find some sort of distraction.
that's what i do.
a video game
a book
painting
knitting
crocheting
listening to music
watching a funny video on youtube
or hugging a kitty cat
having a nice cup of tea or coffee or cocoa
or even taking a nice bubble bath
lately i am loving watching episode after episode
of that 70s show.
that show makes me smile :)
and sometimes i try to talk to someone.
not about what's going on.
just socializing in general.

I am in a similar situation because of my recent discovery that much of who I thought I was was built on a false premise. I'm just going to keep on with my journal, my therapy, and occasional meditation, and be patient. I'm pretty sure a deeper self will manifest itself. Meantime, it is very uncomfortable, isn't it?

hugs back

i just keep looking when i can't find myself

I sit still and let myself come find me. I'm not being sarcastic, it's what meditation does for me. I only started meditating when I got diagnosed with PTSD. It's not a religion to me, it's sitting through flashbacks and panic attacks and confusion to breathe and let muddy waters settle. It's like being a muddy river, and if you stop flowing furiously, the still waters and the silt separate and the silt falls to the bottom, letting the water get clear.

The more I run around looking for myself the more I add to how wound up I am and how lost I am. I ought to know, I've moved from city to city a ridiculous number of times. Didn't help. I racked up miles but not self knowledge. My real self isn't out there anywhere, it's inside me all the time. I have to learn to trust myself and hear myself, learn to trust my own gut and sense.

Works for me.

Muji, that is a great way to talk about meditation. I'm going to make a note of that!

look into yourself, you are there, you didn't go anywhere, when you have so much heaviness on, in you, release it, you can try mindfulness, meditation, relaxation, writing or whatever you like

What I am today is homesick for Uruguay, my little homeland. How could I be homesick for the place where I got PTSD? I wonder. Living here in the USA where I'm a citizen with a good job, why do I want to be in Uruguay?

But I do. I was there this past July, and the folks here at DS PTSD helped me go back to the site of all those traumatic battles. I did exposure therapy, and then I even enjoyed it. Now I miss it. Sometimes I felt like a fish returned to water back in Uruguay this past July somehow. Something about being back where I grew up, even if it was so hard. It wasn't all nice all the time, either, as it is the Third World, but even the dirt was familiar. How odd.

I feel so stupid sometimes, not appreciating what I've got here and now and desiring something else. Do you think homesickness is another form of mental illness, too?

I think it is inevitable for you to feel the way that you do. Your body grew and formed in that soil - it is a part of you. The land of Uruguay supported you through all that you went through, and the sky over Uruguay beamed down upon you. It is the curse of the emigrant/immigrant to always miss one place or the other.

It's not solely a curse, though, is it?

Thanks, Donna, Lilly. In the press in Uruguay they call my generation the "generation of the diaspora." We were spread all over escaping the dictatorship in the 1970s and couldn't come home when the dictatorship ended in the 90s. We vote through Uruguayan consulates in our respective countries where we live now in what they call exile.

I don't dare call it exile, I have a good life. But now more and more I want to go home some day. I'm not unhappy with my life here in the USA. There's just this yearning. I have this belief it would complete my PTSD recovery to come full circle to the place where it started. Silly, probably, it just felt that way on my visit this summer, with all that progress in my exposure therapy. In a funny way it makes me motivated to work harder at my job here in the US, because someday I might give it up to go back home for good, and I don't want to feel like I did less than my best before I go.

Lilly, you mention how the mountains felt to you. What kept getting to me as I walked around the cities of my childhood this past July was the sidewalks. They're made of tiles there, different from the concrete sidewalks in the US. I learned to ride little bikes with training wheels on those sidewalks.

Then a little older I learned to play soccer on them with the kids from the barrio, playing until our ball rolled under a bus and got squashed. Then we'd wait until it was a birthday for one of us and another ball came as a birthday present, and we started on those sidewalks all over again.

Those days are all gone, of course. I don't plan to be chasing soccer balls. But those sidewalks are different and they're the original ones for me, I guess, my home pathways.