the difference between calm and numb

Therapy came not a moment too soon.
I was thoroughly unable to formulate a sentence without weeping. And I no longer had to. I cried. About everything.
I talked about my uncomfortable body, poked at my bruises and abrasions... acknowledged my tired body's inability to stuff my tension in the usual ways. My shoulders are too weak to be stacked with anxiety and fear. They are too gelatinous to serve as the usual sturdy gleaming armour, able to buck off all attackers and casually shoo away the onslaughts. There is no tough exterior. I feel much like a crustacean plucked from it's shell. Gooey and terrible vulnerable to attack.

I wept, and I wept.
"It all happened so fast."
"What do you mean?" my therapist asked with an incredulous smirk.
"I just decided to do this, and I went in and did it. And now it's over."
She reminded me of the long testing process I had endured since February.
"I know," I continued, "I know I didn't really need to think about it. I decided to do it and I was never unsure. But I never felt much of anything about it."

I recalled a conversation we had just prior to my surgery, in which she assessed my typical stress tolerance. "With all of your trauma history, and everything you've been through in your life... things that most people find stressful are just not stressful to you. For God's sakes you work in a prison." I agreed that my everyday existence is often much more stressful, high-drama and high-trauma than that of most. She asked, that day, if anything is "too much" or seems unmanageable to me. I thought very carefully, unable to identify anything.

Today I acknowledged how odd it was that I had felt so very little prior to my surgery.
"Sometimes it's hard to tell if you're calm or if you're just numb."
I acknowledged that my feelings and behavior were certainly not normal, and that I walked into surgery with no trepidation, no anxiety, just a serene feeling of calm.
Was it...? Was it a feeling of calm? Or was it just... feeling... nothing.

"I think I feel a little mourning," I cried, "For all the things I didn't feel beforehand."
"A part of me is gone," I wept in sadness with a smile, "and it's out there in someone else... doing what it's always done. And it's so wonderful and it's so... weird. It's so weird!"

I had remarked prior to surgery, within this very blog and at several other points, that I never expected the pre-surgery portion to be so emotional. And I didn't. There were copious tears. There were extreme feelings of distress and abandonment and alienation. And all of this - these reactions to the changes within my own relationships - I felt very deeply, and I acknowledged and understood.

What I did not understand is everyone didn't feel like me. I could not wrap my mind around why I was the alien. Why people just weren't "getting it." I did not understand, in some ways, what I was walking into. I did not understand what perhaps these people did. I did not understand that I should feel anxious.

As I laid in a miserable puddle of pain and tears on coarse, alienating white hospital sheets, I started to get it.

I really am insane, I thought silently. This is not normal. I am not normal. Who does this!? How could I misjudge someone else for not being as bizarre as I? For being, obviously, more normal than I.
How could I judge someone for not wishing to endure this misery? For not wishing to have their abdominal muscles severed and a vital, healthy organ removed? Having never experienced surgery, my therapist was right in pointing out that I didn't expect or understand how vulnerable it makes you. The fear it brings. The ways in which it simply violates you. Fear of this, wanting to avoid all of these things, is terribly... terribly normal.

My lack of fear for these things was, I imagine, abnormal. Or perhaps just naive.

But now I have felt crazy. I have felt "nuts" and just plain wrong. I have felt as though I was looking in on myself- as an alien. I have felt self-assured and self-righteous. I have felt frail and frightened. I have felt calm. And I have felt numb. I have felt nothing.
Right now I'm feeling everything.