*drumming fingers along desktop, waiting for things to finish fucking compiling*

So I was thinking to myself, for reasons somewhat inspired by cleolinda’s closure vis a vis her father, what true closure vis a vis my own parents would be. Obviously, given the nature of my chronic PTSD, complete closure is still not here, and may not be here for a long time, even if they’re dead.

Thus far in life, I’ve had to break up chunks of my issues with my parents and declare them closed, one by one.

The first was closure with my desire for my father to appreciate me, or something. Or at least stop hitting me. I’m not sure what I wanted, but I stopped wanting it. Haven’t wanted it for years now, and that was an intoxicating freedom.

The second was closure with my desire to rescue my mother from a situation where she didn’t want to be rescued (or at least, not in a realistic way). Sometimes there are things you can’t help. Haven’t wanted to for years, and that was one of the hardest to let go, actually.

The third was closure with knowing that some of my friends betrayed me. This kind of thing could make you boil for years; or you can just shrug and say, “human nature,” and move on. It’s not forgiving—I am for sure not going to forgive people for endangering my life, knowing full well what they were doing in two cases—but it’s simply acknowledging that this is ground not worth going back over.

All of these I needed to achieve closure with before I could move onto the next shutting of the door: getting away from my former life physically and legally. That’s a door that will never open again, and indeed, since them I’ve put more doors in front of it. The extra doors may keep me from ever finding out if my parents are dead, and for my general sanity, that’s likely for the best.

I have not yet achieved closure with respect to worrying about my parents finding me again and making my life a living hell by causing my PTSD triggers to go off constantly. They don’t have to kill me—I think, actually, death would be a mercy if they found me again and started stalking me again. I already am afraid of what happens to me when my PTSD triggers, even in small amounts; part of this is that I know now what’s going on, and I even know (broadly) why, but I don’t know how to stop it when it starts. It stops when it feels like it, and I don’t really have control. I assume it’s possible to get control… but there are limits. Some triggers would be too strong.

Will I ever find out my parents are dead? Looking up stuff about them would be unwise, because (a) I would draw attention to myself, and (b) more importantly, I would trigger badly, and I don’t have mental space for that.

*drum, drum, drum, fingers*

Life is like a really bad RPG video game for me. I know people enjoy that kind of stuff, including angsty pasts of their characters and so on, but when you can’t leave it behind and it’s actually your life, it’s almost unenjoyable. I’d say almost entirely unenjoyable. I want to seriously move on to the epilogue, where all that’s left is exploring the further limits of my relatively new world without worrying about whether my parents… or, frankly, their agents… are behind me. Yes, it would be boring to a third-party person viewing my life.

But I want tea, Sherlock Holmes, F&SF and mystery, reading, writing, my Kindle, my job. Like Fallen London, there’s only so many damned action points to spend, and they’re even more difficult to spend successfully if your Nightmare level is somewhere beyond 8. I do not really want to spend actions on the unavoidable interrupts that PTSD keeps introducing into my life.

Sigh.