And here is where, dear reader, I confess to you that I have been struggling and struggling painfully.

I’ve mentioned it before and it bears repeating that I live day to day with PTSD. Specifically, Complex PTSD. For those unfamiliar this is the best link I have found to describe what it is that I am dealing with and how it impacts my life: http://outofthefog.net/Disorders/CPTSD.html

There are things that happen in the course of caring for J that can set off my symptoms like nothing else and I know, in logical brain, that this is not his fault. Of course it’s not his fault. He no more asked to deal with autism than I asked to deal with what I deal with, and yet, here we are paired up in life to figure out how to manage both things.

The periods of time in which it is painful defy description. I cannot adequately express to the world around me how much pain I am in, why I am in that pain, and that I am sometimes strictly unable to easily find my way out of it. How do you express a pain you are in to others when one of your deepest fears is them feeling that same pain? It’s not like the description is equal to inflicting it but when you are a sympathetic type of person, you cannot help but to think that even imagining the pain can hurt.

Endless loops, that’s what I get stuck in sometimes.

So that is where I have been. The absolute frustration that is fundraising has not helped. It’s not its fault entirely, for I have not been able to focus on it, but it does not help. J’s behavior has been off the wall in ways I struggle with intensely. He comes home from school daily and just falls apart. His friends at the Kioko Center have some great ideas to help with this and I am hoping, for his sake as much as everyone else’s, that they work. Today, for example, he had a nap and he has been so much better for having had it. During school days though this is not possible, so we must make up for it somehow.

Something will sort out, right?

More on fundraising Monday I hope. I am sorry to all who I am letting down, I am trying real hard here, even if you can’t always see it outwardly.