5 years and 8 months ago, I have tried anything to not let them get into my head and though I didn’t succeed for a few yrs, this past year, I have finally started to gain some emotional distance. I have come to see the logic of a situation like this and now know that nothing they do, does anything to my life. It is all in my head. All the fears I had of being turned on and attacked have never come to pass. I know now they never will.

Time has a way of showing the truth of a situation like mine. They were tenants, so it will never be accepted that they know me and my motives as they claim. Personal opinions written by an anonymous person, on a personally named domain, will never cause someone to attack me. The time for that is long past as I ain’t that important! Why would anyone come after me now?

I make my life. I have come to see that I choose who and what I allow within it these days, not nasty adult tenant bullies. I have choices, we all have choices.