Faces

It has certainly been a crazy week.  Mother Nature seems to be sharing my mood swings, providing us 3" of snow in the first week of May.

This week, one of the icky weeks between my birthday and Mother's Day, I am spending alone.  My husband is once again traveling.  Bad timing, but I suppose there never is a good time for him to travel.  I know myself well enough to admit that creeping up on Mother's Day often sends me into a death spiral.

Yes, my birthday and Mother's Day barely two weeks apart does seem to be God's cruel joke.  The remnants of birthday pain are still lingering, regardless of my desire for them to leave. 

One of the things that popped into my head and has made itself at home this year is a memory of one of my pre-teen birthdays.  It wasn't so much a suppressed memory as one I just didn't think of much. 

I believe I was in 2nd or 3rd grade when my dad brought home a paper sack full of Beta video tapes on my birthday.  On the lined labels, the titles were handwritten.  Faces of Death 1, Faces of Death 2, and so on.  I believe there were 7 total. 

This was my gift.  If you aren't familiar (and most people aren't because they aren't quite that sick), Faces of Death is a series from the 1970s.  It is a documentary style of death and brutality.  Whether by accident or on purpose, deaths of humans and animals are recorded and shown in compilation while being narrated. 

One after one, my dad made me sit and watch.  I remember being mortified at first. But after 6 or 7 90-minute videos, I had built an immunity to it.  So much so, that death had never really bothered me much.  I was so young, I think it was my only way to cope with all that I had seen.  Think about how you would react to seeing video of an autopsy or a death happening or animals being beaten to death or a live execution.  How would process that as an adult?  As a child, I had limited ability to do anything other than become conditioned by it and see it is normal.

This seriously warped me.  When I was 16, I watched a man climb a metal ladder that was placed in a water puddle to cut limbs off an electric line.  You probably see where this is going.  My cousins and I watched as a green glow followed the man to the ground.  Relatives tried to revive him, but he was gone.  My cousins cried, I laughed.  It was my conditioned response.  Thinking about the whole thing, I can still remember the smell and the sounds.  It was terrible and so was my response.

Today I was thinking about those videos and just how jacked up it was that my dad made me watch them.  I started to wonder if I was still that warped, still that cold.  I went in search of them online and quickly found them on youtube. 

I skipped the talking parts and watched about 4 full minutes of the video.  I was physically sick to my stomach.  Horrified.  Scarred.  I absolutely remembered each of the things I saw, but I felt completely different this time.

Ok, Ok, Ok.  I know what you must be thinking....WHY?  Why would you go watch something like that?  Especially while your husband is out of town and you are already incredibly depressed??? 

Ok, so the timing was really, REALLY bad.  But I had to know.  I had to know how or if those things would even affect me today.  It did.  I couldn't watch without feeling.  I couldn't watch without being absolutely mortified.

I am positive I will pay a price for this little mistake, but maybe that is ok.  Maybe it is a good thing to know I can't watch the same sick things that my dad can.  Maybe it is really ok for me to know I now have limits.  Maybe it is absolutely a sign of growth that I can no longer sit for hours and watch that filth without having some serious emotion about it. 

The benefits might even reach a little further.  I know I have been severely depressed and anxious lately and still am.  However, I have not had much "stuff" from the past creep up on me.  At least not enough to make me feel as though therapy or counseling was needed.  In fact, I've been set on a decreasing or stopping all of it.  If I didn't have any issues to work through (at least none that were bothering me enough), then why waste every one's time right?   (I know, that's not what everyone else thinks but it was certainly what I was thinking.)  These videos have most definitely reminded me that I still have a lot of issues to work through.

Ugh, now I have to go try to sleep in a house alone with that evil floating in my head. 

I'd like to leave you with this....don't even think about watching these videos.  They are evil.  You can't unsee them.  Trust me, you will not easily recover from any portion of these videos.  Not even 30 seconds is safe....Just don't do it!