A New Beginning

triggers old feelings

Written just before my eldest started on her high school journey. We’re now 5 years, three kids in and walking through those gates still make me feel this way. At the time, I had to get the feelings that this day evoked out and return to focusing on her. It felt like a very selfish piece.

It smells the same as it always did, the scent takes me right back. I feel small, unsure. I don’t belong here, just as I didn’t in the past. The hairs on my arms and neck stand up, I can feel the discomfort seeping in and crawling through me. I want to run but my legs won’t let me, I want to scream but my voice is frozen.

The buildings around me are familiar, yet this is a completely different place. It makes no sense. It’s like I’ve been pulled back in time and space.

My hands are shaking, I can’t get a deep breath to fill my lungs and panic is threatening to engulf me all the while, I was trying to seem normal on the outside.

I hate this, but I’m not the person starting out in this new place, it’s not where I once was and yet I feel overwhelmed and smothered by the mere thought of it.

As the days fly by and the reality of this becomes more and more real, I feel the air around me being sucked away. I fear how I will cope once it’s something I can no longer pretend isn’t about to happen. Once one, two, three children are there. Once I have to walk through the games for interviews, assemblies and whatever else parents are required to do when they have children in high school.

I try to stifle how the sounds around me make me feel, I don’t want my irrationally fear to be reflected in my children. I don’t want my experiences to shape theirs in any way what-so-ever.

I didn’t expect this.

Sometimes, I think there’s a possibility that I can be a real person who can just do the things and make the milestones without having it affect me and then I do something as simple as walking through the gates of a high school and am reminded that I’m not a that person.

The sights, the sounds, the smells- all turned to silent fingers, grabbing and clawing at my brain. Pressing into those trigger points, releasing them and then pressing in again harder.

All those years of therapy and, honestly, I still have no idea what caused the initial school phobia. I have no idea now if my reaction is from that or later on when life got turned upside down again. The feelings, the clenched jaw and swirling stomach, all so familiar and yet so foreign.

Seemingly, I will never be free.

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